Audience: Who is your strategy aiming to reach?
- American Historical Association (AHA) members curious about the evolution of the organization’s blog posts – i.e., How has the content changed over the last decade? Has it changed at all, or is the AHA still covering the same types of themes and topics?
- Digital history researchers and/or enthusiasts looking to compare the field’s narrative from 2008-2009 vs 2019 – i.e., Are the same topics still being discussed? If not, what’s changed?
- Prospective historians (academic, public, digital, etc.) – i.e., What types of backgrounds do professional historians have in 2019 compared to 2008-2009? Have the professional and academic requirements changed? How do you get into the history field today compared to 10 years ago? Perhaps it’s the same?
Social Media Platforms: What social media tools do you plan to use to reach this audience?
Because I’m using Voyant as my researching and analysis tool, I think that it’s important to use social media tools that are more image-based versus word-based because images tend to hook your reader more easily than just words. I’d like to leverage the colorful and captivating word clouds and graphs from Voyant and couple them with trending hashtags that’ll link my project to other posts within the AHA or within the digital history field in general.
-
- Instagram: Because this is an image-based platform, I think that’ll be quite effective in expanding my project’s visibility within the AHA user community and hopefully even outside of the organization within the greater digital historian community.
- Facebook: You can’t deny the expansive Facebook user base – it’s huge. I’d be foolish not to take advantage of this global community by creating posts that incorporate Voyant graphics with catchy blurbs of my findings that hopefully are enticing enough to get users from Facebook to my Online Portfolio.
- Twitter: I think that I can use Twitter to share interesting nuggets from my research and analysis that hopefully pique enough interest for users to want to learn more. I think that this platform will be the most effective with prospective historians looking to get into the history field because I can ask questions that elicit curiosity and further exploration. That’s my hope, at least.
Messages: What message will appeal to this audience? What do you want to convey? What action do you want them to take?
I have two main messages that I’d like to convey to my audience and hopefully appeal to them, too:
-
- Are we still talking about the same topics in the digital history field? If so, what are those topics? If not, how have the conversations changed? Using the contextual analysis, I’d like to understand why some things have remained the same over the last decade and delve into some of the potential reasons why they’ve changed. I think that this exploration can appeal to anyone remotely interested in the digital history field, not just academics.
- How do you break into the history field as an aspiring historian, from academia, to public history, to digital history? A lot of my research when I wrote for the AHA centered on interviewing professional historians and picking their brain for words of wisdom to share with prospective historians. Nowadays, the AHA has “Member Spotlight” posts that I think accomplish the same thing – they profile folks working in the field.
If I can convey my messages clearly enough and appeal to my audience, then I’d like for users to go from my social media pages to my Online Portfolio. That’s my main goal for pushing my research on these social media platforms.
Measure: How will you measure the success of your strategy?
Specific
-
- Who: AHA members, digital historians, and prospective historians
- What: Expand my final project’s visibility in the digital history community
- Where: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
- When: Beginning in January 2020 and ending in December 2020
- Why: I want to see who visits my Online Portfolio and when over the course of one calendar year. I also want to see if any hashtags are more effective than others, if at all.
Measurable
-
- How many? Tracking visitors coming to my Online Portfolio, when they visit, how often they visit. I can use Google Analytics to perform some of these statistics, too, which should provide valuable insight into user activity. I also think that I can track if my social media strategy is working based on how many users repost my posts. I can even create a new hashtag and see if it gains any traction within the user community.
- How do I know if I’ve reached my goal? Tracking user activity over the course of one calendar year should allow me to see if there are certain times of year that spike visitors to my Online Portfolio.
Attainable
I’m not currently on social media, so I first need to establish my accounts and build my online presence. Once that’s under my belt, I can move forward with my social media strategy outlined above on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Realistic
I think that the plan is realistic and reachable. My only real hesitancy is whether users will be interested enough in my posts and Voyant graphics to take the time to visit my Online Portfolio to see the findings in full. I mean, I think that the topic’s interesting, but I’m partial because I’m analyzing posts that I wrote for the AHA ten years ago, so it’s nostalgic for me. I’m not so sure that the general public is going to share my enthusiasm, but I think with the right buzzwords, hashtags, and graphics, I have a chance of piquing their interest.
Time-bound
I think that tracking statistics over one calendar year (2020) will provide a nice snapshot of user activity and provide insight into who, what, when, where, and why folks came to my Online Portfolio. I’m hoping to be able to see trends in topics and perhaps even trending hashtags. Like I mentioned earlier, I think that I can leverage Google Analytics to analyze who visits my site and how they engage with it.
