As a member of the publicity team, we focus on the promotion and awareness of the magazine amongst our target audience on social media networks with posts and campaigns. While discussing our course of action within the team we decided it would be best to conduct some research and see what times would be the best to post on social media to gain optimum engagement. We found out that the peak hours within the UAE are Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 am onwards, so we decided that we would post twice a week on these days for heightened engagement. After this we started brainstorming ideas of what we wanted to post and what kind of content our Instagram page would have, we decided that we wanted to keep the theme of the account playful and interactive. A lot of inspiration was taken from the social media of Lifestyle Magazines such as Friday, Harper’s Bazaar, etc. We chose to make Instagram reels instead of TikTok’s since we realized that it would be easier to focus on one platform at this stage and think about TikTok as a future venture.
For the reels, we decided that we would post them twice a week but we would post them on Sundays and Thursdays in the time frame of 11 to 4 pm. The content for the reels would consist of fun student interviews, reviews of restaurants, upcoming trends, documenting university events, etc.
We will also be utilizing Instagram Stories to interact and engage with our audience in the form of polls, Questions & Answers and many more stories related to fashion, food, technology and an endless number of sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes shots.
When coming up with the name of our account we decided that we wanted to keep it short and catchy so we came up with “20barely”. When posting our stories we created many categories as a part of our ‘highlights’ which include About us, BTS(behind the scenes)Fashion, Food, and Tech. We also included an ‘Our Team’ highlight wherein our team collected pictures of each team member and posted a story with each of the teams. My colleagues and I designed the highlights and stories on Canva and created our templates so we could stick to a certain format. I thought that this would help the audience get more comfortable with us and engage more freely with our content.
Documenting the BTS of the making of the magazine is a very important part of our social media page as were trying to incorporate a semblance of reality into the making of the magazine. After posting our BTS, we saw that it really did have an impact and increased our engagement significantly. We recently started posting teasers and ‘coming soon’ posts on our feed in hopes that we can attract our target audience through re-shares and create hype around the student-led magazine.
A posting plan was made so that we consistently post our content throughout the week.
To take it up a notch my colleagues and I decided that we needed to come up with a ‘publicity stunt’ to help promote our magazine further. We came up with a couple of different ideas but decided to do a hidden camera prank where we would cover our whole student lounge with post-its and papers with the magazine name on them and also give out chocolates to students, only if they follow our Instagram. We think that this will get people talking about our magazine. We also thought that getting a ‘TikToker’ to participle in our magazine would also garner a lot of attention, so ‘MixedNaz’ has agreed to take part and come in for an interview for BarelyTwenty.
My BCM workshop 