Over the summer, i read a book called The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. In this book, it divided effective social media marketing (SMM) into four “wings”; focus, grab attention, engage, and take action.
In the first wing, the book offers a section written by Randi Zuckerberg, the former Director of Market Development and spokesperson for Facebook, highlighting three ways to increase the effectiveness of Facebook use. Her first tip was regarding tagging. Zuckerberg advised to allow people to tag themselves in your pictures. This allows people to be engaged, and Facebook is driven by tagging (43). When a friend is tagged in a picture, it shows up on your friends newsfeed, making the reach of the post increase. I took this information and have found ways to try to make the post of this. After both weeks of the leadership academy, I had uploaded 90 photos of students, squads, and staff. I made my best effort to tag everyone who had Facebook in each of these pictures. Our reach skyrocketed! We were reaching over 9,000 people! This was a major success for our organization’s online presence. On January 3rd, 2016 we had our Winter Reveal and Reunion. Students went to the Boston Museum of Science to experience the Pixar exhibit and see an icon among leadership academy alum, Dory. After this, attendees made the short trek to the brand new Education First building in Cambridge. Here Evren gave a presentation about how our 2016 summer leadership academy would be evolving. After this, I contacted our list of attendees, asking for submissions of any pictures they had from the event. All of these pictures went into a Facebook album, and got a reach of well over 1,000 people. My first real social media campaign, Humans of ELL, also had an incredible effect. Our total reach for all 32 photos up to this point is an astounding 22,400. Twenty-two thousand! All just through the simple act of tagging people we are able to reach an average of 700 people per post. That is my dream.