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CLIENT PROJECT
By Tristan Bergerhofer
MY CLIENT: Zoe Youth Ministries
Zoe Youth Ministries is Cross points Church’s youth group. Their motto is “life, an life to the fullest”. The word “Zoe” is Greek for life. It is their goal to live life to the fullest and inspire a generation of teens who love God and the life he has given them.
Zoe caters to students from 7th through 12th. We have weekly youth group along with lots of other events for the teens to enjoy and have fellowship.
CHALLENGES
As with any job, there will be a number of challenges. As social media and marketing goes, my client had a large number of problems coming into this semester, including: Poor Online presence
Bad communication
Not reaching new people on any level
Lack of community
Going into the year, we really had no online presence. It was weak and mostly abandoned. Because of this, we were getting no publicity and numbers were at a low standstill. Beyond this, there were tremendous problems with communication- events were poorly attended because no one was aware, and parents were out of the loop about what was going on. This was a common complaint and needed to be fixed in an immediate and sustainable way.
OUR BASELINE
Like stated before, we had little to no online presence before this year. The only things we had were 1. A Facebook Page; having around 60 likes and no activity whatsoever.
2. A website; being updated every once and a while.
Both were not being posted on at all, and no new likes or comments were coming in either. Overall, while I can’t procure the exact stats of how it was before; I can safely say it was inefficient and basically useless.
OUR STRATEGY
After brainstorming what needed to be done, I came up with a few things that we as a group wanted to accomplish and how we would get there. We needed to communicate with parents better, to keep them informed and in the loop.
We wanted every person in our youth group involved in at least one of our social media pages, in order to keep them informed and create community.
We wanted to better promote our events to increase attendance.
Finally, it was our goal to provide a solid social media presence so that when shared with other students we would be attractive, possibly gaining more students at our group.
SRATEGY CONTINUED
In order to achieve these goals, we needed a wide spread of accounts. Certain profiles would connect better with parents and other with the teens. After creating all the profiles required for this class, I weighed my options and came down to the ones that best fit our needs, and “cut the fat” as we were taught in class. Profiles such as linked in and Google + did not benefit us, so I concentrated my attention elsewhere. We concentrated on these profiles: Facebook
Another form of communication called “Remind me” a web app that communicates through internet generated SMS.
For our demographic, Facebook is outdated. Less and less younger kids are creating an maintaining active Facebook accounts. Regardless, it still provides us with a way to reach some teens, but more importantly parents. Where Facebook was once a young persons social media platform, the average age is getting older and older every day. After polling our parents at a meeting, we discovered that this was a great way to get out information.
Having this knowledge, I started posting to Facebook for every event we had or any changes to our schedule. Frequent posting along with humor and good posts resulted in more success. I was able to get the important information out for the parents while keeping it fun for the teens.
Twitter, being our most recently developed page, is still growing. It can sometimes be not very useful because of the character limit, but it still good for communication. A small number of our teens favor twitter and therefore it was important to post here.
On twitter, my goal was to put out as much information as possible and to direct people to our other pages.
As of now, twitter is not our most powerful page, but I believe that in time it will continue to grow in popularity and will over power Facebook.
By far, Instagram has been our most useful social media device. I believe that of all social media apps Instagram reaches the most teens. Because it is a phone only app, and really has no desktop format, it is popular among teens who have smartphones (pretty much all of them). It allows us to create humor and interest with not only pictures and video, but also as many characters as we need to get our information out. And due to the frequency of how often teens check Instagram, we having the greatest reach here and are never missed.
My plan with Instagram was to post relevant, humorous and good posts. Also, using relevant hashtags and promoting users who involve us on social media. We have reposted pictures from other teens, furthering the community online. We have been largely successful with this profile.
RESULTS
Besides the immediate numbers and stats from our profiles, there has been incredible change for my client. Attendance has been at a historical high, and more and more visitors claim to have hearing about us from our online presence. Our events, once hard to have enough people to do anything, are reigning in more than half of our entire attendance at least. Lastly, parents have no more complaints because they are being well informed in multiple different ways. They are no able to choose what form of information best suits them.
We have reached further, gained more online influence and fan base, and gotten out important information that was missing before.
RESULTS
Here are a few posts and stats that have been results of our social media renovation.
• This was a recent campaign on Facebook for an event we were doing. This one of the first posts after creating our audit and plan. I crated this video to spread the news. As you can see, it reached almost 900 people, with 16 shares. Because of this post we doubles our attendance of this event from last year, going from 100 to 200 students.
Our Instagram page, created after starting this class, was completely grown from the ground up. It has 255 followers and receives a lot of activity, IE commenting, tagging, and likes. It has do-ne exactly like we wanted it to .
Additionally, I created a all new logo for each profile we have. From Linkedin to Youtube to Twitter ect, all of our profiles and covers match. Being mindful about our branding has helped us create and online identity that matches that of our group.
BEFORE AND AFTER: NEW PROFILES
Profiles before: Facebook
Youtube
o Profiles after:• Twitter • Google +• LinkedIn• Instagram• Hootesuite
BEFORE AND AFTER: MAJOR PROFILE FOLLOWERS AND ACTIVITY
Before: Facebook: 60 followers, no activity
Instagram: Didn't exist
• After:• Facebook: 103 followers, frequent
activity• Instagam: 254, frequent activity
(commenting, posting, tagging)
IMPLEMENTATION
Through this semester, either by learning or by trail and error, I have learned a lot about social media marketing. I learned how important it is in todays world and how it really isn’t an option when it comes to growing a company. I learned the proper ways to curate content and how to run a successful campaign thanks to HooteSuite, and also how to manage a companies pages thanks to them. One of the biggest things I learned was that an online reputation and presence is not made in a day, a week, month, or even a semester. It takes a long time worth of working hard and growing fan by fan. While you can nurture that growth, it takes perseverance and effort to push through. You may not be gaining hundreds of followers a day now, but you are laying the foundation to do so in the future.
GOING FORWARD
After this semester, I will continue to run the pages I did for the past month. On top of that, I will be taking on a new client; a growing conference called “STAINED CONFERENCE” it is approaching its third year and has roughly 400 teens per average each year. This year they are hoping to grow so I will heading their profiles and website, curating new content and growing a fan base. The things I learned in this class will aid me greatly in doing so.
As far as strategies go, I will continue to grow the online presence of Zoe and try and make these profiles powerful as I can. My hope is to have them this way when I pass them off to the next volunteer. My goal will be to post 1-2 times a week, and create more logos and posts from scratch.
It has been a wild ride running these pages, and there has been highs and lows; but overall, this class has given me the skills to continue grow these pages and in turn help my client, and provide me with the know how to do it again someday if needed.
