I’ve always found social media daunting. There are aspects of it that are so fun and creative but I find the constant pressure to produce and to produce things that people will (quite literally) like a task that quickly becomes paralysing. In starting this project, Trompe L’Oeil, one of our goals was to trial a social media campaign. Both Amber and I wanted to test out and grow our marketing skills. We felt like this was an area where we were lacking - and if I am being honest I also felt intimidated - so what better time to try it out than during our MFA project. It feels like we can experiment and fail (or succeed) within safer parameters because we are still operating as students. I suppose that is what this year has given me in so many ways. Permission to fail. Maybe that’s a blog post all to itself.
So what did we do? We started with a quick google and also a very helpful info session from one of our course mates (who is a social media manager). I won’t give away all of their tips and tricks but I will focus on what I’ve found most helpful.
Consistency
Amber and I created a social media calendar. Charlotte was already running one for Very Rascals so credit must go to her! I am pretty proud of this document. We split up an excel spreadsheet into days and for each day we detail what post is going out and the caption and what platform. This allows us to bulk create captions (I hate writing captions so this is great because you do all of the hard parts at once). We created a rough outline for us to follow. Each week would get a theme (introducing a team member). Monday would then be an introduction post, Tuesday an interview, Wednesday a blog, Thursday a reel/Tik Tok, and Friday a rehearsal picture form the week. This takes away some of the activation energy needed to post because we have an outline to follow and all we have to do is schedule all the posts and out they go!
Schedule
So I have talked about our miraculous calendar which is where we keep our content. We have also started using Hootsuite because scheduling stuff just makes everything easier. You do all the work upfront and then you profit as it goes out. I love it. We are definitely still learning how everything works but it does feel like a god send.
Divide and Conquer
We decided pretty early on as a group that Marketing was a two person job in our small producing team. And thank goodness for that! It is so helpful to have a team of two to create captions and trade off creation/posting responsibility. Amber and I will also switch each day for stories which means only one of us has the responsibility of posting stories for that day and interacting with other companies on social media. I know it’s not always possible to work in a team for small projects but if you organise your group getting your other cast members/producers/creatives on side to take a little of the workload from you can really help.
It still makes me quite nervous to put some much content out there but it really has been a team effort and I’ve found that is the key. And no, we haven’t gone viral over night. But we are plugging away and I figure practice makes (or gets you closer inch by inch to) perfect.