Whiteboard Friday: How a Social-First Content Strategy Gave a Legacy Video Series New Life

01 — Project Summary

The Whiteboard Friday SEO video series was a successful staple of Moz's content marketing strategy for many years. By 2021, however, Whiteboard Friday faced new challenges on social media channels — declining engagement, shifting audience behaviors, and increased competition in the SEO education space.

My goals for this project were to reinvigorate Whiteboard Friday’s brand presence on social media, boost engagement, and solidify its position as a go-to-industry resource. 

Over the next three years, I developed and refined a social-first content strategy, optimizing content  formats, messaging, and post structures to resonate with specific audience segments on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube — while keeping pace with ever-changing algorithms of each platform.

Persistence and hard work paid off — resulting in impressive results,
including the following:

• 360.3% increase in engagement

• 54.7% growth in impressions

• 131% rise in engagement rate

• Elevated the Whiteboard Friday brand

• Reinforced Moz’s thought leadership

02 — The Challenge

• Engagement was plateauing. Traditional link-based posts were struggling to drive clicks and conversations.

• Social platforms' algorithms were starting to favor visual-first content. Text-based posts were no longer engaging audience segments on Moz's five social media channels.  

• Audiences preferred digestible, high-value content.

• Moz needed to re-establish Whiteboard Friday as an authoritative, must-follow educational resource for SEO professionals.

03 — My Strategy

Here’s how I transformed Whiteboard Friday's social media presence with a three-phase approach:

Year 1, 2022: Laying the Foundation

• Worked with the Design and Content teams to level up social graphics, making them more engaging and attention-grabbing.

• Focused on writing copy to engage specific audience segments, ensuring that each post “stopped the scroll,” addressed an audience pain point, and included a clear call-to-action.

• Incorporated socially shareable graphics into blog posts.

Year 2, 2023: Optimizing for Engagement

• Shifted away from link-based posts designed to drive traffic to the blog, to visually engaging posts that delivered immediate value to people in their social feeds.

• Created carousels of slides by breaking down Whiteboard Friday topics into bite-sized takeaways for social media, aka snackable content.

• Experimented with long-form storytelling on LinkedIn and Twitter/X, but saw the biggest success with carousels and short-form video snippets that delivered key insights from Whiteboard Friday episodes..

Year 3, 2024: The Social-First Evolution

• Fully optimized Whiteboard Friday for native social content. Instead of repurposing blog copy and video content, social-first content was planned for from the start, before the camera rolled.

• Baked shareable social content into every Whiteboard Friday post on the Moz Blog.

• Leveled up the look and feel of YouTube videos, and improved optimization for YouTube and Google search.

• Standardized carousel formatting for visual consistency and brand recognition, and elevated the quality in terms of graphics, value, and storytelling.

• Adjusted the content strategy to focus on quality over quantity, prioritizing LinkedIn and Instagram with high-performing formats like carousels and reels, as well as full-length videos on YouTube.

• Reduced investment in content creation for Facebook and Twitter/X to maximize limited resources and focus on platforms where ROI was increasing, not declining.

• Continued to build brand recognition, improve quality of content, and boost engagement rate, despite social media platforms' increased emphasis on pay-to-play business models.

04 — The Results

Year-over-year improvements in engagement rate exceeded all expectations!

05 — Top Takeaways

• Social-first content wins. Repackaging Whiteboard Friday for each platform drove massive increases in engagement.

• Carousels and video clips outperformed static images and links. Visual storytelling improved reach, stopped the scroll, and increased audience engagement.

• Optimizing messaging for each audience segment deepened brand trust. By tailoring posts for SEOs, content marketers, and agencies, Whiteboard Friday became more relevant across industries.

• Consistent brand identity improved Whiteboard Friday's visibility. Establishing a recognizable look and feel added to the Whiteboard Friday brand's credibility and built trust.

• A strategic evolution paid off. Year-over-year optimizations transformed Whiteboard Friday from a legacy blog series into a high-performing, social-first content campaign.

This campaign highlights my ability to evolve a legacy brand, reimagine its content strategy, and drive measurable business impact through social-first content.

By implementing a structured, persona-driven, and engagement-focused approach, I helped Moz reclaim its authority in the SEO education space while achieving significant social media growth.

It also highlights my ability to adapt content and social media strategies as audiences and platforms evolve — and make the most of each and every piece of content.