Month: October 2022

Establishing a strong PLN before creating a social media campaign is crucial for success. In plain terms, what’s the point in giving a presentation if you have no one to come listen to you speak? The same principle can be applied to social media. Creating an online community invested in your brand, product, or idea will make or break your campaign. Creating a passionate, engaged PLN requires networking. In September, I was hired by a local liquor company to represent them to the UVic student community. My first order of business was to establish my PLN and gauge my audience’s interest by posting a series of Instagram story posts. Having already developed my personal Instagram account to almost 1,000 followers, my social media PLN at UVic was well underway, granting me an excellent head start. Upon the first series of story posts, I was able to gain a strong understanding of my PLN’s engagement using Instagram’s provided analytics and insight tools. This data in turn would allow me to predict how my PLN and community would react to this content moving forward. 

Based on the data I collected from my story posts, I was able to recognize the following:

Instagram followers: 955

Story post #1 views: 512

Story post #2 views: 493

Story likes: 73

Story Replies: 58

This overwhelming amount of engagement on my story posts allowed me to follow up with over 50 people about the brand and campaign. Using this PLN, I created an incentivized purchasing campaign at local liquor stores, featuring bi-weekly story posts to continue engagement. After the first week of a buy two twelve packs in return for one free 12 pack, I was able to sell out one liquor store.

To reiterate, using my PLN and a student-targeted social media marketing campaign, I was able to sell out a liquor store in one week.

Not only have I used my PLN to help drive sales directly, but I have also utilized strong connections of mine with a large following of UVic students to help with the campaign. Over a two-week period, I was able to reach a total of ~7,500 Instagram views using 10 people. I provided these 10 connections of mine with product in exchange for story posts. This tactic helped create a strong buzz around campus. These connections of mine are influential students with large followings and engaged audiences. They understand our target demographic and post content accordingly, helping drive and build the brand on campus. 

Being able to quickly reach out to individuals within my PLN has reminded me of how important it is to continually expand and develop my PLN.

Social media in education is designed to help connect students with one another and maintain a positive learning environment remotely.

What are some problems with social media communications in education settings? 

• Lack of commitment
• Lack of engagement
• Sustaining engagement
• Cyberbullying
• Accessibility
• Privacy

Explore the video provided and reflect on the themes of a PLN in a professional capacity.
The Brad Baker interview highlighted a great point regarding the effectiveness of utilizing PLNs and social networks to help promote tourism, economy, and connectedness within first nation communities. Establishing a social media presence can greatly help modernize a first nation community. The video also discusses the theme of outreach PLN and public networks provide. Public networks help allow users to form connections, gain creativity, and get inspired by other users to help them improve their own pages. In this case, a social media manager who manages a first nations community’s Instagram page could benefit from seeing another creator’s content to help improve their own page.

Which social media platforms are beneficial in education?

Growing up as one of the first generations intertwined with social media, but also remembering what it was like when I was young prior to social media platforms, I have had my fair share of experiences using these platforms in education. I’ve used Instagram and YouTube to create projects where myself and classmates display our findings in a media format. However, these platforms are not focused on or designed for educational purposes. They lack user privacy, as well as make it hard to maintain a work-life balance because users might not want their school or professors to see their personal profiles. UVic’s platform Brightspace is the best platform I have used. Being its own platform, this allows the student/user to log in and out when they want to work, promoting a strong work-life balance. Brightspace is beneficial for education as it features many excellent tools to allow for a wide range of user interfaces when displaying content. Users can post Blogs, comment on classmates, upload videos, and even create discussion forms to collaborate with each other. Having a platform tailored to education exclusively is the best option when looking for a beneficial educational platform.

When working with the vulnerable sector, how does social media fit into professionalism and regulations? 

• Users can interact with each other
• Expand the work environment remotely to maximize accessibility
• Regulations must be in place to help protect user privacy and safety
• Networks must be protected using firewalls and encryption to protect users from hackers and third-party breaches

How do educators create discourse? 

• Discussion groups
• Group projects
• Feedback-oriented projects and assignments
• Peer review processes
  

How diverse is my PLN?

As much as I think my PLN is diversified, I lean more toward the unfortunate side, lacking diversity. Although the people in my PLN are diverse in their own ways, most in my community falls into a similar socio-economic situation. West side kids who live rather protected lives, many of whom have faced little to no diversity or adversity in their lives. Although there is nothing bad about this, sometimes when engaging with my PLN, perspectives, mindsets, and ideology can be much more biased than you might think, so it is important to be conscious of this and always keep an open mind.

To add to this, I went to a public high school filled with unique individuals all with very different lives, backgrounds, and diverse upbringings. However, regardless of how diverse it may seem, most of the kids at my school grew up in a prominently higher-end neighbourhood in Vancouver, so any opinion is to be made with a grain of salt.

What is a learning outcome of your PLN and how are you ensuring your exposure to diversity and inclusion?

My learning outcome of my PLN is to widen my connections at UVic and meet many new people of all different backgrounds. It has been a great pleasure of mine getting to meet many international students so far, as well as getting to meet students from across Canada, such as local island residents, Albertans, kids from Saskatchewan and even New Brunswick. Expanding my diversity and inclusion in my PLN has all happened relatively naturally through my BCom program and word of mouth from friends. I am enjoying the amount of knowledge and stories people share with me from their unique lives. That has been one of my greatest takeaways from UVic, is how widespread our student population is. I love meeting new people, and am excited for all the new friends to come in my remaining years!

As mentioned before in my previous blog posts, your social media identity is just an expansion of your normal identity. When using these public networks, it is important to always keep an open mind and put yourself out there to meet new people. One of the greatest things about social media is how easily we are able to connect with people all across the world with different backgrounds and lives. One of the great ways I have found to meet new people of different backgrounds is through Facebook groups. These groups highlight different cultures and people, many from different communities and are dedicated to bringing individuals together. Joining these groups is an excellent way I like to gain insight into how people of different communities interact with one another. This then allows for myself and new group members to interact politely and safely with each other.

Professional networks such as LinkedIn provide many great resources to help educate their users on how to be inclusive online. They offer free educational resources such as videos and tips to help expand users’ diversity and inclusion within their communities. Social media platforms should continue to promote diversity and inclusion training and resources to help keep their users educated, as sometimes users forget there are all different kinds of people in this world and that it does not just revolve around themselves and their opinions.

What digital platforms are students currently using to develop their professional network?
Professional networking platforms are excellent for students to jumpstart their professional careers. LinkedIn is the go-to professional network for students. Students flock to linked in as its user interface is similar to other social media platforms, promoting a natural and seamless transition for users. 

As a daily LinkedIn user and student, I can vouch for its applicability to students in both academic and professional realms. Before starting my undergraduate business commerce degree at UVic, I knew no one in my program. By updating my educational status on LinkedIn to display “University of Victoria – Bachelor’s of Business Commerce, 2025”, LinkedIn’sn’s algorithms were able to immediately ping other users of the same status, providing me with the option to reach out and establish a connection with them. As August closed out prior to my start in September, I was able to connect with a few classmates of mine, allowing me to have already formed a network before ever even setting foot at my new school. 

Establishing an online presence on a professional platform such as LinkedIn is crucial for students. LinkedIn’s algorithms promote content, so continued engagement such as posts and comments helps increase viewership on one’s profile. In turn, this engagement with your online network and community can help grow your personal brand by maximizing outreach and creating new connections. Regardless of one’s current educational or professional status, it is always important to continue updating your network.

What could the student consider in expanding their professional learning network? 

Expanding your professional learning network as a student is a very intuitive process. Most students are in the same boat. They are looking to find internships and excel academically, so they must learn to network professionally. Students can get involved within their school community in many ways to expand their professional learning networks. For example, students can join clubs and societies at their school. Attending events such as a club fair would allow a student to gauge different opportunities and ideally find something that interests them or aligns with their values and interests. At UVic, I joined the UVic Consulting Group. This group helps students establish a network with like-minded individuals, as well as advises and directs students from start to finish in the hiring process at consulting firms. Lastly, the UVic Consulting Group also helps connect students with potential employers and business professionals, promoting the growtstudents’ts’of s professional learning networks.

How does data privacy and security limit and/or promote a PLN? In your network how can you create a digital identity/ reputation?

Regarding the “perfect” lifestyle and appearance online, many users must remember not necessarily to not believe what they see online, but more to take what they see with a grain of salt. Platforms continually chase the authenticity and realness sectors of online public networks and social media by consistently updating their platforms. Before BeReal, there was Beme. Beme (or be-me) allowed users to share a 1-2 minute video from the front-facing camera of their phone. Here’s the catch; when a user starts recording, the screen would blackout. This tactic was used to encourage the user to be present in the moment and avoid worrying about the quality of the video. After the recording would finish, the video would immediately upload the user’s network in an unedited, raw state. Beme was short-lived, as one of its major flaws was that users (myself included) found there was not enough privacy. Ultimately if anything were to happen when recording that you might not want to be posted online, there was no control on the user’s end to protect their safety or privacy. As businesses chase this “realnesss” phenomenon, they must be aware of the fine line between too much and too little amounts of privacy.

“Beme (app).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 May 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beme_(app). Accessed 1 Oct. 2022.