Hi! My name is Meghan Gaerttner and welcome to my website! My experience with social media right now is about average to the typical American Millennial. I use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn regularly. I used to use Twitter in 2007-08 (before it really took off and became one of the most popular social media sites), but in 2010 I deleted my account and haven’t looked back. I’m interested to see what the limitations of social media are for different professional companies. I’m curious to learn what is acceptable content, how often should companies be posting, and the transition of power from Baby Boomers/ Gen X leaders to Millennials in the workforce and how professional uses of social media change with that. I expect to learn how to operate different social media platforms in this class. I think that would be beneficial for me because I have stepped away from the Twitter universe, but I know that it is a popular platform for companies to use. So, learning how to attract the best audiences on those platforms and different styles that are used when posting content. My goals for this semester are to learn how to operate different social media platforms. The first step was creating a website, which is a big step for me because I’ve never created a website before. Overall, my goal in this class is to learn as much as I can about how to use the different social media platforms and apply it to my real life experiences.
Introduction
Meghan Gaerttner
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Professional Uses of Social Media
Final reflection:
Welcome to my social media class portfolio. Within this website you can find an op-ed about millennials, view my process documents that show my progress from the brainstorming section and then view my strategy page to see the final strategy. What excites me about this strategy is how much the organization means to me. I wrote a strategy for the American Diabetes Association, a nonprofit organization that I interned with for two semesters. I was first drawn to this organization because my mom, both grandmothers, and maternal grandfather have diabetes. This disease has fully grasped my family and when I started to intern with the ADA, I had no idea what I was getting into. I really enjoyed the work I did while I was with the organization and I love the people and culture. I was fully immersed in a community that is aggressively fighting for a cure for a disease that affects 1.4 million people in Pennsylvania. However, while I was there, I noticed that their event attendance and fundraising were declining, and their social media was not well designed. I believe that the two forces go hand in hand, and they both rely on each other to do well. My passion for this organization and the cause motivated me to put together a social media strategy to hopefully make the organization better so more people can benefit. I am still deciding if I want to submit this strategy to my fellow coworkers for their use.