social media
2017: ZTA YEAR IN REVIEW
In a lot of ways, 2017 was a huge year of growth for me. I got a promotion to Senior Communications Coordinator and started helping my Director manage projects in the department and also had a bigger part in managing the ZTA brand and upholding our Style Guide. My team and I also sent a pink ribbon into near-space! You'll see related posts in this recap, but you can read the full story on that nail-biter of an experience here.
Purpose-Driven Content
Zeta Tau Alpha’s social media work is rooted in a set of four core outcomes that drive content and interaction. These outcomes have guided our social media content for years. Through ZTA social media, we aim to:
Build community among members and friends
Share best practices and spark creativity
Encourage personal development
Increase organizational pride
Content is created very intentionally around these outcomes. They map directly to National Council’s goals for the organization and ZTA’s mission statement. We spend our time seeking success through these outcomes, measuring every step of the way. Basing our work on a set of goals has helped ZTA stay focused on providing compelling and purposeful content for audiences.
Instagram
This is the heavy hitter for ZTA. It makes sense, considering that its most engaged audience is collegiate-age women. Instagram is their bread and butter, and so it goes for the national account.
Here are the quick stats:
33,312 followers (+6,146 followers)
352 posts
653,500 likes (14% increase over 2016)
1,857 average likes/post (36% increase over 2016)
7,732 comments
22 average comments/post (10% increase over 2016)
This post became our most-liked media ever (as of Jan. 1, 2018), with 4,788 likes.
Getting silly in our promotion of the "space ribbon" (more here), we photoshopped two board members into this photo and tinted the spacesuits pink. This became ZTA's second-most-commented-on post ever (as of Jan. 1, 2018).
Instagram stories also became a part of ZTA’s social media strategy when the feature premiered. Promotions for ZTA’s in-house boutique, chapter takeovers, promos for other campaigns, and social media best practices are all shared in stories. ZTA Instagram stories were viewed around 6,000-10,000 times each.
Facebook
Live video played a larger role in our Facebook strategy this year, and the results paid off. Seven live videos garnered a collective 53,196 views, which averages out to 7,600 views per video. One of our live videos even became our most-commented-on post of the year. At its peak, that video also boasts 232 people who were tuned in at one time during the live broadcast. Watch the video here. This video is one of my claims to ZTA fame, as I performed the introduction.
Quick stats:
55,443 followers
375 posts
4.79M post reach
133,000 reactions
15,000 shares
15,000 comments
Check out our other two top posts below.
Zetas love to see each other succeed. This post had an extremely high number of reactions at the time. Including reactions from shares, it reached 2,732 total reactions.
This project was the highlight of my year. More about it here. This post received a huge number of shares for ZTA.
Twitter
This year, I made a concerted effort to respond to as many mentions and replies as possible with a funny quip or reaction GIF. Every mention was either favorited or replied to within three hours. I was working to humanize our brand with custom, direct responses, which in turn creates its own important kind of engagement.
Here are the quick stats:
27,230 followers
1,161 tweets
39,874 likes
11,835 retweets
Check out the top two performing posts below.
This one was fun to make. How did I find the time, you ask? I was sitting in an airport with nothing better to do. It went on to become one of ZTA's top tweets of all time with 1,320 likes.
Founders' Day is always a high-engagement time. I block off my entire day (and night!) just to reply to members and make the day feel as celebratory as possible. This tweet had the highest number of RTs for all of 2017.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a favorite with our younger members. In 2015, we realized that 70% of chapters had Tumblr accounts, which made the decision to create a national Tumblr an easy one. The goal was to set an example that ZTA chapters could follow—posting not only artsy photos, but integrating more substantial content like blogs, videos, GIFs and pull quotes. We started to see chapters using their Tumblrs to post blogs and share ZTA’s content, so this has proven to be helpful.
In December 2016, ZTA started a new contributing writers program allowing a group of 22 vetted Zetas of all ages to become recurring contributors for the blog. That month, we published five blogs.
In 2017, we really hit our stride. The contributing writers and International Office staff members published a combined 48 blogs. They ranged in topics from advice on how to have the best semester ever, to Panhellenic friendship, to professional development and more.
Quick stats:
18,955 unique visitors
52 average unique visitors/day
24,323 total visits
31,555 page views