On Monday, students in the 200-level Social Media Strategy & Analytics course presented a comprehensive social media plan to their client Brookhaven Dog Park.
Divided into three teams — management, creative and analytics — students functioned as a marketing firm, identifying areas of growth, creating unique content and branding, and mapping out the park’s social media usage moving forward.
Social Media Strategy & Analytics, taught by Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Dr. Kate Keib, is a service-learning class — meaning students get the opportunity to apply what they learn in the classroom to a hands-on service project. After learning the fundamentals of effective and goal-oriented social media usage, students met with representatives from the Brookhaven Dog Park to help build their online presence.
Zuri Johnson ’23 explains her ideas to representatives from the Brookhaven Dog Park
Zuri Johnson ’23 (left), a film and media studies and communication studies double-major, says that this project helped her to better understand how to work with clients. Part of the analytics team, she monitored the engagement on the class’s content and helped create attainable growth goals for future users.
“In this project for the Brookhaven Dog Park, I was able to be very hands-on, figure out what works and what doesn’t work and how to create something that has longevity.”
Dedicated to building a safe and enjoyable community in real life, representatives from the dog park wanted to create a similar environment on their Facebook and Instagram accounts and expand their audience as much as possible. With a Halloween event at the park coming up, the class created a campaign to spread the word and interact with followers. The management team defined the brand, the creative team crafted posts, and the analytics team monitored progress throughout the campaign.
By creating a definitive voice, posting new and creative content, engaging with users, and optimizing the use of native social tools, the class effectively doubled the amount of visitors on the park’s social pages and saw user interaction spike. All of this information was captured and presented to the Brookhaven Dog Park team to help them make use of similar campaigns.
“This kind of experiential learning helps the students prepare for the realities of the workforce in several ways,” says Keib. “They learn how to work as a team, how to meet a client’s needs and they get practice at thinking like a marketer — not just a savvy social media user. They come away with very practical skills to put on their resumes and talk about in interviews, as well as content that they can use in their digital portfolios.”
