Cara's CSIT 155 - Fall 2020 Class Blog

 Blogging is an excellent way to increase the flow of traffic to a website because a blog humanizes a company. While not all blogs are about personal things the blogger themselves has experienced, the blogger can still share personal notes as they relate to the business. When people read blog posts they know a human being actually took the time to write the blog, whereas information on a website is just straight forward with no personal flair.  A great way to add a personal touch to a blog is for a testimonial. A lot of companies only allow their best employees to write testimonials for the company that is then shared on their blogs or websites. Being honest about the company and what they are doing makes the customer trust the company/brand more because they could be a shared connection. If the company sells soaps specialized for people with certain skin disorders, a testimonial from an employee who has a skin disorder will make others feel more comfortable knowing they are buying a p

This week I chose to look at Mt. San Antonio College, Fullerton College, UCLA and North Texas University's athletic accounts. I found it interesting that the only school that consistently uses the same hashtags is UCLA, which is #GoBruins. The other schools will use them sporadically or not at all. UCLA has 116K followers, while North Texas has just under 9K. The two smaller schools, Fullerton and Mt. SAC have 400 and 600, respectively. Again, UCLA is the only school that has more than five comments consistently on their posts. Maybe this has to do with the fact they are a larger school that is nationally known, whereas the other schools are smaller with a more specific audience. Both UCLA and North Texas have very clean posts with minimal design to them. Fullerton has a lot of editing to make the photos look "cooler" but it looks weird and, in my opinion, turns the viewer away from their content because it is hard to see. On our accounts, we do minimal design to catch th

For Palomar's Athletics Instagram, we use a majority of still images in our stories and for main content. It seems to be effective for us, but we definitely have more engagement with posts regarding specific teams. Because our social media presence is still new, we have a handful of our athletes following us and certain teams utilize different platforms. For example, the majority of our Instagram followers are women's basketball and softball players, while Twitter is mainly football and baseball. We try to content plan for videos, but as a one-person shop, the video planning gets pushed to the side for more pressing matters.  We use the hashtags, #CometPowered☄️ , and #PalomarAthletics. The Comet Powered one came from a spin-off of the school's, #PalomarPowered. We wanted them to be similar but their own entities. For specific posts, like school-related ones, we use #ScholarComets and for athletes who move on to the next level, we use #NextLevelComets. We follow almost all

 For my scheduled content, I have started a new series called Comet History. I am going to dig through our archives to find stories that make our history so special and promote why student-athletes should choose our school. The person who wrote these stories really put our school on the map when it came to writing about our students and I want to honor him in this way. I think this will be good content because our fans love the historical aspect of things, so I think they will have fun engaging with the content. 

 Here is a list of pages I have followed as Palomar College Athletics Orange Coast Community College Athletics Grossmont College Athletics California Community College Athletic Association Bakersfield College Athletics California Community College Baseball Athletic Association Mt. San Antonio College Athletics Riverside Community College Athletics I chose to follow these pages because they have a good grasp on what works for Facebook. Since this is one area I want to work on for my department, I wanted to follow pages that are doing well so I can get inspiration for my content. I can also see what is working and what isn't for those pages which allows me to plan for better content. By having better and more consistent content, my audience will grow because more people will be liking and sharing the content. 

The Palomar College Athletics Facebook page is about a year old now. I didn't have any followers for about a month and the numbers are slowly increasing. This is one platform I typically neglect. Whenever I post to Instagram, the post is also on Facebook, so that is where the content is coming from. I really want to stop doing this and turn this platform into its own unique thing so I can increase the number of likes and followers.  Grossmont College Athletics uses their Facebook as their main platform. They post short interviews with their athletes, they post old content as a Throwback Thursday, and general information from the college about scholarship information, registration dates, etc. I do think they were doing this effectively since they were posting about once a week, but they haven't posted anything since August 19. I think their cover photo is nice, it is of their athletic facility, but it could be better. I only know that is what the building is because I've bee