So, You Want To Be A Star!
Tell your story, build a community and grow your following on social media.
Lately, I’ve been learning a lot about how to build a social media presence and personality. My top tip — do your homework.
Personally, I am on the verge of completing a homework-intensive, six-week formal training program with journalism professor Matt Veto, a longtime journalist and multimedia storyteller.
The course, which was offered online this summer through Lehigh University, has provided me a wealth of insight on various social media platforms, multimedia applications, mobile photography and videography techniques. But what has really opened my eyes has been realizing the power that the smartphone places in our hands to tell a story, to further needed conversation and to contribute to change.
I came into the course thinking that if I did a perfect job following the professor’s instructions, I might find immediate success in social media. I even briefly considered that, through my homework assignments — such as my blog posts on Medium and my tweets on Twitter — maybe my voice and narrative could go viral and attract thousands of followers.
Please don’t get me wrong — I am a graphic designer by background, so fame is not my first priority. On a professional level, I have long expected to use social media primarily as a means to enhance my design career.
However, as the course has proceeded, I have eagerly redirected my narrative toward the two major issues of our era — the coronavirus pandemic and systemic racism in America. I feel passionately the need to use my posts to show support and even provide tangible help for the victims and communities affected by these two crises.
I made progress by utilizing the guidance provided to me in Veto’s course curriculum.
On Twitter, for example, I created a concrete niche for myself, turning to online artists and designers whose tweets and retweets seemed to align with my goals. I started by reaching out and following over 50 of the major players who seemed like leaders in the design and artist community.
Just as I hoped, some of them followed me back. I then researched what “thought leaders” in the community were using as keywords in their posts about racism and COVID-19. I made a point to incorporate those keywords in my posts in order to improve my search engine optimization.
While SEO helped my posts get picked up by search engines, social media optimization (SMO) helped me make sure the posts attracted my audience’s attention, for example, by including a call to action.
Specifically, I called on my audience to buy “Say Their Names” masks, which I designed and produced for Black Lives Matter protesters as a fundraiser for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I encouraged my fellow activists to wear these masks so we don’t spread COVID while we march and demonstrate.
Ultimately, I collected a number of my own tweets and those of influencers in my design community who were also reacting and contributing to the conversations surrounding systemic racism and social justice, and curated them into a “Twitter moment.” As a result, the fundraiser has begun to make money, and people are buying the masks. Moreover, through Twitter Analytics, I can see interest in the masks is growing along with the increasing number of impressions and a consistent engagement rate of 20.2%
I also learned, however, that what works on one platform does not necessarily work on another. For example, on Instagram, I learned to ask a question to engage followers, use a couple of relevant emojis to make the caption more attractive, place hashtags in as a comment and, again, to research which hashtags are most relevant to my topic.
For a blog post, on the other hand, such as on the Medium platform, you do not generally want to start off with a question as the “lede” because the technique has been overused. Rather, once the call to action is made in a blog post, it is the content that should do the heavy lifting of getting the audience to read it.
I began the course approaching social media channels as platforms to promote myself and my work. While I continue to post about design, I am also frequently finding myself in many other threads about topics ranging from comedy to social justice.
Currently, I am trying to have fun and inject some light-hearted moments in my narrative.
Simultaneously, I am preparing to publish my first social journalism piece — a video about the personal and economic consequences of the pandemic on a once-thriving local business.
While these posts may seem at opposite ends on the spectrum of seriousness, they are all topics that are important to me, and I have awakened to my responsibility to promote them all as my own call to action.
