A Week of Advocacy

It is currently the last day of our week long advocacy project. I had Tweeted my last Twitter post for our group advoacy project several hours ago. In case you didn't have a chance to read by last blog post, my groups members and I were assigned to raise awareness of animal experimentation and promote the use of cruelty-free products through social media. My group chose to use Twitter, Facebook and a Wix website as our main platforms of social media. We decided the best way to distribute the work would be have one person be in charge of a social media platform, with me being assigned to Twitter.

For our group advocacy project, we decided to do a 7-day challenge, in which there would be a task for our participants to perform everyday for seven days. The purpose of this challenge was to raise animal love and care, raise awareness of and spread knowledge about animal experimentation, and to have people adopt a cruelty-free lifestyle. To learn more about our 7-day challenge, check out our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/safeuci?fref=ts) and our website (http://stopanimalexperime.wix.com/safe). My role for the advocacy project was to be in charge of the Twitter social media platform. I tweeted once or twice everyday, about either facts, videos or photos of animal experimentation or advertising our 7-day campaign. I chose to tweet facts, videos, and photos because they are short messages effective at communicating to our audience. These photos and videos are also capable of evoking pathos while the facts can establish logos.

One of the major issues I had with Twitter for this advocacy project was the character limit. With a character limit of 140 characters (115 after all the neccessary hashtags), I was unable to tweet the facts I wanted my audience to read about. For the facts I did post, I had to cut of the majority of the facts that they lost their shock and surprise factor. In addition, because of the character limits, I was pretty much limited to what I can post and ended up advertising our 7 day challenge that could be found on our Facebook page.

Overall, I didn't think our group advocacy project was very effective. At the end of the 7 day period, I ended up Tweeting a total of 16 tweets, receiving only 3 favorites, 1 retweet and 8 followers. I feel like our campaign would have been more successful if advertised our campaign more on our own Facebook pages, attracting our own friends to join. In addition, if we had included an incentive for our 7 day challenge, such as free T-shirts for the first 5 people to complete the challenge and nominate 3 of their friends, more people might choose to take the challenge. Although the campaign was not as successful as I had originally hoped it would be, I still feel like it was a great learning experience and it definitely taught me how to use Twitter.