Over the past few months I’ve learned that social media management is a 24/7 type of job. Especially in the news industry which is what I am aspiring to work in. There have been numerous times when breaking news comes in and I have had to get it out as quickly as possible. Not because people are forcing me to or my jobs on the line but because it feels important to the success and growth of the accounts to be the first to report on a story. An honor that The Star has had multiple times this semester with various breaking news stories for the local area.
I feel like this job is vastly different from being a social media manager for a brand where you're focused on trends and what's going to get the most interaction. Instead my focus is really on timeliness and packaging stories to give the most information possible while not giving the entire story away and making people want to visit our website and read the full stories. Web traffic is a huge metric that drives my everyday tasks and goals. I am proud to say this metric has been rapidly climbing and I have received praise for the increase since I took over the role. That's not to say we don't work on promotional campaigns as well, we recently had one for an inhouse fundraising event called Star Stories. Star Stories is a yearly event The Star Hosts where speakers from our community tell inspiring stories on stage, with all the proceedings benefiting the paper.
This year I created a promotional campaign that featured instagram posts, reels/ tik toks, story posts, promotional videos and flyers. It honestly struggled at first under the direction of the PR department of The Star. But I would say it played out well, a pivotal moment in the campaign was when I created a promotional email campaign to send to our 58k+ subscribers on our mail list. Ticket sales for the event more than doubled and I actually experienced instant gratification at the end of the event. As I was walking out there were 3 older ladies in front of me talking about how wonderful the event was, then one of them asked the others how she heard about this event. The women in the middle followed up by saying “I never would have heard of something like this!” and the woman standing on the far right exclaimed in an excited tone, “I got a random email about it!”. At that moment I was so stoked that my email had a real world impact right in front of me! Below I have attached images from the event set up and the early start of the event. You can read more about the event in the link below!
