As someone pursuing a career in Social Media Marketing, I found this Social Media Audit extremely useful. I recorded posts and interactions, the day of the week, and the time of day. This was useful to compare what times and days worked best for posting. Herschel Supply Co. is similar to Buhi because they sell bags for a variety of reasons from travel to school backpacks.
Herschel’s Facebook posts happened on different days of the week but always at 10 in the morning. The posts received likes but little to no shares, and very few comments. The last three posts that I audited were from the beginning of September and were posted on Thursday, Tuesday, and Sunday at 9 in the morning. These photos had the most likes, still no shares, but had more comments than any of the other posts that happened later in the morning. I did not see a correlation with the captions and customer interactions on the posts. There was not much interaction on any posts whether it was a long or short caption.
I also did an Instagram Audit through the month of September. I noticed there were more interactions on this platform. Their photos and videos gained thousands of views. There were several comments on every post as well. This tells me more people are interacting on Instagram than Facebook.
Conclusion
As the Content Marketing Manager at Buhi, I would invest a little more time and effort into Instagram because the pay off is greater. I would also suggest making Facebook posts later in the afternoon. Posting in the morning is not yielding the results and interactions that the posts may get later in the day.
Overall, this audit shows where and how these posts are not working. It also gives me an idea how to direct Buhi’s social media posts and how to conduct those. This will be extremely helpful in my future marketing career.
Mimic Social Simulation Reflection
I have come to love Mimic simulations. They really are helpful in learning how and what to do. I felt like I was actually marketing on Buhi’s social media. I would recommend this to anyone wanting to learn more. This gave me real results, statistics, and feedback to improve my efforts.
In a previous blog, I did a social media audit on a similar company named Herschel Supply Co. This was the most helpful in showing me what was working and what was not working. By analyzing when and how Herschel was posting, this helped me to see when not to post. My first thought was to post in the morning but with the audience I was targeting, it worked well to post in the afternoon.
About Buhi
Buhi sells a variety of bags. For my simulation, I choose to focus mostly on backpacks. This worked well with the demographic I chose as my audience. I think focusing on one was the way to go. If I had spread my efforts around multiple bags, I think this would have been less of a success.
Demographics
My demographic was Back-to-School Mindy, being college females ages 18-26. The first round, I promoted to multiple audiences which proved to fail. I then decided it was best to focus on one demographic. In the third and fourth round, I saw that my numbers doubled by doing this.
The Learning Experience
By using all this information, I continued to promote backpacks to this demographic. Throughout this simulation, I learned that some social media platforms performed better than others. I also promoted with influencers which I found to be quite difficult. This is where I failed a bit. I got rejected and turned down by a mega influencer. I was able to secure a contract with a micro influencer which was a success. However, the next round, I dedicated my entire budget to a mega influencer which is where I went wrong. This yielded extremely low results and dropped me three places in my class rank. This lead into the next and final rounds where I continued to promote through social media and not use influencers at all. This provided results, however, I finished 6th in my class which is not the worst but not the best either.
This simulation is all about trial and error. I think I could have spent more time listening to my peer’s feedback and making the changes accordingly. Instead, I focused more on the analytics after each round and made the changes I thought were best. Every week, in class, we shared our results. I compared what the other students were doing and how it differed from my own strategy. This helped a lot by setting some guidelines on what was working and was not working.
Final Results
This resulted in myself being ranked 6th in my class. My overall revenue was $102,591, my budget spent was $29,958, making my ROI $72,633. Again, this could have been better but I am proud of how I improved. My goal was not to be the best in the class but to make improvements every week. I recommend this simulation to anyone interested in Social Media. I enjoyed this class and learned so much from it. I hope to improve with my marketing skills and continue to better myself.