Our Social Media Pages
The iPatriotPost has an active Instagram and Facebook page, which I helped reinvigorate this summer. After not posting about our articles for over a year (since May 2023), I began Weekly Recaps, which is a weekly (now biweekly) post featuring all the staff's articles.
After school started, I recruited one of our new staffers to become the social media manager to help continue the momentum we had gained over the summer. Currently, we have 1,000 iPatriotPost followers on Instagram and hope to grow more.
We use the same template every week for our Weekly Recaps. Our Facebook and Instagram accounts are linked so when we update one, we update both.
I try to prioritize images taken by staffers instead of stock images always, and try to have 2-3 images for each article in our Weekly Recap.
The color of each "Read More" box corresponds to the category each article is in. Since this is a news article, the box is red-orange, but for features, the box is green, and for entertainment, the box is blue-purple.
I try to encourage our staffers and student body to engage with our posts, as well as have cute captions with emojis to attract students to our posts. I make sure to tag all our staffers on the posts they write.
Polls and Stories
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For my article about the new Principal's Breakfast policy, I wanted to receive an accurate representation of our student body. With nearly 100 responses, this by far has been our most beneficial poll on our Instagram. As one of the few with access to instagram, most polls are posted by me at request of staffers, another one of my responsibilites. Additionally, I received over 12 DMs from students supporting my article, and 4 of these responses actually commented on my article. One even emailed the principal.
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Inspired by our publication counterpart PatriotsTV, which I used to be a part of, I decided to try to actively post on Instagram Stories more, featuring staffers and their day-to-day activity. This part of the series gave our viewers daily insights into the workings of a newsroom, while also helping build our newspaper family.
I always try to promote the Patriot Post on all platforms, whether it be the print or online publication. I've had my whole family subscribe and follow our Instagram, and have asked my sister to tell her 7th grade classmates when we are coming to sell issues, so we can sell more to middle schoolers (a demographic that usually buys a lot, but is unaware of our selling days due to them not watching senior high announcements).
Growth
Our winter dress-up day articles, which feature photos of Heritage students during dress-down days, remain our most popular posts.
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From over the summer, where our following list was barely 780, I've helped grow our social media following to have substantially more engagement. I have encouraged staffers to repost the Instagram posts as well as making sure they like the posts, I've helped reach even more students who don't usually follow us online through promoting our social media on our website and school website as well.
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Check out our work here:
