ProjectSocial Media Management
City Today: Lighting Up Cities One Reel at a Time
Brand, reels, photo shoots, website, SEO and expat events for a city guide.
City Today is a city guide that began in Haarlem and now covers cities like Amsterdam, Utrecht, Leiden and Dubai. We designed the brand, make its reels and photos, built the website and run the SEO and ads.
Elian, Katya, Melvin, Steff, Tolga worked on this project. Meet them
- Client
- City Today
- Sector
- City guide and community platform
- Service
- Social Media Management
- Published
City Today started as a passion project in Haarlem. It set out to show the best the city has to offer, the food, the local hotspots and the hidden gems. Haarlem was the pilot, and other cities followed.
One logo, a skyline per city
The logo was the first thing we made. We wanted one bold mark that could be adapted across all the cities, so each one gets its own black skyline on a green circle and it still reads as one brand. Haarlem’s has a windmill in it, Dubai’s a row of towers. Underneath, the city’s name is set in black capitals with the word Today in green.
Every city has its own skyline and its own hospitality offer, so the content changes with the place while the brand stays consistent. It’s meant to feel young, and to work for locals, expats, tourists and businesses alike. The brand book explains City Today on four cards. One is headed “Local business booster”, another “Every city, every voice”.
A reel template that travels
A lot of the work goes into reels. We built multiple accounts and developed a viral template that can be adapted to a different city without losing the City Today spark. It has been a big success on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
The material comes from our own photo and video shoots of businesses and sights in each city. On the Haarlem account that gives a grid of canals and evening skies next to a coffee being poured. A shoot is planned before the day itself, and the editing happens afterwards. We’ve captured sunsets over Amsterdam and street life in Utrecht. Counting photos, blogs and reels, we’ve made hundreds of pieces of content since the brand was set up.
Where the blogs and events live
Then there’s the website, which we built as well. It covers city life in one place, with blogs, event listings and city info. The Haarlem homepage opens with one large featured item and a column of articles beside it. Further down is a row of city logos.
We keep the site SEO-optimised so traffic comes in organically, and we run targeted ad campaigns to support that.
Offline, we’ve organised multiple events for expats in Haarlem, which brought the City Today community together in person.
Published by the Social Sparrow team. Social Sparrow has worked in the Netherlands since 2020 and in the UAE since 2022, and is a Google Partner agency. About us