A Social Media Journey. Or in more official terms, Rip's Social Media Portfolio
Thumb.
Most probably never heard of it, and fewer used it. But during High School, Thumb was my first successful venture into the world of Social Media. For several months, every day, I'd make a new post asking people to "thumb up" the post if they liked option A, and "thumb down" the post if they liked option B. People enjoyed my Daily polls, and towards the end of my little Thumb career, I had a following of around 500 people with hundreds of people voting on every post. While those might be rookie numbers by today's standards, it meant the world to teen Rip, and kick-started my budding interest in Social Media.
Unfortunately, the app shut down four years ago, along with nearly all evidence of my Daily Poll. All that's left is an old twitter account, which would later too be shut down, but not before my taking a screenshot of my twitter shares from the early Daily Poll career.
It even had my first logo, created in Microsoft Word.
and after some scrolling...
The Official Zamics YouTube channel.
A project that lasted roughly 4 years. Gaming channels have always been difficult to run. Just as soon as you find a niche, a game for which viewers come to see you play, talk about, and criticize the gaming industry moves on and your once popular game loses all it's interest and relevance. However, this wasn't a project built to gain followers, maximize outreach, or spread a brand message. I created, and continued, the Zamics YouTube channel to practice talking to a public audience, interact with a bigger community than I'd ever had before, learn media content creation programs and skills, and of course, talk about games. I'm proud of the YouTube channel, and what it did for me over the years.
But it was a hobby. And it's time I learned how to make it a career.
My most recent project. For the COMM 323 class at SOU, Strategic Social Media Marketing, myself and 3 others began with a simple prompt. Create a blog. So, we created a blog about something we all enjoyed: documentaries. We created Culture Shock. The blog would share and discuss documentaries we'd seen, or were looking forward to, through the lens of showing the new opinions, ideas, and cultures those movies provided.
And then as is appropriate, we ran Social Media Accounts for our project.
This included Facebook
Twitter
And Instagram
In terms of raw follower counts, the blog project was not as successful as my YouTube channel, or even my Daily Poll. But I was okay with this. For once, I began crunching the numbers. I cared about who was reading our content, where they were coming from, what they were interested in, and any other relevant analytics I could get my hands on. I perhaps wrote the least for our group, but I wasn't focused on creating the content for once. I wanted to see where we did well, what we didn't do well, and develop strategies for the types of content and locations of our content. I ran a comprehensive excel sheet to collect the data I thought best to see over time, in one place, that I could draw comparisons with and infer conclusions.
With the information I gathered, we learned of the hidden problems of Facebook, where we gained the quickest following, but had nearly non-existent engagement. We decided to double down on our Instagram account, posting more often, and using it to see what types of content for our blog will also perform well in social media posts. Plenty of data didn't make it into the spreadsheet, as it was more relevant on the website the data came from, or in the form of discussions I could bring up with my group members. I brought up discussions such as what links people were clicking, how people were discovering our website, what picture choices performed well, and what styles of posts engaged people.
It's hard to say how far we came with our project. Outreach went up. Visitor counts went down. With the amount of time available to us, we never got the chance to take what we learned during our second phase of planning, and could only experiment so much. But at the end of the class, I'd learned tools and abilities that I can apply to any social media marketing campaign. I learned the pitfalls of trying to make content without the innate passion to make the content. With the analytical abilities I learned through the CultureShock project, and a passion for a new one, I believe my next campaign will have every chance it needs to be a successful social media project with an earnest group of people making content for an earnest community.
