Social Media Story Update
Hello fellow classmates! I have a few updates for you.
Since my initial story plan was posted, I have definitely made changes and improvements in order to make my social media story the most visually engaging and keep my audience entertained. During my meeting with Professor Ryan and Terron Moore, I learned a lot about how my story could be told better on social media. Terron, the king of entertainment and social media, suggested that I create my social media posts into a story, not just a succession of photos and videos. He also suggested that for one of my experimental platforms I could use Instagram and post about five photos that tell a story throughout the day I am following around the athlete. For example, I could take five photos throughout the day of the athlete and create a 100-word short story to post along with the photo. Therefore, at the end of the day I will have five photos and a 500-word story told on social media for my alternative platform. After Terron’s advice, I also came to the realization that I would like my story to feature CU women’s golfer, Brittany Fan. Not only would Brittany be the perfect athlete to follow around because of her insane busy schedule (6am workouts, eating on the go, classes, more workouts at the golf course, rehab, studying, going to bed late, repeat the next day), but she has a story central to her identity that I believe could be great to include in the story. Her story is focused around the fact that she was homeschooled for two years so she could focus on golf prior to coming to CU. The switch from being homeschooled to a full time student and athlete was a challenge for Brittany. I think it could be neat if she spoke about her story at one point throughout the day. Upon research I found that sharing inspiration helps attract viewers and engage your audience, so I think sharing Brittany’s story is perfect for that.
In my senior capstone class, NewsTeam, I am working on a similar feature with Brittany and I have collected some footage and photos. I will collect similar footage and photos for the Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat portions of my story, so below is just a preview of what is to come.
If you have any suggestions, I would love your input. Thank you!
In addition to my experimental platform, I am going to focus on the following social media platforms:
Snapchat: I am going to produce the social story on Snapchat which will run about 1:45 in length. This will consist of “a day in the life” type of story where I follow a student athletes around from the time they eat breakfast, to workouts, to walking to class and everything in between that forces their days to be hectic, stressful and often very overwhelming. There will also be parts of the story where I may have Brittany take over the Snapchat and she can have fun with that and take us where she needs to be.
Facebook: At one point throughout my Snapchat story, I will stop to record a Facebook live element. I have been thinking where would be the best place to record this and I think it would be visually appealing to record it out at the golf courses while Brittany and her teammates are practicing. Here I will include information about the athlete and perhaps even have them say something on camera about how their busy day is going and how practice often acts as a stress reliever for them.
Twitter: Throughout the day that this story will be active, I will be on Twitter generating content for my audience so they have the ability to be quickly updated to see what I have found/where I where I am with the athlete. This will consist of 12–15 tweets throughout the duration of the social story. After research, I found that a creative way to engage your audience on Snapchat is to pose engagement questions, therefore I want to have about 5 of the tweets be a question and answer, so I will allow my followers to tweet questions at me that they may have for Brittany and then I can tweet back answers. However, if for some reason people are not tweeting questions, I will conduct my own question and answer with Brittany and tweet it out using specific hashtags. When researching I also found that people are more likely to read and engage with your tweets if you write under 140 characters, trying to aim for 80–100 characters, so I will focus on that as well.
Looking back on class readings…
When asking myself which social media platforms work best when it comes to social media storytelling, I thought back to Fuchs’s book, Social Media: A Critical Introduction. In the first chapter, Fuchs points out how media in general has changed vastly from the year 2000, to the present day and which platforms are most engaging to audiences now compared to 18 years ago. I find it fascinating that the social media platforms that I understand so well were not existent in the days that my parents were my age. Therefore, I really have to think critically about which platforms will reach the millennial audience that I am trying to target. This leads me into my next point by Fuchs, the theory of critical thinking. Fuchs says that critical thinking is having power, and power has to do with who controls society. When applying this to my social media story, I first think the social media platforms that I am using. Which one has the most power in today’s society, and which platforms are considered to be influential?
In a reading by Adornato, he explains that journalism today has been dramatically affected by current mobile and social media trends, which is very different than what journalism was affected by 20 years ago. Adornato explains in Chapter 2 how our everyday news sources have been impacted by living in a “mobile-first” time. This made me think of my social media story and how my mobile phone is being used to record and display the whole story. This chapter emphasizes how the digital age has challenged journalism to evolve. It makes me question what advances are left given the fact that social media is already so advanced. Adornato analyzes how different sectors of journalism such as the newspaper, television, radio and digital-only platforms have to modify their business models in order to keep up with the “mobile-first” mindset. I think it would be much more difficult to display my story had I been tasked to do it via newspaper or radio. With all of this in mind, I look forward and keep in mind the different ways that I can use social media while gaining the audiences and different generations.
