Module 3 Blog Post - Audience Engagement

Hello, my name is Sarah Arkison and I am the Undergraduate Recruitment & Liaison Officer for the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta. I direct the School's undergraduate recruitment/marketing/communications activities and manage our Student Recruiter, who along with myself, is responsible for our social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

My personal account on Facebook has been active for many years and mainly it is used to connect with friends and family that live outside of Edmonton. I have resisted other forms of social media for years, simply because I just don't feel like I have the time or the inclination to be that connected.

That being said, I actively tweet and posts on our School SM accounts. At first, I created these accounts to use as another tool for student recruitment. We very quickly came to realize that our current students were quite active on the accounts, so we changed our strategy to try to connect with our two audiences, as opposed to just our prospective student audience. We recently launched a hashtag campaign, specifically targeted to our current student audience, as a means to create a sense of community online and to promote the amazing diversity of our student population and their accomplishments and experiences.

Using Storify has been quite inspiring and I would like to explore more about using media to tell a story. I am also very interested in learning more about creating a sense of community for students using SM and how to better engage our two distinct audiences. As I do not have any formal communications training in this area, I am hoping that this course will allow me to add to my skill set and work on creating engaging SM content.