Essays From A Ninja: Birth Of A Social Media Ninja

Winter 2008, I was a sophomore in college and Facebook has become a social media powerhouse. Fan pages were a new feature on the site and I had already been notoriously famous on campus for being the guy with “the most Facebook friends”. Prior to my freshmen year at Union, I had started the first class of 2011 Facebook group which ballooned to several hundred people. That number might sound small but for a school of 2400 students, almost everyone in my class was in that Facebook group. This was my first taste of social media growth success by following the rule of “being the first to market”.

I began to see many big brands use Facebook fan pages and me being the trouble making opportunistic that I was decided to create our schools first Facebook fan page. Over the course of the year I managed that page as a school communication channel, sharing news, content, and announcements from the college website through the fan page. The Union College fan page quickly grew to several thousand Likes and word began spreading around campus that I was the social media Ninja behind the school page.

That Spring I was approached by someone from the communications department on campus and asked how can the school integrate social media after seeing the success and engagement the fan page I created was getting. Long story short, I went through the usefulness of using Facebook as a publishing channel, etc, etc and the conversation quickly lead to how can the school take the fan page off my hands. Eventually that fan page that I had created and grew was taken down by Facebook, and the school created their own official Facebook fan page which worked out for the better because I was essentially winging it.

That was my first taste of social media success and fast forward to today, my social media engineering and skills has more than improved ten-fold. It was the first sign that I could potentially make a career out of social media and in the digital landscape. In 2009, I would join Twitter and the fun of social media growth and harnessing its power would begin all over again.

-@NinjaRAWLegend