Wednesday 12th August 2015
Hello, it’s time again to reflect upon my
learning at Clarity Communications. The past few days of my internship have largely
involved social media, an area that I have been looking forward to learning
more about.
I was given the opportunity to have a go at
social media content creation and scheduling. This was a great insight into how
brands and businesses plan out their social media posts across all platforms to
be published over a given time frame. In this case I was scheduling posts for
the months of August and September for Celebrate
WA, a not-for-profit celebrating the people, places and past of WA.
I wrote the content for the Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram posts in an Excel spreadsheet document. Content was
driven by the direction of the client with some additional suggestions such as
events and articles that could be included. A screenshot of the content
schedule template can be seen below.
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| A screenshot of the social media content schedule used to plan posts |
After the client approved the schedules I
was allowed to log into the various social media management tools online to
schedule the posts for the months ahead. Facebook posts were planned on
Facebook, while Hootsuite was used for
Twitter and Postso was used for Instagram. Prior
to doing this task I was naïve to the fact you could schedule Instagram posts,
which in hindsight seems a little silly as there seems to be an online tool to
help businesses complete every task possible!
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| A 'conversational' Facebook post for Celebrate WA |
Through being involved in the scheduling of
posts I also learnt to plan posts for times when social media platforms are
their busiest: early morning as people wake up and leave for work, mid-day when
people are on their lunch break and late afternoon/evening when people are
settling in for the night. Therefore,
posts were scheduled at times such as 7am, 8am, 12.30pm and 7pm.
The challenges of social media content
creation, for me, were finding a suitable image for each post (using sites such
as Iconosquare) and developing content
that was interesting and relevant to followers. It is so important to make the
effort to discover what types of people are interacting with your social media
channels in order to curate content that engages them time and time again. For
the purpose of Celebrate WA’s social media pages content is created to interest
people living in WA and who share an interest in WA events, people, news,
special interest pieces and places.
Getting involved in the social media for
clients at Clarity has been one of my favourite tasks so far. I have discovered so many new tools and
resources, so I am really looking forward to seeing what else I can learn
during my internship!
What has been your favourite learning
experience so far? Let me know in the comments.
Candice
3 comments:
Dear Candice,
What I like most about my task was media monitoring because I could spend the whole morning reading newspaper and browsing the Internet! I always make fun of myself as being paid to read newspaper, but we know that media monitoring is more than just go through the newspapers.
Thank you for giving me an insight on how to managing social media platforms. I didn't learn that during my internship.I think you do such a great job! Well done, Candice!
Looking forward to your next post!
Regards,
Lee Jin Woei
Hi Candice,
I definitely loved working with social media accounts while working at my internship. For some people social media is a fun outlet that they will post on every now and then, but for business it is definitely an important part of building and sustaining growth of a company. I found it comical that there were certain times you had to set posts and carefully construct what the caption reads etc, but I can definitely understand why they do it and it all comes back to the traction of people looking at posts. Similarly to your experiences I found it hard to decipher what attracted people most to the posts. After a few attempts I got the hang of it, did you feel the same way?
Brigette
Hi Candice,
It is so interesting to hear about your experience with social media!
After almost a whole degree of learning about the importance of social media, I have been interning at a school that doesn't currently have any social media sites! Initially I thought perhaps this was because they didn't want to encourage students to spend time on social media. However I brought it up with the PR Officer, and she informed me she had been thinking about it for a while, but hadn't had the time to invest in it!
I have been offered a job with the school, and I have the feeling my first task will be to set up a Facebook page! So thank you so much for your insights for how to do this in practice! It has given me some great ideas as to how to set it up successfully!
Glad you have enjoyed your internship!
- Bronte
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