Update

Our Facebook and Twitter accounts are continuing to grow. Currently, I'm using our Twitter account for a couple of different things: To get campus quotes and to send out pictures from the Beacon. The latter is a new development I've been trying, and it's been getting us a lot of retweets and favorites (and, as a result, followers). I've sent out three pictures so far: the Linden/Warrior princess photoshop, our butt bracket, and a picture of the word "Bacon" so that we can promote the upcoming Bacon issue.

I poked around inside the various folders and found a lot of old pictures that could conceivably be deleted. If Linden approved their deletion, they would free up a TON of extra space (pictures are extremely space-consuming). I'll show her them on Thursday.

Another update

Our Facebook and Twitter numbers continue to grow. The past week, I spent some time on Twitter responding to a couple of people who were asking about why some stories didn't make it online. This is another solid use for social media...we can find out what people are looking for and give them those stories. We didn't have the porn article online, and they wanted to read it.

I also responded to some people on Facebook who were requesting that we put the campus quotes online with our next issue. That's my department, so I told her I would be happy to do so. I'll have to figure out an acceptable format for the quotes on WordPress, but that shouldn't take me very long and I can create a template for future editors (who might not have written 2,000 NBA blogs on WP) to use.

I talked to Linden about deleting some of the old pages. We have copies of all of our old Beacons saved, but we also have separate "Features" "A&C" etc. clogging up room. They were never deleted after Linden packaged them all together.

I'll look for more excess this week.

It's been a confusing couple of weeks Beacon-wise thanks to spring break, but we continue to gain ground on our sites. Both our Facebook and Twitter accounts saw progress (although I learned I can't post anything from my iPad). Our processes seem to be working well.

I plan to do some organizational work this week once our stories are completed.

Numero Four

I began organizing the folders as a part of my practicum last week. I looked in our "old stories" folder with Linden, and we considered whether or not to delete all of the old stories since the library keeps track of all of the old papers. We decided to hold off for a little bit, but that folder seems like a prime candidate for deletion when we begin getting rid of the things we don't need anymore. We could also consider getting rid of old pages for the same reason, but it would be a good idea to confirm with the library that they do indeed take record of all of the old papers so we don't delete something we will regret deleting later.

I also continued my Twitter/Facebook work and I'm getting some good results. We continue to get campus quote submissions via our various social media outlets. I would even submit that we could probably get rid of the "submit via email" option on our submission blurb and just focus on our social media outlets, since they are doing so well on their own. We are up to 120 followers on Twitter and 105 on Facebook.

Post #3

Thanks to a very busy week (WHAT WITH WINNING AN AWARD AND ALL), I didn't have time to do much other than my normal duties. But Emilee posted a lot of pictures on our Facebook, and our Likes continue to climb. We are well up over 100 now (a pretty solid improvement over the 12 we started off with), and our Twitter followers are in the 100s as well. I'm trying to post one status/tweet per day from a different department each time and I think that's going pretty well. Our Campus Quote submissions are continuing to grow online as well (I've even gotten enough to turn away a few of the more mediocre ones!)

I'll probably begin organizing the system this week, since my Valentine's Day will consist of myself working at the Beacon and my fiancee working at her job. Frankly, I'm not really complaining.

Update #2

I spent the past couple weeks continuing to try and build our following, but it's nice to get a social media presence of some sort, because it makes other jobs easier too. For example, all of our campus quotes for this week will come either via our Facebook or Twitter accounts. People seem to be enjoying the ease with which they can submit, and hopefully we can get that to spread somewhat.

We've also been retweeted a few times by the various NWC Twitter accounts around campus. One thing we may want to do (and I plan to try in the next couple weeks) is tagging those accounts in our tweets hoping they will retweet us so we can continue to reach out to people who would potentially be interested in following us. So, for example, a tweet might read:

We bid farewell to Japanese students visiting @NWCIowa. By @PriyankaFernando. (link goes here)

NWC has roughly 1,000 Twitter followers, so retweets from them would be likely to gain us some followers as well.

I haven't had a chance to examine the archives yet, but I will probably start doing that next week (since this week I will be putting my page together on Wednesday).

Here we go again.

I have been posting from the Facebook and Twitter accounts frequently, offering stories and opportunities to contribute to submit campus quotes. I figured out how to post Facebook statuses automatically, which has been helpful. We have been generating a little bit of activity, certainly more than we had last semester. I would be interested in taking a look at the Beacon Wordpress stats to see how much traffic the posts are generating. I will do that this Thursday when we are working on the website after our pages are done.

I've been struggling to think of other things I can do besides social media. I'm open to doing more, but if we decided not to do more, that would be fine as well since my schedule is kind of crazy this semester. But I'm definitely open to other suggestions.