Students in Darrell Flynn’s Social Media Marketing class are gaining hands-on experience creating a successful social media campaign!
Beginning this fall, students have been working to create an “Athlete of the Month” and recently, an “Athlete of the Season” campaign for the Tappan Zee Athletics Facebook and Instagram pages. Athletes are nominated by their coaches and people can vote by liking the post of the athlete they would like to win. The results are then reviewed by a committee within the school including teachers and Athletics Director Bill Pilla to ensure the contest is fair. “Our athletes are often recognized on the county level and these campaigns are aimed to highlight even more of the athletes within our school for their dedication and hard work. What we’ve seen is that on Instagram, we reach people mostly within the school and on Facebook, we are able to reach the students’ family and friends that live across the country,” said Flynn.
While working in groups, students created a presentation to explain how they would make the campaign successful. “We had to figure out all of the logistics of the campaign including which social media platforms would work best, the best time of day to post and how people could vote for the athletes each month,” explained senior Maya S. Sophomore Haley A. added, “We also designed the graphics for the campaign using Canva and created different hashtags that we thought would increase engagement.”
The design that junior Jenna F. created was ultimately chosen as the template that was used for the November “Athlete of the Month” posts. “I took the Entertainment and Sports Marketing class last year and we were using Canva all of the time so I’ve definitely learned a lot about how to make graphics like this. I found pictures from each of our sports teams on the TZ Athletics Instagram page and worked with different design features like filters, graphics and text boxes to make it more interesting,” Jenna said.
Social Media Marketing is a half-year elective that is offered to students in grades 10-12. Students enrolled in the class next semester will take over the campaign and brainstorm their own marketing strategies.
