This past weekend was more than an 'experience.' I was able to work on a team for over a semester to develop an event that I am proud of. The storify below is a small sample of what attendees were able to take away from the event. It's a tad long, but it contains the best takeaways from the conference and what it takes to become a PR professional.
This past week our strategic social media course was assigned a video project to help engage outreach and content analysis on different sites we're learning about in class. I used the organization, Kitchens on the Geaux, which focuses on feeding the homeless Baton Rouge community. Last Friday I sat down and recorded the President and Vice-President of the organization and had them share about why the organization is important, special events and how to join. I posted the video to Facebook and Tweeted it out through Kitchens on the Geaux's account. I also posted the video on YouTube (9 views) hoping to gain more outreach through common tags such as LSU, Campus Life and volunteering. After 4 days of exposure, I went to the analysis page on Facebook to grab some statistics. I chose to highlight this assignment through Facebook because I am confident that this social media platform is much more engaging to our organization audience compared to the new 60 followers I have gathered on Twitter. The analysis component of Facebook is very developed and can be somewhat confusing when it comes to specifics. My post specifically was on 3/15/2014, the fourth from the top where you can see 422 people on Facebook were reached. In layman terms, 422 people had my post in their feed during the past 4 days. This number is surprising, seeing that only 236 people actually liked the page (See yellow content labeled reach). To the right of reach is engagement, where more detailed analytics are provided, it tells me that 121 people clicked on the post and 26 liked, commented or shared KOTG's post. It's also interesting to observe that the second post from the top that contains a photo album from KOTG's social this past Sunday at the UREC reaching 1,057 people with 1,799 people clicking on the post. This post from the account was solely images and somehow reached 4 times as many people that 'like' KOTG's page. This organization's Facebook account has never garnered more than 250 reach count, so this was an interesting spike in outreach. I am also forced to question whether the amount of photos that were posted in the album, along with the people that were tagged serve as factors to the reach count. I was under the impression that videos would capture more attention and views, yet sometimes interactive pictures can do the job sufficiently. This was clearly a lesson on learning your audience. This was also a lesson on what could potentially work in the future. I think I am going to try creating an infographic relaying the same information, and track it's reach. This is another page that delves into more analysis regarding the specifics of the specific post I am analyzing. On the right closer to the bottom, I can see that while 52 people actually watched the video, 69 other people diverted after seeing the post. If more people diverted than viewed, I need to reassess my approach. As you can also see I inserted the #KOTGlsu hashtag in anticipation for more people to follow the hashtag and to create a wondrous revolution over 4 days! This was sadly not the case. Hashtags are easier to develop and share when you have an active and engaging team/audience. The majority of KOTG members and Facebook followers, as well as Twitter followers are not sufficiently social media literate or active enough to contribute with trending hashtags.
Perhaps a longer time frame of dedicated social media by this organization will develop more interaction and a stronger response from the audience. This was a fun and different assignment because not only did it force me to practice analyzing my outreach; but it also allowed for me to practice my video recording skills! After recording, I also decided to import the video I recorded with my iPhone into iMovie to add subtitles and to crop out unnecessary portions. This assignment reminded me that strategic social media is more than tweeting for an organization, it is interacting and analyzing your progress as well as determining the best way to approach your audience. |