by: Emma Meine
Objectives
Social media work and engagement is a field of effort I had little understanding of before I started this project. From my inadequate knowledge, I was able to come up with a few objectives I wanted to accomplish by the end of my project. I wanted to make sure I could see real, tangible progress between my first edited post to my last. Below you will find a screenshot that displays a sample of progress I was able to see in regards to this objective.
My other two objectives were to achieve confidence in the basics of what I was doing. Especially with the back and forth I had with my mentor, I saw changes in my editing as well as my overall thought process in the creation of these posts. It became less of a struggle in figuring out where to start as time went on. My last objective of focus, when it came to this project, was creating posts that were more diverse than the previous posts made by the owner. This diversity I wanted to be included in its look visually as well as the purpose between all them.
Samples of Work
Regarding to the objective of diversity I mentioned previously, before I made any projects I focused on what my goal was. The Instagram reels and posts mainly just displayed a recap of wedding entertainment that was performed by the company. I decided to put more focus on quick videos to draw attention and edits that displayed the quality and quantity of DJ Dave’s Mobile Disc Jockey’s services.
One of my first videos, I did a short formatted clip displaying all the parts of the wedding that our DJ’s are apart of. I wanted to narrow down my audience, so I included a caption to grab the attention of future Idaho newlyweds. I also made sure to include a trending song to also gives more opportunity for people to stop and view it.
Instead of continuing with the their other format of photos posted on the social media page, I took a different approach. The photos posted on their Instagram followed a themed concept and showed pictures of different weddings. I decided to take Google reviews of the company and pair it with black and white photos of weddings they serviced.
By the end, I was making reels that followed areas of engagement from timing the clips to the music to changing things up like the font to boost engagement. And, in this video, my goal was to show that the DJ company provided entertainment services for a variety of different events than just weddings.
Challenges
Through this process of learning, I have come across a few challenges along the way. For one, the quality of content I had to work with was not the best. There was no photographer or videographer on their team so videos and photos were only captured by the DJ’s themselves on their phones. This resulted in not the best quality content or lighting to achieve a great form of content.
Another challenge I ran into was the inconsistency that the owner posted the content I created for their company. I had the ability to make the posts, but the owner was the one who had the rights to post them. I would remind him, and he would constantly apologize for his busyness and said he would post them soon. This made it difficult since a lot of my goals and progress reports had to do with the amount of views the posts I made would produce. No content posted, no data could be collected.
Project Process
As I went about this project, I came up with a knowledge and a system of how I was going to accomplish it. I, first, did as much research as I could do collect as many insights to start with a good vision of work. I, as well, reached out to a mentor I had that was willing to give me insight into how I should go about these projects and any input on the ones I was in the process of editing.
For editing videos, I used a simple phone app called InShot. I tested out other apps that had even more features than the one I ended up using. However, InShot had a feature to embed music into videos that the other apps did not have. This was something that made the finalizing of posts so much easier, so I chose to stick to one editing app for videos. For photo post edits, I chose to use Canva. For one, it was very intuitive for what I wanted to achieve. I also, have used the editing website for many years and did not need to take the time to learn it.
Takeaways
I have learned many skills and lessons from this social media content creating project. Some specific ones is visualizing your purpose and audience before even beginning the editing process. This guaranteed me to accomplish reaching the right demographic and not wasting time trying to guess through trial and error. My main purpose was to persuade people to book with DJ Dave’s Mobile Disc Jokey entertainment. Everything that I was doing had to tie back to that main purpose. If it didn’t, I had to back up, reassess, and get back on track with accomplishing that goal.
Overall, I am proud of what I discovered and learned a lot about myself through the entire process. I know the experience I have gained will not only grow past this point, but will reveal itself even more as I push the boundaries of my knowledge and unveil how what I have done for this project has made me better.