This project brought on an experience and a community platform which I would’ve never expected. When I first began this project I didn’t think that much would come of our project’s social media platform, however to my surprise a small but growing community as created. Though the topic that we did choose, sustainability, is a trending topic these days especially in a town like Boulder, we made this community and the intent of this platform to be more empowering and enabling than just simply informing. I think that the focus we chose is much more inviting for people than just an overwhelming site of just depressing news of how we are turning our planet into an inhospitable rock.
After looking at our case study 1% for the Planet, which has a fairly strong social media presence among several platforms, I was able to see that there was some strategies that worked better, this too was found through a trial and error process. I personally enjoyed posting more of the comical and casual tips that I found and posted, as well these posts seemed to generate more participation(likes and comments) as well as views. As for the frequency I tried to make it more variable, because all of us were posting onto the page, so if I were to post everyday I figured that I would them become apart of the saturation that is occurring on the internet. So knowing that on most days something would be posted, I didn’t feel the need to post every day.
It was also surprising as to how many people our Facebook group ended up with, in my participation log I posted a pictures as to where there are instances of friends of mine who ended up adding other friends of their’s to the group, thus increasing our perspective audience. It was also pretty cool to see how I had friends who don’t live in the state who were participating on our platform and engaging in our community.
But overall the act of the project ended up being a cool experience because it was something that I didn’t know could be created from a couple of college kids interested in a certain topic. Though this project never turned into something really big, it exciting to see what we learned about using social media and what tactics (such as kairos and the timing of the posts, the rhetorical velocity ( seeing how our rhetoric which we put out may be perceived by others), as well as remixing with memes, and using multi-media posts) can create participation, lead to popularity among a Facebook community, and with the possibility of a viral image or media instance. With this knowledge is has been interesting to see what tactics work within the community that we were calling to, (pretty much busy college kids, trying to care for the environment) in comparison to the studies that showed how on a larger scale the this research was conducted with a broader audience on the web.
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