initiative #1:
consistent posting
This year, my fellow social media manager Katie Kim and I decided to challenge ourselves by posting every weekday for several weeks during the busiest time of the school year — in regards to school events — on our most active platforms, Instagram and TikTok, with the aim of keeping our audience engaged. Before this, our publication would struggle to post in a timely manner especially as events started slowing down and there would be ample amount of time to get posts up. We were able to fix this by emphasizing that timeliness was our top priority, especially in order to post every day.
In order to achieve this goal of posting every day, we created an “audience engagement” calendar with posts for Instagram and TikTok scheduled for the whole month. Additionally, we coordinated with each other on who was posting what on which day and made sure our class was aware of the time crunch. We made sure to communicate to staffers who were reporting on certain events and took over certain events ourselves.
​
This initiative was a huge commitment and took a lot of effort to coordinate and execute, but we successfully posted content that reached a large audience. For example, fourteen of our top performing posts on Instagram came from this period, with over 1,000 accounts reached. One of our top three posts from the whole year was also posted during the time, reaching over 2,700 accounts and having over 8,000 plays. On TikTok, some of our videos reached over 1,000 views and all videos reached over 500 views.
This reel — posted during the period where we were posting every day — reached over 8,000 plays and made 2,745 impressions as of June 1st.
This post made the most impressions during the same period. It reached over 1,000 accounts and made 2,788 impressions as of June 1st.
This challenge also allowed us to recognize the content that our student body engaged with more frequently compared to others. It also helped me step out of my comfort zone of posting what we usually cover, as I had to be creative in order to come up with posts on days we didn’t have anything to post.
initiative #2:
New methods of promotion
In order to promote our newest issues, we worked with our video editors to produce reels to post on Instagram right when distribution came around. We analyzed our insights from the past two years and noticed reels reached the most viewers, which is why we decided to continue issue promotion throughout the form of reels.
As you can see, 10 out of 12 posts that reached the most accounts in the past 2 years were in the form of reels.
Also to promote our magazines, we took boomerang videos of students and staff as we distributed our magazines around campus which helped members of our student body recognize the magazines.
Additionally, we recognized from the previous year that our online articles published on our website were not promoted enough. This prompted me to start creating visually appealing stories that included a direct link to the article and a short summary. These stories gained over 400 impressions and were effective as our followers clicked on the links provided.
This particular story reached almost 500 impressions.