In the Silicon Valley, the hub of technology, it’s almost impossible to come across someone who doesn’t spend their days in front of the glare of a laptop screen or countless hours engulfed in the device in their hands. With all the information in the world safely tucked away in people’s back pockets, it is hard to imagine how print publications have managed to stay alive and thriving in this new digital age. When I became the social media manager for Verde Magazine at the start of 2018, the responsibility of handling the social media pages of our magazine, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter fell onto me. Through this position, I learned that the best way for media outlets to stay connected with their readers online, as well as on paper, is through social media. There, they are able to publicize articles to a wider audience and reach more people than they might be able to reach in print. At the end of the 2019 school year, I became digital managing editor of Verde Magazine. This new position granted me unlimited access to all things digital regarding Verde, and allowed me to make drastic changes to the way we managed our digital presence. Now, on top of handling our social media platforms, I, alongside Emma Donelly-Higgins, Verde's hybrid (digital and print) EIC and Ethan Chen, our webmaster, am also able to handle our website, which is still in the midst of undergoing drastic changes, in hopes of bringing Verde forward.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms among teenagers. Thus, it is important that we utilize it wisely, in order to help us reach a wider audience, especially high schoolers. At the start of the 2019 school year, Emma Donelly-Higgins, the hybrid (digital and print) EIC, and I decided to improve the way we posted on instagram, wanting to make our content even more engaging. We began experimenting with instagram stories, making every staffer create several panels for an instagram story, which had to include some kind of interactive element, like a poll or quiz. We then created story highlights, so that users could go back and click through the instagram stories that were created for each story. Our instagram posts themselves also underwent some changes, but we are still trying to figure out what looks best and working hard to create a standard for our social media posts that future Verdites can follow.
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instagram posts upgrade:
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We experimented with our instagram posts, adding in excerpts or quotes from each story into each post.
Instagram Stories upgrade:
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We made story writers create instagram story panels using apps that we gave them and required them to include some sort of interactive element, as can be seen above.
exclusive instagram news stories:
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Throughout the course of over a year, a handful of exclusive online news stories have been published on our magazine’s social media platforms and have turned out to be some of our most successful posts. Although not published on our main website or printed in our magazine, these stories have garnered the most attention from our online readers. With stories like these, I tend to base their popularity from the amount of likes they are able to attract. Looking at Instagram alone, such online news stories have proven to be our most successful posts, gathering the most likes since the start of the year.
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While managing Verde Magazine’s social media platforms, I realized that the popularity of certain posts differed among platforms. For example, with Instagram, online news stories were the most popular form of media. However, on Facebook, videos were more watched, liked, and shared by users. A popular post on our magazine’s Facebook was the livestream I recorded when Kevin Kwan, the author of the book series “Crazy Rich Asians”, and Tan Kheng Hua, an actress from the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” came to our school to give a talk about the book and movie at the Performing Arts Center in 2018. On Facebook, live streams, videos, and strong imagery get the most attention, most people clicking onto our website via Facebook posts with such multimedia elements. At the start of the 2018 school year, around 3,800 people clicked onto our website through Facebook.
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Facebook livestreams:
When I became social media manager in 2018, I quickly discovered that Twitter was one of the social media platforms that Verde focused the least on, despite all of our tweets constantly being retweeted by Palo Alto High School's twitter, which is linked to the official Paly website for everyone to see. We always talked about improving our social media presence, but only ever really focused on instagram and facebook. Thus, when I was social media manager my junior year, Asia Gardias, the digital EIC at the time, and I decided to utilize Twitter more to our advantage. For example, when there was a forum with the PAUSD board candidates in 2018, we both went to not only film the event, but also to post live updates of what was going on and being said on Twitter. As the forum was going on, I frantically typed down important quotes into my notes app and took picture with my iPhone, transferring my quotes and photos to Verde's Twitter nonstop. This was one of the moments where I felt like a true journalist, having to pay close attention to what was being said, writing down word for word noteworthy quotes, remembering who said it (which wasn't too hard thanks to Asia's quick breakdown of each candidate before the forum), taking a photo of them, and posting on social media.
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Live twitter updates:
Live updates I posted on our twitter page during a forum with the PAUSD board candidates.
Staying updated
Although it’s important to promote our main stories from our website and magazine on social media, it’s also important to constantly check up on what our readers are most attracted to, and from there on, decide on the amount and the kinds of posts we publish on different platforms. As a publication, we must take our community’s interests into account and provide them with the content that they enjoy most. The feedback and support I’ve received from fellow staffers ever since I was social media manager has helped me better understand the world of social media and the types of demographics we can reach through it. Staff suggestions have also led to me to create a Verde Magazine snapchat, which although not as active as our other social medias, will help us reach a wider range of people in our community.
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