WEB & SOCIAL MEDIA
When I became Editor-in-Chief for the first year, it was our first year as a fully-online news platform. This meant a sudden large focus on the web and social media. The fully digital platforms allowed for more flexibility with posting and made it easier to publish things such as breaking news and a wider variety of media forms. However, it also required constant attention, daily publishing and an understanding of new tools.
WEB
Web Sections & Story Elements
While the About page is an important part of our website, providing a home for editorial policies I've worked to refine, contact information, and more, I knew there was more that could be added--more to show off our skills, our sister publication, and allow space for honest questions mixed with a little bit of personality and humor.
After browsing for inspiration, I pulled our Contact Us page to be its own page, separate from About, and created three new pages: an Awards page, a Yearbook page, and a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.Â
Awards has helped us to celebrate our staffers and show off our skills, while also acting as a digital documentation of all the awards received, organized by year and the association that awarded them. Yearbook gave our friends at the school's yearbook publication a place to reiterate their contact information, policies on senior portraits, etc. since their book has no digital component to hold these details. FAQ, my personal favorite, gave me a chance to answer the questions I've heard the most and offer a little insight into how things work.
Scroll through these pages below.
As seen below, I've made an effort to use as many different types of story elements as many places as I can. This ranges from embedded quizzes and polls to a "Meet the Staff" button, timers/countdowns and pulled quotes.
Pulled quote example.
Quiz example.
Meet the Staff example.
Poll example.
Consistent Content
As seen on the left, I continue to publish content regularly by planning ahead of time and scheduling at least one article a day to stay consistent. I also plan for the articles each day to vary in content and category.
Web Tags
As seen on the right, I've utilized tags in every article to help make the website easier to navigate and content easier to find. It also automatically links content on the same topics. Tags were never consistently used by previous editors, so this was a change for the website and staffers, but brought more interaction and organization.
App
I continued the promotion and use of our app, hosted by Student News Source (SNS). I synced updates to the app so that publishing, changes made in design, and other actions completed on the website automatically uploaded to our app as well. The app notifies users of any and everything published as soon as my cursor hits the button, encouraging viewers to quickly and easily press the notification and be taken to view our content.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Instagram is the Rock Online's most popular social media account, followed by X, then Facebook. Our synced Instagram and Facebook posts always use strong visuals and detailed captions to attract attention. Posts serve as a way to get photos and information up from an event quickly, as opposed to stories that may take longer, as well as a way to increase traffic to the website.
Social media, specifically X, has been heavily used for marketing, which can be viewed here.
Before I took over as Social Media Manager in my sophomore year, our Instagram posts were inconsistent or below our typical standards. Our Facebook and X had gone just about dormant--and so had all of our followers. When I took over, we started with about 500 followers on Instagram, 500 on X, and less than 100 followers/friends on Facebook.Â
As I began getting my hands dirty in the social media world, I carefully watched what posts increased traction such as likes, shares, and follows. My fellow Social Media Manager and I figured out what media and caption formats balanced informative with interesting and how to balance what we want to report on and what people want to see. We watched as the use of tags, hashtags, and locations increased engagement and expanded on that even more with options such as Instagram and Facebook stories, polls, question boxes, links, and more.
I noticed that while Instagram caught the attention of students, Facebook and X were better for other parts of our community, such as faculty and parents. We found ways to use these differences to cater to a variety of readers and synced our Instagram and Facebook so that our content was distributed across all platforms. In class, we created and enforced social media sign-ups and daily posting schedules. Social media posts soon became a part of the class curriculum.Â
Since then, Social Media Managers have been a staple part of every year's editorial board and social media posts have become a part of everyone's grades. As of March 10, our Instagram boasts 1,989 followers, X has 618 followers and Facebook has 107 followers.
See below for examples of posts I've worked on. Click on each photo to view it on Instagram or Facebook.