Social Media, Marketing & Audience Engagement
Online
Our most recent Beacons page.
Social media engagement
Working with one of my managing editors who focuses on social media, we set out on a process of creating a cohesive, engaging social media platform on Instagram.
Implementing our Beacons: On the first day of the school year, I realized that—with the amount of content we were already producing during editors’ week (for more, see Leadership and Team Building)—we needed an accessible way for our readers to click on our most recent stories. I created a Beacons page for our site (see here for the link), which we upload with the most recent story that’s showcased on the Instagram page. With s many of our peers active on social media, ur audience engagement spiked this year with the addition of this link since Instagram users can just click the link in our bio to see our most recent stories (usually we link around five) and multimedia, as well as find ur other social media platforms while they browse the Beacons page.
Creating an Instagram theme: This year, we went through numerous trial-and-error processes over the course of four months to create a cohesive Instagram page before finally settling on one we were happy with and that we felt best represented our site. After identifying Instagram as where we could reach the most amount of our school community readers and committing to posting on Instagram at least once a day, we knew we needed to create a theme that would excite and attract our followers on the platform in order to maximize audience engagement. Below are four of the themes (see image explanations by hovering over the photos) that we’ve tried this year, with the bottom right being ur current theme.
This is the theme we followed during editors’ week and the first week of school, a simple upload of the visuals following the example of last year’s editors.
We then unfaded the photos and only added a fade behind the headlines, which we added to every other upload in order to create a checkered effect. However, our page still lacked an overall color cohesiveness, and the non-headlined photos looked out of place in the feed.
We decided to start adding headlines and faded our photos as a more striking visual element, but we eventually realized that the overall visual became too messy and distracting.
Finally, I suggested a green theme to match our school color, adding a border on every other upload and source quotes in between. Instead of a headline, we discovered that our audience would enjoy reading the thoughts and opinions of their fellow peers and community members instead.
Student News Source App
Harker Aquila on the Student News Source app.
One of my goals since last year was to create an app n our mobile devices so that anyone who wanted to read the news could have a better-designed, more efficient way of engaging with ur content through their phones. This past fall, by integrating our news site into the Student News Source app, we made our content much more accessible by our community.
Now, whenever we upload a piece, anyone who has the app downloaded n their phone will receive immediate notification, as seen in the upper right image. To the left is another screenshot of our sports page, neatly designed, and to the bottom are categories, where users can save their favorite articles or immediately navigate to other sections, rather than taking time to scroll through a website that doesn’t fit design-wise on a mobile device as well as on the app.
It has been one of my most exciting initiatives this year and has been extremely gratifying to see more and mre people download the app and receive our updates.
Newsletter
A wider audience engagement: Last year, I pitched the idea of implementing a Harker Aquila newsletter to my then editors-in-chief. Manually, I imported the emails of over 2000+ Harker community members, including parents, faculty and students. At the time, the newsletter was sent out monthly without a specific name.
Though production for the newsletter halted over the summer, I decided to re-pitch the idea to our strategic team as a part of our redesign process, modernizing the look of the newsletter along the way. (For more on this year's site redesign process, see Web and Design). Rebranding the newsletter as the “Aquila Arrow,” we approached the newsletter with more care, sending it out to a smaller group of beta testers, who responded with feedback on how to improve the design and content. I spent a weekend redrafting our mission with the newsletter, adding layering colors and standardizing the font.
Due to our massive spike in over 100% story content per cycle, we decided to make the Arrow a weekly newsletter, creating a direct link to our community. Though I first pitched the original newsletter as a way to connect our school community while separated during the pandemic, the focus of the Aquila Arrow is now to keep our community updated and informed during a time of returning to the speed of “normal activity” and “normal life” at school while still in a pandemic. I believe that our newsletter was one of the bread-and-butter things we could do as a journalism program byy bringing the information to our readership’s doorstep.
How the newsletter used to look when I first pitched and designed it with last year’s editors-in-chief during online learning.
How the newsletter currently looks a year later, rebranded and redesigned as the “Aquila Arrow,” a weekly update of our site’s content now that we are back in person.
