Entrepreneurship
Social Media Presence
Personally, I strongly believe that Instagram is the best social media platform to promote articles. I chose not to make a separate account because if I did, my articles would only be promoted to those who are solely interested in my work, whereas on my personal account, everyone, whether they care about my work or not, will be able to view my writing. It makes it easier to have a wider audience.
I included other publications I’m a part of in my bio and made them so people can click on their page and look through the account. I made my page a business account and tagged myself as a journalist—the tag is visible on mobile.
I advertise my articles primarily on my Instagram story and save them as a highlight, so even when the post goes away after 24 hours, people could still look at them (Below are examples of some of my posts).
In my bio, I also included my Linktree where people can access my pages on every publication I write for.
Insights
Below are the insights I received on my Instagram stories.
Instead of just having a screenshot with words saying “Read my article” on it, I wanted to make the post look appealing enough so people click on it. I make sure the colors for the background and words match and always include a sticker or smaller graphic in the empty spaces. I used to follow the same outline, but now I do different designs, so they’re all unique.
@npknightcrier
This year, the editors and I have made an effort to use the Instagram more since we weren’t very active last year. Since I mostly post on my stories, we also repost them on our page to reach more people.
While I love Instagram, I created a Twitter just to have another platform to promote my work. I don’t have many followers, but we have our newspaper page retweet all of my tweets, as well as anyone else’s on the staff, and it still gets the job done.
Similar to my Instagram, I included the other publications I write for, as well as my LinkTree.
Our newspaper also has a Twitter account where we tweet/retweet about articles that go up on our site.
I use my Facebook account primarily for articles. I don’t usually post anything else. My family normally shares what I post and it goes around their friend group. I find that posting my articles on my Facebook helps reach to the older crowd since Instagram and Twitter usually reaches those around my age.
Contests
Throughout the past 3 years I’ve been on the staff, we held contests to get more people on our site. We gave free tickets for our Winter Ball Dance and Senior Prom by through Tik Tok contests, photo contests, and promposal contests. We allowed the school to vote. For our Promposal contest, we had 60 comments. For our Tik Tok contest, we had 332 votes.
