The el Don News Team recognizes that news is only useful if it informs the public so we wanted to focus on reaching people who don’t pick up a print edition or visit eldonnews.org to read our reporting. Starting in Spring 2019, el Don created two social media editor positions to experiment with new ways to inform and engage the public through storytelling on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The small team (as well as section editors) identified different audience needs for each platform and surveyed classmates to come up with different ways to share information across platforms. On Facebook, we created a group called Santa Ana College News (moderated by an el Don editor) and began posting articles from other outlets in between our own. In one semester, we gained 106 followers and reached an average of about 50 engaged accounts per post. Since the beginning of the year, we have also grown our follower count on Instagram from about 300 to 758, which has tripled our reach with each Instagram feed post and more than doubled our account reach for daily Stories. At least 4 days a week, social media editors share real-time posts from on-campus events as well as student-produced photos, videos and text through both the feed and Stories tools. Highly engaged posts are ones that ask for feedback or comments on certain situations on our main feed posts or asking questions and posting polls in our Stories. Our followers are vocal in the comments about their opinions and often Direct Message us with follow-up questions. Using GIFs, boomerangs as well as interactive tools like polls, questions and opinions, we always try to push ways on how it can relate back to those who follow us.
Social media links:
Daily posts on all social media channels sharing images, articles and information about campus news and events.
Breaking News
Click here to view separate page compilingall el Don breaking news coverage of a homicide investigation on campus that was presented in real-time across all social media platforms.
Facebook Videos
Link to all FB-uploaded videos from 2019: https://www.facebook.com/pg/eldonnewspaper/videos/?ref=page_internal
Instagram Stories
Using Instagram Tools to inform and engage audience:
Informing the public via direct messages, comments and tweet replies
Transparency and self-promotion
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