The Triton
Content Design
Engaging With the Audience
Overview
I joined The Triton as an Assistant Engagement Manager and also a Graphic Designer. As a member of the digital-first, student-run, and independent newspaper editor organization, I sought to help The Triton cover authentic and relevant news to the UCSD student by engaging with the audience through social media platform and graphic contents.
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See instagram
Design Process
To come up with contents that serve the best engagement purposes, I discuss with Engagement team members to decide which contents we are proposing each week, in which forms are contents presented, and how we can convey messages and hold the audience's attention. We also coordinate with cross-team leaders to get news content, recruitment content, staff highlight content etc.
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As an Instagram and Facebook content creator for The Triton, I have experimented and gathered the following insights for content creation:
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Insights 1.
Highlight the most important words gets message delivered better.
Insights 2.
Add engaging and relevant graphics often grab audience's attention and increase browsing time
Insights 3.
Questions/interactive formats often increase interaction and dictates familiarity.
In response to these insights, I created the following contents per different purposes using primarily Canva and Instagram internal effects.
Posts
General Recruitment
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To expand The Triton's influence and organizational power, we sought to recruit members to the team through general recruitment graphic posts that grab people's attention increase retention on our posts redirection to the profile.
Staff Highlight
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Following the traditions of The Triton, we also did Staff highlight posts focusing mainly on section editors and news writers.
This time, however, as a content graphic designer, I decided to create a new set of templates for the new highlight posts to bring novelty and liveliness to the feed. I decided to use the trapezoidal frames to add a touch of formality yet keeping the lively feelings.
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Tuesday Takeovers
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To increase reach and engagement, I proposed to the team that we perform weekly Takeovers, or the practice by which we have one member from one of the sections take over The Triton instagram account, sharing their one-day life, interacting with the audience on stories through polls, multiple choices, short answers, questions. Ex ante, I would create a Takeover graphic post that introduces the takeover member and directs the audience to the stories. Ex post, our team members would edit the takeover story clips into a short video and post it as reel.
So far, Takeovers has improved our interactions and impressions. For specific stories, the impressions doubled while interactions spurred from single digits to double digits.
Section Recruitment
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In the new quarter we decided to also focus on section recruitment to reach to people with specific interests. Since less restrictions is imposed upon section recruitment graphics, I talked to section leaders/members to gather their hiring information and desired look-and-feel of the graphics.
Below are a few examples of the graphics that cater to each section's demands.
Final Week Reliefs
Stories
Quarantine Reliefs - Interactive Polls
Quarantine Reliefs - Bingo
Reddit AMA Event
Facebook Live Series Event
What has happened
Through these contents plus hard work of other team members, our reach rate has increased 20-40%, and our follower count has doubled from 700 to 1400 to date. Section recruitment particularly attracted double amount of applicants from which we can select the most fitting members.
Takeaways
Content design and creation is an important job as it directly influences the engagement rate of the organization social media platform, and thus its reach and influences. Being a content designer at The Triton has helped me to gain a deeper understanding of content creation and social media management. It has also allowed me to sharpen my graphic design skills, manage cross-team works, and become a flexible team player.
Credit to my Engagement teammates
© 2022 by Chia-yu Chang
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