SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
Taught a college level social media course and managed multiple social platforms for the Graphic Communication Department with a combined following of over 8K. Built relationships with and adapted to learning styles of 50+ students, while instructing them how to produce, organize, and distribute content for the department. Developed brand guidelines, templates, and a posting calendar with new content categories (such as DEI) with a goal of consistent content creation and brand awareness. Implemented organic and paid social media campaigns with original content and user generated content to identify and cater to the target audience of potential students. Tracked native channel insights and Hootsuite analytics to identify KPIs, adjust strategy, and create better content; results most notably on Instagram with an organic increase in following by 38% and engagement by 32% YoY.
Skills
Social Media Management • Content Creation • Leadership • Delegation • Team Building
Scope & Deliverables
Presentations on Class Material • Social Media Posts • Social Media Content Calendar • Analytics Reports • Adobe Illustrator Files • Canva Files • Branding Guidelines
Branding Guidelines and Strategy
Under the supervision of Professor Lyndee Sing, we created branding guidelines for color, typography, voice, tone, and photo quality. These acted as a guide for the students to understand how to work within a client’s branding, with a goal of looking cohesive. We also were constantly adjusting our strategy in order to grow brand awareness. Our organic growth strategy involved creating a content calendar, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), learning everything we could about our audience, performing channel audits, competitor analysis, and social media listening.
Presentations
A "How to Create a Post" slide show presented to the class during the second week of each quarter. I had a ton of information to convey that needed to be clear and concise, including content brainstorming, planning, creation, software, following GrC guidelines, basic design and typography principles, how to save the graphics they've created, how to write clear and accurate copy, and more!
Social analytics are becoming increasingly important for businesses and companies to consistently review. The goal of our social media platforms is engagement and so our KPIs (key performance indicators) that we pay special attention to are likes, comments, shares, and saves. By learning why a post does well vs. doesn’t do well, we can adjust our strategy to create better content that our audience wants to see.
Campaigns
Summer Spotlights
For the first time in 5 years, the Summer Spotlight campaign had to take a completely different route. Due to COVID, all internships were virtual which made photo content more difficult. In the past, the campaign would include updates of the students physically at work. I had to improvise and instead asked for students to send in pictures of them selves working virtually or of their workspace. The goal of the Summer Spotlight campaign was to shed light on the different career paths that many GrC students take. For example, one student was interning at Ebay as a Project Monetization intern, while another student was working for Wilde House Paper as a Graphic Design intern.
DEI and Allyship
The purpose of this series is to be an ally to marginalized communities. As a department, we want to build and nurture a community that is welcoming and accepting of everyone, no matter their religion, social class, race, gender, political party, and so on.
The posts will provide educational material, a call to action, resources, and encourage dialogue. We want to shed light on injustices and inequality in our community, but more importantly target the root causes, and what can be done to create effective change. These posts tie back to SLO and Cal Poly specifically.
Creating these posts required students to put in thoughtful and substantial research for a high quality post. I would remind them to always remember to always have a reason for your post, don’t just post something to post it.
GrC Speaker Series
The GrC Speaker Series occurred virtually during Winter Quarter in place of International Graphic Communication Week (IGCW). The faculty invited speakers of various disciplines into their classes, and I created graphics and copy to market the series on our social media. These posts were aimed to invite all students to learn from these industry experts.
Overall, the best engagement occurred on LinkedIn, which I believe the content was most appropriate for. We were able to tag the companies and each individual, and most reposted which helped with reach. Instagram Stories had decent engagement and it was easy to repost multiple times; we used the countdown feature and added the zoom link to our bio.
From our insights, we could see that there were on average 3 link clicks per GrC Speaker IG Story. Instagram posts however did not do very well. Because all of the posts looked the same, many of our students said that they thought it was the same post and skipped over it. This supports the current trend of event posts not doing well on Instagram, but better on Instagram Stories.
New and Recent Graduates
I decide to create a new series on LinkedIn to honor graduates that lost opportunities due to COVID. Those who wanted to participate filled out a google form in place of an interview and I put together the graphics and copy. These posts on LinkedIn acted as a way to network and market that they were open to work. Some students did have jobs already lined up for post-grad and had the opportunity to share.
GrC Career Day
Every quarter the Graphic Communication Department hosts a Career Fair for current students to meet representatives from hiring companies. We created a cohesive branded series each quarter to highlight each company in attendance. We interview Graphic Communication alumni at each company in order to make each feature personable and relatable.
