When I first came into the Social Media Manager position at RED-i in September of 2019, their accounts had been relatively inactive for the better portion of a year. This meant I had a significant challenge ahead of me to re-engage existing followers in addition to growing the audience of RED-i's accounts.

The first step in this process involved providing a new expectation of consistency. I developed a regular schedule for the accounts to follow, promoting our services through a variety of content types. I began this step by promoting our primary three service areas individually: Photography, Graphic Design, and Videography, with my main goal at the beginning being to balance the type of content I posted between the categories.

After a short period of time prioritizing consistent engagement on RED-i's end, I used what I had learned about our customer base and the types of engagement they offered to re-strategize. It had become clear that most of our customer base, university student organizations and the students that run them, primarily used Instagram as their method of online marketing. Knowing this, I began focusing on RED-i's Instagram strategy much more by diversifying the content posted on this platform and the ways our organization engaged with our customer base.

This is the primary strategy I used when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic as NC State attempted to facilitate a hybrid learning experience for students beginning August 2020. Coming back to campus in the fall of 2020, RED-i aimed to keep our workload high enough to keep student employees paid, even as student organizations activities drastically decreased. This transformed how we provided our services significantly, with our team introducing marketing packages like our “COVID Kit” and eventually took on much larger and long-term projects for clubs in the spring of 2021.

With larger projects like the Art2Wear Virtual Fashion Show () and the DanceVisions Virtual Concert (), our team was producing much less finished content on a weekly basis compared to before. I used this shift in our work environment to market how our team worked with our clients, showing more behind-the-scenes content and providing project updates to steadily advertise for said projects throughout the semester.

Within this experience, including my time as Team Lead in the fall of 2021, I had many opportunities to work with a variety of digital resources. Most frequently, I was using Adobe Creative Cloud softwares like Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and After Effects. In addition to those applications, I got very familiar with team collaboration tools like Google Drive, Jira, and Slack. My position as social media manager allowed me to experiment with content scheduling softwares like Facebook Business Suite, Later Scheduling, and Hootsuite, as well. While I still have much to learn in all of these areas, I am both extremely grateful for the learning opportunities RED-i provided and extremely proud of how much I grew during my time on the team.

Over the course of my two years working for RED-i, I was able to change our Instagram from an inactive social media account to our primary source of online engagement and customer leads with the organization. Additionally, I grew as a content creator in photography, videography, and graphic design, and, most importantly, I found a passion for digital marketing.

See more of my work at RED-i here: