October 1–November 3
90/135 hrs
Halloween just ended and we’re more than halfway through the semester with just about five weeks left. The internship has started to lose its novelty and I think we’ve reached a status quo, where I can just walk in and do my work with minimal check in. I think there’s a part of me that feels like I should be engaging more with my supervisor to make sure I’m on the right track, but at the same time, I’ve been getting work done in accordance with the different project we have set up and that probably indicates that I am on the right track.
The first third of the semester was spent prepping for all the events that are happening during the second half of the semester. I think if I had to sum up this part of the semester, I would say it’s been hectic. I had to merge my current responsibilities with some new ones after a shift in the office, and I’m still getting used to it. What’s cool though, is that I’ve been working on our engagement with our publics on our social media accounts recently. I checked the analytics and since I started working in the office, we’ve gained 53 new Facebook followers and boosted our engagement rating by 20 percent, and on Twitter we’ve gained over a hundred new followers and have noted a 16 percent increase in engagement.
I’m really proud of these numbers because I made it a personal goal to increase out follower engagement when I joined the team. Seeing these results shows me what I’m capable of in comparison to my role as social media and communication intern for College Magazine doing somewhat similar work on a smaller scale. It’s nice to see that what I learned from that internship 3 years ago has only progressed from there.
In addition to monitoring our social media analytics, I’ve also been a very active part of our social media plans, including creating monthly themes for us to follow as well as an editorial calendar for both Twitter and Facebook. This really stands out in lieu of the events that we’ve hard in October and the events that we have coming up this month. The overall goal has been to encourage engagement and participation in different things like the Diaspora Tour and the College Park Think-A-Thon, as well as enrollment in the upcoming ARHU Dean’s Lecture Series next week.
Something I think that has been a huge factor in our recent success has been the change of voice and tactics we use to share information. Rather than tweeting out straight information or making a long post that no one wants to read, I’ve been engaging followers with other posts related to the information and encouraging other people in the work space to also engage with the work. When people see that other people are interacting with this information, it diffuses in a sort of snowball effect as more people share that information with other people. Our Facebook post reach averages around 40 people with an occasional spike in the hundred, compared to when I first started at the internship and our reach averaged under 10.
We hosted the College Park Think-A-Thon at the beginning of the month to gauge the c
TJ Digital Creative 