Best Social Media Promotion- ACP/Pinnacles

During the 2021-2022 academic year, el Don staff returned to the newsroom for the first time in 17 months and quickly conducted information needs assessments with their audience. Through those community conversations, we decided that being back on campus means our fellow students would respond well to printed news products. So instead of daily social media posts that they knew would only get lost in everyone’s news feeds, el Don‘s social media team focused prime real estate on informing, engaging and promoting our various print products.

Over two semesters, staff created three editions of a newsmagazine, two Back to School zines, one 16-page mental health zine and no less than five single-topic one-page zines. Below is how they promoted some of them on social media:

Fall 2021 – Back to School Cheat Sheet Zine

The zine that started it all. By the second week of school, we had enough reporting to publish a one-page zine with critical information for students returning to campus. Over 500 copies were printed in house, hand-folded by staff and distributed to key locations on campus.

An Instagram feed post uses the gallery function to display the information inside the zine, informing the digital audience while encouraging them to pick up the physical product.

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The gallery feed post was coupled with a series of Instagram Stories (bel0w) that showed people how to make the zine and where to find it on campus.

The feed post and the last IG Story says to click “link in bio,” which directs users to our Linktr.ee (below) where the first option was to print the Back to School Cheat Sheet zine.

The top link goes to a post on eldonnews.org that includes a list of what’s inside the zine along with a PDF version that people can read, download and print themselves!

Click here to download a PDF copy of the Fall 2021 Back to School Cheat Sheet

November 2021 – First Newsmagazine Print Issue

For the first el Don newsmagazine since the pandemic, staff went all out with a 12-page issue reporting on. The big news was fall sports and the Instagram gallery feed post promoting it showed off the print issue first along wth photos from some of the stories in print.

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Spring 2022 – Back to School Zine

Returning on campus in spring, el Don staff spent the first few weeks of the semester hunting down information that students needed to navigate rising Omicron cases and uneven back-to-campus policies for different campus resources. The resulting reporting about everything from how to get a counseling appointment to the new president was placed in a zine designed by Editor in Chief Kate G. Bustamante.

About 300 black and white and 250 color copies were printed, handmade and distributed by el Don staff across campus.

Click here to download a PDF copy of the Spring 2022 Back to School Zine

Again, the social media team took to Instagram Stories to do two things: drive traffic to the website post with the information and zine PDF and encourage people to seek out and pick up copies around campus. To do that they shared the process of how the staff made the zines, which this time included more pages of information and required both cutting and stapling.

Another Instagram feed post was used to promote a specific part of the zine, one with far fewer stakes than distributing critical information and news. To build community in those early weeks, students made playlists where everyone had to submit at least one jam. The back page of the Back to School zine featured the “Welcome Back Vibes Spring 2022” Spotify playlist with a QR code that when scanned takes you directly to the app to play it.

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Between the “link in bio” promotion through Instagram and the QR code on the print editions, the playlist has thousands of plays and dozens of likes.

May 2022 – Looking Back on a Year of Print

For their final assignments of the semester, many students chose to create zines out of some of their reporting. Students were able to print as many copies as they wanted to distribute over the summer. Below is a final Instagram feed post promoting all of the print editions the el Don published during the 2021-2022 academic year.

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To keep the promotion of print going, staff created a permanent “highlight” on the el Don Instagram account featuring all of the IG Stories related to print from the last year.