Anna's Anecdotes

Another week of the semester has gone by, is it just me or is time flying? As usual, track updates from the weekend... I broke my personal record!!! I jumped 12' 1.25" or 3.69 meters. I did not run this weekend since there was no team scoring at the meet we went to and we were trying to save my legs a little bit. This upcoming weekend is the conference meet, and I'm really excited!  Another assignment for my social media class is to live-tweet an event, and I am thinking about live-tweeting the second day of the conference meet since I'm just running in the first event that day. I don't use my Twitter account very often and I don't have very many followers, but I think it will be a fun assignment.  I was really tired the morning after my track meet, so my friend Hailey and I went to Starbucks! We always go get coffee together and it's one of my favorite things to do. Our friendship kind of started there, the first time we went together was after a Polar Mer

We are moving right along in our textbook! This week I read about Marketing with Twitter.  Did you know that Twitter is considered a micro-blog? Users can share short messages with 240 or fewer characters, and it's a great platform for users to have quick connections with the people and businesses they follow. Like the previous chapter, the most intriguing section of this chapter in my opinion was the content strategy section. I think the most daunting part of managing a social media account is how, when, and what to post. However, each of the past and upcoming chapters will be helpful in planning how to manage social media accounts.  The content strategy recommendations include less promotion to create more conversions, keeping posts short, posting consistently and at optimal times, posting visually appealing content, running polls, using emojis, and providing customer service to name a few.  They recommend only promoting products in 20% of total tweets and using the rest of your

 I'm beginning to think I should change the title of these weekly posts to "ONU Track Updates" or "Weekends @ ONU" because that's all I feel like I'm writing about! Track season has always been and always will be the busiest season of my life. I love track and I don't think I will ever get tired of it, but it takes up almost all my free time in the spring semester, which makes it kind of hard to do other fun things to write my blog about! Even though I want to write fewer blog posts about track updates... something happened at this week's meet that I absolutely NEED to write about! Pole vaulting was going great again, I was clearing all the bars on my first attempt (except for one) and everything was coming together! Finally, the bar was set at what would be an all-time personal best. I came down the runway, I put my pole in the box, and BOOM I was on the pit. My ears were ringing, the packed fieldhouse was dead silent, I rolled over and saw my p

 Chapter 5 of our textbook is about Marketing with Instagram. Similar to the previous chapters, this chapter goes over the numbers, components of a post, advertising, and more. The section that was the most interesting to me was the content strategy section. There are a lot of features on Instagram that are unique to the app and others that are replicas of features on other apps. The authors recommend taking advantage of stories, live video, IGTV, Instagram Shopping, geo-tagging, and hashtags to make the most out of your posts. Instagram shopping is a rather new feature on the app, it was introduced in 2020. This feature allows businesses to tag up to five products in a post so that other users can view product details and pricing, and even jump to a page where they can purchase the product. Some other suggestions made were partnering with influencers and doing account takeovers. Both of these gain more attention for your account by reaching users that may not already be following you.

 Our reading this week was Chapter 4 of our textbook. This chapter was about Marketing with Facebook. This chapter seemed to build off of the concepts from Chapter 3. It talked about establishing voice, being authentic, and determining a strategy for a business's social media accounts. However, the section that intrigued me the most was the section explaining how to build the perfect Facebook post. After all, why should you waste your time with trial and error on your business socials when the research has already been done on what works and what doesn't? According to the text, creating a great Facebook is rather simple - keep it short, include links, attach a visual, and use hashtags. As for building your "perfect" post, 140 characters or less is ideal. More than 140 characters will force the user to expand your post to reveal the rest of the reading, and if it happens to be "too much" there's a very good chance that a lot of your followers aren't g

 This week/weekend was so busy again! I had another successful track meet, went snowmobiling for the first time, and cheered on some fellow polar bears at their basketball game. One thing is for sure, I am never bored at ONU - there is always something going on, especially on the weekends. This weekend we went to Indiana Wesleyan University for our track meet. I had a pretty good day, I pole-vaulted over 11'6" again. I'm starting to become a little more consistent with my vaulting, which I think will be really beneficial as the season moves forward. I also beat my personal best again in the 60-meter dash from two weeks ago. My time tied with another girl on my team for the 8th and 9th spot, and at first, we were both going to be running in the finals. However, after checking the rulebook, the officials told our coaches that when there's a tie to get into finals with the 8th and 9th person, they are only supposed to run the top 7 girls. This was kind of disappointing be

This week we read Chapter 3 of our textbook, which was about Social Media Marketing Strategy and Social Media Advertising Strategy. Social media marketing strategy outlines the tactics for how a company will incorporate social media into its business, whereas social media advertising is put in place to ensure that the company is effectively targeting the right customers. The social media marketing and advertising strategies work hand in hand to reach their target audiences.  There are 10 steps to creating a solid social media marketing strategy listed in this chapter, and the fifth one was the most intriguing to me. Step 5 is establishing a tone of voice. A brand's tone expresses their personality and can be used to set themselves apart from competitors, build trust with customers and influence customer purchase decisions. It brought up the point that customers will not respond well to brands if they sound too corporate or impersonal. I feel like this relates a lot to building your

This weekend was super busy for me!  Friday night I had a team meal before our track meet Saturday with the other pole vaulters on my team. Andy made spaghetti, chicken, and garlic bread, and it was delicious! After we ate, we watched this Netflix Original movie called Seal Team. It was an animated movie about seals fighting sharks. There were so many pop culture references, and we were all laughing the whole time. Ever since coming to ONU, team meals with the vaulters the night before meets are easily my favorite tradition. It's such a fun and relaxing time hanging out with my friends before the big day. Like I said, Saturday was our big track meet at home. There were only two other girl pole vaulters this week so I spent most of the day jumping alone. It was definitely a different experience, but I still had a lot of fun! I ended up jumping 3.55 meters, which was my second highest jump EVER!!! I almost broke my personal record, but after running in the 4x200 meter relay and takin