As the publicity team, we had one of the most important responsibilities, promoting and publicizing our magazine, Barely 20.
During our first discussion as a group, we realized that we would have to find methods of accurately targeting our audience to make sure we reach them. Since the team was responsible for spreading the word using social media, we started off by deciding what platforms we wanted to utilize and found out that Instagram was the most viable option for us to explore. After conducting our initial required research, we found out that the best times to post or be active on our social media would be on Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 am onwards, so we decided to post twice a week to gain optimum engagement. We followed this schedule for a week and realized that these timings weren’t necessarily working for us so we modified our posting time to between 2:30 pm till 4:30pm, we saw that we got increased engagement if we posted within this time frame rather than at 11 am.
We also had to come up with ideas on what we wanted to post and what kind of content was to be created for our Instagram page, a conclusion was made that we want to keep the account very fun and interactive in order to gain more engagement. We took immense inspiration from popular lifestyle and fashion magazines such as FRIDAY, Harpers BAZAAR, etc. Talking about the type of post we would upload, it was decided that we would post two feed posts, as well as two reels per week. Although, the reels would be posted on Sundays and Thursdays between 2:30 to 4:30pm rather than the Wednesdays and Fridays that we decided for the feed posts. TikTok as a platform was considered for a fleeting moment until we decided that Instagram Reels would be a better option, as at the moment, reels are being intensely pushed by Instagram and are being widely circulated. In order to keep our account alive and active, we post daily stories related to fashion, food, technology, and/or behind the scenes and sneak peeks into the making of our magazine. Basically, we decided to create and follow a schedule to allow us to stay consistent and keep our audience engaged.
The account is named ‘20barely’ in order to keep it short, catchy, and easy to remember. When we started posting our stories, we realized that creating highlights would be beneficial to both us and our audience as we would be able to subtly introduce them to our magazine categories and give them a peek into what to expect. The ‘highlights’ themselves contain the following categories, ‘About Us’, ‘Behind the Scenes’, ‘Fashion’, ‘Food’, ‘Tech’, and ‘Our Team’. The ‘Our team’ highlight consists of a story with each team and their team members with pictures that we gathered. We decided to do this since we thought it would help our audience familiarize themselves with the team and get them more comfortable with us and engage more freely with the content that we post. This is also the reason that we added so many behind the scenes shots and sneak peeks of the content creation process, we wanted the audience to feel like they were a part of this journey.
We designed all the story and post templates on Canva since it helped us maintain a theme and format. We found this to be way easier to manage as well since we were all familiar with using the program and collaborating on it. For the stories, we began with posting polls related to fashion and food to increase engagement. After that, we started to post on our feed. Our first post was a sort of ‘sneak peek’ into the making of our magazine, we chose to do this as the first post since it was talking about the magazine itself, and letting our audience know what was in store for them.
Our post ideas were very diverse, we wanted to portray a good mix of informative and entertaining posts, and we achieved just that. Our team started off by creating content, we did this for our Instagram reels. We decided to make the reels fun and student-centric so they could be more relatable to our target audience, the students of The University of Wollongong in Dubai. To achieve this, we filmed our reels with students in them, we wanted to keep it fun and interesting so we asked the students questions like, ‘What’s your favorite met gala look?’, ‘What car do you drive?’ ‘What project are you working on?’ etc. As for our posts, we decided to keep them related to the magazine’s content, we uploaded a post with ‘Summer Essentials’ for the fashion section along with ‘Top Summer Destinations in Dubai’ for travel and ‘5 Highest Selling NFTs’ for the tech section. Along with this we filmed a few review reels as well, The Hint Café at the Etihad Museum was one of them, wherein we went in rated the food, and shared our opinions on it.
As a next step to promoting our magazine, the marketing team was able to procure a brand deal with two brands, as the publicity team our responsibility was to film and promote the products we were given. The first brand was ‘FitElla’ they specialize in whey protein based chocolate spreads and are sugar-free, so they gave us two products. One was a large jar of their chocolate-flavored spread which we filmed a reel on, wherein we talked about the health benefits and versatility of the product itself. Eg: it could be used as a topping, spread, etc. For their second product, we were given small packages of the same spread which were ‘snack-sized’ we filmed a reel promoting these as well, for this we asked a UOWD student to try and test ‘FitElla’ and give us their review.
The second brand deal we got was with ‘EveryThink’ we had already conducted an interview with the owner of this brand for the magazine, the product we were given to promote was the ‘EveryThink weekly planner’ we decided that we would film a reel for this as well to show the utility of the product, but we wanted to do it in a more natural manner so we asked a student to tell us how they would use a planner to manage their busy schedules.
Our reels ended up doing really well and brought us a lot of engagement and views, but we realized that our audience was more interesting in watching content that the students were involved in, or the reels that required the students’ opinions rather than the reviews.
To promote the magazine launch we decided to approach students and tell them about the launch, and asked them what they would like to see, or what would they expect from a launch of that scale. We filmed a reel asking students the same and spread the word about the launch event. We also made Instagram Posts about the event and shared multiple stories of the same.
As the fruit of our efforts, we now have a following of 261 which is steadily growing. In the last 90 days, we have managed to reach 60,000 accounts, out of which 59.9k were non-followers and only 81 of them were followers.
We think this is because of the fact that Instagram boosted our reels and spread them to a wider audience, the most well performing reel was one we made for ‘FitElla’ which garnered us 19.7k views and 287 likes. Followed by a reel we filmed with the students ‘What’s your favorite fast-food joint?’, the reel garnered 14k views got 692 likes, and was shared 30 times. The next one was a reel exhibiting student projects from different majors, it got 13.9K views. Our most well-performing feed post was the one with Tiktok star ‘MixedNaz’ with 314 likes in total.
This whole project was a team effort and our group had to collaborate with each other to finalize and discuss content ideas and create the said content on a daily basis, and would not have been possible if everyone did not take their responsibilities seriously. The student magazine was a success and has the potential to become a UOWD staple.
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/20barely/
My BCM workshop 