Learning assignment #1

1a

I am most familiar with Instagram as a social media tool. I have for years used it for personal purposes and followed it's trends and ways of marketing, promoting and following statistics. I have observed the ways texts, hashtags, quality of pictures and content affects the way people like to follow you, stay following you or unfollow you.

Creating content on Instagram or any other social media service is all about knowing who you're creating content for. Knowing your audience, and what they are looking for on your account, helps growing your audience and makes them more connected and committed to your content.

I am unfamiliar with many social media tools and services, as I learned while reading through the course material. I believe a service I should learn more from taking into account my career, is LinkedIn. It is a platform where many of our possible customers are active at, and I should be able to help my colleagues use it effectively.

Our company had very little social media activity before I joined in to develop it further. Facebook page was given to an advertising agency - which is a good choice if no one inside the house is interested/able to keep it up - but they updated the bare minimum to "be present on social media somehow". I am no expertise on social media (yet), but I for sure am most experienced at our office. I started an Instagram account, took over the Facebook page and guide my boss to share posts and updates on LinkedIn (with my limited knowledge).

I am interested in learning more about optimizing data and sharing content on social media as effectively as possible, to increase visibility and spread our brand and values.

I will be doing the following assignments keeping in mind my own working environment, but will not be mentioning our firm or our competitors on the field by name.

1b

Company A
This company posts regularly on it's feed (every 1-3 days), shares a lot of quotes from customers and employees. It has a very trendy and constant visual look, and seems to be the "person you want to be friends with" (not exactly sure how to open this.. seems present, friendly, happy). It is active on both IG feed, but also stories. It saves stories to well organized categories, so the audience can click on what they're looking for or what catches their interest. It recruits mainly young people, and offers free first visit. It seems to be a workplace where people want to work at. This particular company is not present on it's own on LinkedIn, but is on Facebook. Although they have way more followers and subscribers as we do on Facebook, the posts seem to get about the same or less reactions than we. On Instagram the reactions are more than us - but again, they have been present longer,and have more followers.

Company B
This company is also on the same field as we. It operates around the same area, and has been on Instagram since 2017. Lately they have also started sharing quotes, tips, and employer-stories. They share their lives openly. They have a page where all of their social media contacts are present - they do podcasts on Spotify and Youtube, they have a Facebook page, blog, list of different media sources they've been mentioned at, and an easy "contact us" link. I think their contact is good, but they could improve on a constant, clean visual look (that's what company A dominated in). This company has a LinkedIn profile, which it uses mainly to recruit (And even at that is not very active). It shares information about the size of the company and how many employees it has.

1c

On my field of study - a community educator - the way social media is used is very wide. As I am soon graduating, I already have a job at an elders home care company, as a content creator. I am responsible for our social media activity, creating visibility and brand. Developing our services together with the rest of the team.

The way social media is used highly depends on whether you're working in an NGO, doing youth work, or working in a private sector. They all have something in common though - being close to people, creating content that's easy to access and understand, to pretty much everyone. It's from a person to person, but still focused on a certain audience.

Social media is used to connect, spread knowledge, advertise and recruit.

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