Social Media Project Roundup, Spring 2016

Every semester, my UNI Digital Advertising students work very hard on a massive project: To develop a professional brand based on their personal interests using social media. 

Let's take a moment to praise their work and note a few special honors.

The Big Picture

It's always astounding to me what my classes can accomplish in little under three months.  By measuring our activity and engagement on social media, we can quickly evaluate our performance with quantitative metrics.

From mid-January through April 18, 2016, my 48 #unidigadv students accomplished the following:

• Posted a total of 5,634 tweets on Twitter
• Gained a total of 6,278 followers on Twitter
• Earned an average score of 40 on Klout
• Added 2,766 connections on LinkedIn
• Published 450 blog posts on Blogger or WordPress blogs
• Earned 28,586 pageviews from 10,471 visitors to their blogs

TWITTER

Most Prolific

Tweeting is one of those things that seems very easy at first glance - until you do it every day in support of a professional brand.  That's hard work!  Here are the top five #unidigadv Tweeps by Tweet volume (I only counted original tweets for this - retweets did not count!):

1. Travis Miller @securegadgets - 219 Tweets
2. Wendy Grimm @Grimmw20Travel - 213 Tweets
3. Olivia Jaschen @SocialSlopes - 200 Tweets
4. Janiece Banks @mompreneurs1 - 178 Tweets
5. Kaylee Tritle @TravelTourTech - 166 Tweets

Most Followers Gained

If you want to wield influence on Twitter, you need followers.  Here are the students who added the most followers during the semester.

1. Elizabeth Stokely @DMAdAgencies - added 400 followers
2. Tanner Bernhard @About_The_Brand - added 376 followers
3. Kaylee Tritle @TravelTourTech - added 370 followers
4. Simeon Moes @CeyboardComedy - added 345 followers
5. Travis Miller @securegadgets - added 316 followers
    

LINKEDIN

Most Connections Gained
When job hunting, who you know is often as important as who you are.  Here are the class members who gained the most connections on LinkedIn during this project:

1. Tanner Bernhard +200 connections
2. Sloan Beninga +149 connections
3. Yobel Ande +140 connections
4. Weston Merrill +130 connections
5. Justin Klieman +111 connections

Most Overall Connections
Some students already had a huge network of professional contacts on Linkedin. Here are the most well-connected class members overall:

1. Weston Merrill - 545 connections
2. Stephanie Boardman - 518 connections
3. Tanner Bernhard - 412 connections
4. Kelli Alexander - 409 connections
5. Seth Trautmann - 394 connections

Highest Quality Profiles

A high quality Linkedin profile can help you stand out to potential employers.  The following students had outstanding profiles:

• Stephanie Boardman 
• Olivia Jaschen
• Weston Merrill

Most Recommended

These two students had the greatest number of recommendations by others on LinkedIn:

• Wendy Grimm (4 recommendations)
• Tanner Bernhard (4 recommendations)

BLOGS

The real content was being generated on student blogs, where students developed unique and original posts related to their professional brand.  They then attempted to organically attract an audience of readers - a difficult challenge!

Most Visited Blogs 

We had FOUR students who earned over 1,500 pageviews to their blog during the course of the semester - they did a fantastic job attracting and engaging their visitors.  Browse through their blogs and see what they came up with:

1. Tanner Lawman - Loud Sound Logic - 2,099 pageviews
2. Stephanie Boardman - New Adventures Events - 1,720 pageviews 
3. Justin Klieman - First Order Kicks - 1,549 pageviews
4. Yobel Ande - Underground Panther - 1,500 pageviews

Special Honors

Most Integrated Brand
Stephanie Boardman - New Adventures Events 
Stephanie's impressive brand (created for her event planning business) integrated not only her Twitter profile, but also branded presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Most Helevant Blog (Three way TIE)
"Helevant" is a term I coined that means both helpful and relevant. Sort of like "hella relevant". This is the type of blog that is sure to earn hundreds (if not thousands) of additional pageviews in the coming years due to organic search traffic.


Joel West - Teach Me Cocoa
If you're interested in iOS development, I'd encourage you to watch Joel's excellent video tutorial series, which has content for both beginner and intermediate coders who want to learn about . 

Weston Merrill - Behind the Screen Sales
Weston's blog focused on building a business by selling items on Amazon. Lots of excellent tips for those wanting to get product ideas, private label products, list products and sell them on Amazon.

Travis Miller - Secure Gadgets
Travis' blog tackled the very current topic of security on internet-enabled gadgets such as smartphones, smartwatches, and other devices. 

Best Design

Bailey Nielsen - Graphic Design Trends

A well-designed blog about the latest and greatest in graphic design trends.

Best Brand Mascot (TIE)
Weston Merrill - Behind the Screen Sales
Maicol Josephs - Squeegee Grafx
Both Weston and Maicol came up with awesome and memorable brand mascots.

Personal Favorite
Yobel Ande - Underground Panther
I'm a big fan of local underground music and loved Yobel's blog detailing some of the interesting musicians and cultural events happening in the CV this spring.

Thanks again for a great semester - if you get nostalgic you can always tune into #unidigadv on Twitter and help the newbies out!

Did you have a favorite blog this semester that I didn't mention?  Tell me about it in the comments!

Create Your Own Branded Favicon

What are Favicons?

Ever notice that some websites have neat little custom icons next to them in your browser tabs when you load them up?



These icons add an element of unique branding to websites, giving them a professional appearance. 

They're known as favicons.



Favicons are literally "favorite icons" - short for when bookmarks for websites were called "favorites".  They are very small (usually 16 x 16 pixels). In addition to appearing in the address bar, favicons also appear in browser tabs, bookmarks, and the links bar.

How do you Create Favicons?

Traditional favicons are saved in the ICO graphic file format (used for old school Windows icons). Photoshop used to be able to save to this format, but no longer does. Not to worry - just create a 16x16 pixel GIF or PNG and use the icon utility ConvertIcon.



There are even online tools like favicon.cc or the favicon generator to help you create and save them.  



A newer type of icon is the Site Icon, used by WordPress. The Site Icon can be a PNG or GIF up to 512 x 512 pixels. Once uploaded, WordPress automatically creates a favicon, along with many other icon sizes in between for various mobile devices.

Once you have your custom 16x16 favicon in the ICO format (or 512x512 Site Icon), here are some instructions on how to get them working on your site or blog:

Favicons on websites

Favicons can be hand coded into any HTML file with a single line of code in the HEAD section:



However, doing this for every page in a site is tedious and prone to inevitable error. An easy workaround is that most browsers will automatically look for a file called favicon.ico at the root level of your site. If you simply copy your favicon file to your root level, you should be good to go.

Favicons on Blogger blogs

Easy. Go to the Blogger admin page and click on Layout. You'll see on the top left of your layout an area called Favicon where you can upload your ICO file by clicking on "Edit".

Site Icons on Wordpress blogs

Wordpress users have it a little easier - they can use PNG or GIF files that are 512 x 512 pixels. Wordpress will resize as needed. Just go into Appearance / Customize in your Wordpress admin page. Most themes will allow you to customize your "Site Identity" which includes a custom site icon. Just click on "Select Image" and upload your 512 x 512 PNG or GIF image. Wordpress takes care of the rest.



Now that you know what favicons are and how to create them - why don't you make one for your blog?