Social Media Review

About 2 weeks ago, we had to advocate as a group about a specific issue on different social media platforms for a week. For this project, my group created a group with the acronym SAFE (Save Animals From Experiments) advocating and raising awareness for the issue of animal experimentation and testing. We utilized the social media platforms of Twitter, Facebook, and a Wix website to reach out and communicate to the public audience. After 7 days of campaigning, we found that our social media platforms were not at all successful at reaching out to our audience. After 16 Tweets over the course of 7 days, our Twitter page had a total of 3 favorited posts, 1 retweet, and 8 followers. On our Facebook page, we received 8 likes and an average of 5 people per week who visited the page. We were unable to determine the popularity of Wix website because we did not include the option to comment on our posts, and therefore received no comments.

From the campaign, I have gained new experiences and knowledge about advocating through social media. For example, since I was in charge on Twitter, I learned that Twitter is not the most effective platform to communicate longer messages. The character limits on Twitter limited what I was able to post on the page. Facts and statistics I originally wanted to post had to be cut down to fit the character limit, and therefore, lost their "shock" factor that made our stance persuasive. Based on experiment, I thought that Twitter was mainly useful for advertising the posts on our Facebook page and our 7 day challenge. Based on what my group partners reported, Facebook was definitely the most effective social media platform for communicating. Facebook not only allows you to post longer texts, but also to share videos, pictures, updates, etc. The downside of the Facebook platform is that it is difficult to advertise for your page. Unlike Twitter where you can gain followers by following people back, Facebook pages rely on people to either stumble upon the page or sharing it onto their own Facebook profile. Lastly, my group partners also reported that much like Facebook, Wix was also a effective platform to share videos, pictures, and updates. However, also similar to Facebook, it was difficult to get people to visit our Wix website.

Once the 7 day campaign, we were assigned to make modifications to our social media platforms over the next two weeks to reach more people. For Twitter, I decided in order to increase the number of followers, I would follow more people. I searched through Twitter for people who felt the same way towards animal experimentation and followed their pages. Over the next two weeks, I increased the number of people followed from initially 12 to 65. The number of followers we gained was not significant, and since we started following people recently, we're still waiting for more people to follow back. On Facebook, we advertised that the first few people who complete our 7 day challenge would receive an unique SAFE shirt. This is meant to be an incentive to get people to participate in our 7 day challenge. Since our challenge required participants to share our page and challenge, participants who want to receive a free shirt would also be advertising our page and the problem we want to tackle. For our Wix page, we enabled the option to comment on our posts. We hope that with the comment section, our readers would let us know what they think about our cause and offer any suggestions they may have to improve our campaign. However, we have not yet received any comments on our posts.

In addition to working on our social media campaign, we were also assigned Connect modules throughout the quarter. Although there were multiple Connect modules targeting at different literary techniques, the most beneficial Connect modules, in my opinion, were the modules on skim-reading and on quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. From these modules, I learned that the most effective way to skim read a source is to read the first and last lines of a paragraph. This technique lets you quickly determine the content of the paragraph, allowing you to determine if it's relevant to your topic and if it is worth the time reading. The second module on on quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing taught me when each of the three technique is most appropriate when referencing an external source. I learned that quoting should be used when what the researcher said is direct and clear and cannot/should not be rephrased in anyway. Paraphrasing is most effective when you want to reword what the author says in an attempt to simplify the vocabulary or terminology, clarify the message, or even just to fit the structure and style of our paper. It is important to note not to alter the meaning of the author through paraphrasing. Lastly, summarizing should be used when you want to state the author's main points without restating the entire length of the text. Before this module, I definitely though that quoting is the most preferred method of referencing a text since directly quoting a scholar is the best way to increase the credibility of your writing. I had no idea paraphrasing or summarizing could be used in place of quoting since I felt like it reduces credibility because you are writing the information in your own voice. As indicated by the image below, this was one of the sections I struggled the most with, just because it was a fairly new concept to me.