For the past 3 months I have been the social media manager for the Know Your Lemons Foundation. When I first began in January I was only responsible for the foundation’s social media stories, every other day. As I understood more of the voice and purposes of the foundation I transitioned into becoming a permanent team member in charge of the Know your Lemons social media sites. My role now has blossomed into creating some social media posts, captions for every single post, management of the social media content calendar, continuation of social media stories, and responding to messages and comments on social media.
Though Instagram and Facebook stories are temporary and mostly for fun, I learned how to create engaging and informative stories that gave me a better understanding of our followers. The example below is of just one of the many stories I did that lasted a couple of days because of the amount of interaction that was involved. I decided to showcase this story in particular because it was a turning point for me in learning the what the purpose behind the stories should be.
I created 4 slides that were quizzes (like the one above) to engage the viewer. The focus of this slide was more on the follower and their knowledge rather than the mission of the foundation. The purpose of these four quiz slides was to act as an attention hook for the main purpose to be seen later on.
The image above shows insights from one of the quizzes. Information like this was important to keep because it gave me perspective on our followers. The insights told me that people like engaging in this kind of quiz and that our questions weren’t common knowledge to all of them.
The slide above is the bridge from the hook to the purpose of the story. It brings in information about the foundation that relates to the hook previously shown. Though informational, it is still engaging because it asks viewers what they want to see. This is also a good way to help their voices be heard.
Since the quiz only showed 4 of the 31 languages that Know Your Lemons had their content translated in, I knew that some people would suggest languages that we did have translated. This gave me an opportunity to show our followers what their donations are being used for and that the language they speak is being represented. Below are some examples of countries people wanted to see our work in.
Then, for the languages that we didn’t have content or work in I recognized this way, shown below.
Recognizing that we still have a lot of work to do in getting our content translated, opened the door to ask for donations. I decided to ask for a specific amount so that people didn’t feel like they had to donate so much.
Through this story we generated a lot of engagement and a boost in our donations in a month where we do not typically see a lot of donations.
It was this initial story where I found my break through. When I first started with this foundation I was still getting my feet wet, trying to understand the voice of Know Your Lemons and putting purpose behind the story posts. It was a very difficult hill to get over and I am grateful for the push that my mentor gave me in understanding the vision. If it were not for the challenge of understanding the voice of Know Your Lemons and putting purpose behind each post I would not be creating actual posts for them like I am now.
The process I use when putting together a story is to…
1. Find what is trending on social media
2. Relate it to the Know Your Lemons mission
3. Create the post I have envisioned
4. Send to my mentor Corrine for edits
5. Post the final draft of the story
From this experience I have learned to see content from different perspectives. This has been helpful as I reach out to people around the world and to people in higher media. The team of women that I work with are so supportive and I have learned great skills from each of them. The greatest lesson that I have learned so far is- behind each profile is a person. I know that this is an obvious statement, but working remotely has a bit of a different feel when it comes to messaging and out-reach. It’s easy for me to see someone just as a profile picture or their bio status, but I have to remember that there is an actual person behind the smiling picture who has worries, passions, hopes, and disappointments that life brings to us all. This makes me think twice about the message I am sending them. How will this benefit them personally? How can we connect more deeply? How can what they do work with what we do? These are just some of the questions I ask myself so as to not become a heartless robot with one mission in mind.
This project has given me the perfect amount of experience to transition to a bigger responsibility. It was because of this project that I was trusted to have a bigger role in the Know Your Lemons Foundation as Social Media Manager. What first started out as me creating stories for Know Your Lemons has turned into me creating some post content for them and creating a content calendar. I am so grateful for all that I have learned and for more that there is to come.