Eurasia: Communication, Social Media Strategy & Activations
The following post is part of the #Eurasia project of the Ad Discovery Workshop of Panteion University in Greece.
Eurasia is a start-up project based on the Ad Discovery Workshop : an experimental peer-to-peer learning, hands-on workshop conducted by Assistant Professor Betty Tsakarestou of the Department of Communication Media and Culture, of Panteion University, Athens, Greece. Founded by 6 university students from 3 different countries and 2 continents, Eurasia works as an international journalistic and social platform that serves as a multicultural community that everyone from Europe and Asia can join, read articles from various perspectives, meet people from different backgrounds and write articles of their own to post on our site and social media pages. Our basic purpose is to create a better understanding of the travelling, technological social and cultural beliefs and differences between the countries of Eurasia.
As our start-up project, Eurasia, aimed to not only be a multicultural journalistic platform, but also a social platform that forms an international community between residents of Europe and Asia, it was vital to create a network of communication, using a specific social media strategy to activate our audience and attract more users into our project.
Throughout this process of creating and managing Eurasia; and in order for our team to have the chance of providing interesting and insightful content, about both of these continents, regarding cultural, technological, society and travelling matters, there were certain qualifications and conditions that had to be met. Thus, we were obliged to focus a great deal on matters of communication and the issues that arise from them.
Before analyzing the part of social media in the promotion and actualization of our project it should be mentioned that there we created various possibilities for interaction in the website alone. More specifically, every user has the ability to Sign-Up and become a member, Subscribe to our newsletter and mailing list, Submit their own articles, Contact us for any possible question and Comment under every article to state their opinion and interact with other readers.
Apart from these opportunities and abilities available in the website of Eurasia, the part of attracting members and followers is based exclusively on the extensive and effective use of the most prominent social media templates.
Considering the above, when constructing a website, that’s based on social factors, it depends a lot upon interaction among its users, founders and staff. Just providing interesting multi-visual and audio context into the articles is not enough. In pursuance of building up our audience and attracting them in the first place, we had to rely almost solely to the creation and use of renowned social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. These specific social websites were chosen to be our social representatives of the #Eurasia community because of their vast outreach in a worldwide scale and their various capabilities regarding social interaction and sharing of media material. More specifically, Facebook is one of the most efficient and effective social templates that directs the users easily towards our website, providing all the necessary information, with extra posts of photos, videos and events; whereas Twitter is the best option to promote Eurasia and receive public acknowledgment through followers, and to gain a directed and specific kind of audience.
In order to make our social accounts more welcoming and attractive for any visitor, we included pictures and the logo of our project and website, visual and audio content, such as photos and videos, which were posted on a regular basis, to keep the audience interested and energetic, as well as links and usernames to all the rest of our accounts, pages and sections of the site. In this way, we achieved in improving our follower and reaction statistics making our website all the more interactive and dynamic day by day. What is more, we tried to keep all of our pages as much related and united as possible, so as to avoid any possible confusion from our audience, as to what purpose we serve and how they can join our community. We accomplished this goal by posting the same content on each and every manageable page at the same time, using the same visual branding elements, like our #Eurasia logo and banners, constantly informing them of our site’s capabilities and available activities and adding social buttons that connect each page easily to the other.
Despite the fact that the Eurasia site and its other social media templates have only been recently created, by studying our available statistics regularly (about likes, follows, favorites, retweets ..etc) we noticed that there was a general interest in our community proven by the small but steadily growth of “followers” and “likes” on both Twitter and Facebook, as well as from the video suggestions for our “Video Gallery” section. It is also worth mentioning that some of the video suggestions stimulated the writing of articles e.g. «The Kingdom of the Little People».
Furthermore, it came to our attention that the audience that we attracted seemed to value the fact that our team consists of individuals who come from different backgrounds and have different cultural views, as well as our dedication to update frequently and be active daily on our social media accounts. It should also be remarked that we have not based our social media strategy on prepaid promotion packages, that are offered both on Twitter and Facebook, to gain large numbers of likes and followers and get our page famous and successful apace. In contract we rely mostly on our own personal means and effort, and by showing continuing commitment to our objectives, however hard they might be.
As a consequence, a negative aspect of the social activations of our project is the difficulty we confronted into attracting new followers and users, which only grow in a very slow pace due to the existence of countless other pages that get promoted more often and in bigger scales.
Nevertheless, we are always excited to see an interest in our community through our social media platforms. This interest is making our team all the more passionate on writing articles, sharing videos, being more active and showing devotion in the promotion and enlargement of our community. The reviews from our readers and members also helped us spot our strong and blind spots. As a result, they strongly encouraged us to consider and plan ways of future improvement and development.
Some ways of achieving these intentions are creating more accounts in multiple other social media networks, both from Europe (Instagram, Pinterest..etc) and Asia (Yebbu, RenRen..etc)in order to attract users that may not use our primary social templates (Facebook and Twitter). We are also still holding under consideration the thought of expanding our writing team to provide more articles in a much faster pace.
Through all of these factors we aim at creating a vast international and multicultural community, where all of our users can not only read and write their own articles to share with the world, but form actual connections with other members of our site and get to know each other from a more personal perspective, from sharing their thoughts on cultural, social and technological subjects to finding people with similar interests and opinions.
You can find more info about our startup and the articles on our official website: http://eurasiaco.wix.com/eurasia
Like us on #Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eurasiaco
Follow us on #Twitter: https://twitter.com/eurasiaco
TEAM: twnia nisotaki Amanda Voulgari Ling Jin Catherine Meng Zuzana Hájková Daphne Diapouli
With the help of Assistant Professor Betty Tsakarestou of the Department of Communication Media and Culture, of Panteion Univeristy, Athens, Greece.
© 2016 by an Ad Discovery Workshop of Panteion University
