Last Updated by Mike Henkenis
For a few hours on each of the past six weeks we’ve had the efforts of two of our local high school (Sandvika High School) seniors directed towards our web and social media sites – a practical school assignment that focused on working with “employers.” This is a part of their Media and Communications track where they get to put their last three years of schooling to use in a real-life situation. Each student has to find their own project and get it approved by the teachers. At the end they present what they’ve done and of course they will be graded.
‘Our web site had a lot of errors in it, left over from a redesign last fall. These were things like stock images and text that simply didn’t match with a Florida-based theme. And even though we had an Instagram Business Page, we only had one image and one follower (me). Our Facebook page was more established, but we seldom posted anything, so it had almost no activity.
We tasked them with a pretty big list, including: Recreating the logo and site icons on the web site and social media; setting up Instagram and getting some posts in the site; and updating incomplete information, including replacing all the stock photos with photos that fit with a Floridian vacation rental home.
Our daughter was one of the students (and the employee who got the most criticism 🙂 ), and she had designed the original logo when she was 11 using a painting program on an iPad. She wanted to redo it, and they put a lot more effort into the new logo, also making new ones for Instagram and Facebook, and we were very pleased with the results.
On the photos and page updates, we no longer have any mountain or hiking photos! And the feature about Ice Climbing was replaced with information on local things to do (we couldn’t find any big natural waterfalls close by, much less frozen waterfalls).
Social media was something they were really good at. They set a goal of 50 Instagram followers – It actually increased from 1 to 113 as of February 28, mostly from local businesses initially, and now we’re seeing individuals starting to follow us, which is the ultimate goal. We’re averaging about 88 accounts viewing our posts, and 674 impressions per week. We’ve even had two requests for information on possible bookings that were a direct result of the project!
On Facebook the automatic cross-posting setup increased us from just a few views in the month before they started to 190 during the project. And from 2 post engagements to 227 – a whopping 11,350% increase!
We are pleased with the effort they put into the project as well. They were challenged with working in a “home office” type of situation, including realistic challenges of some construction workers in the room around the corner and some personal commitments that used a little work time. But just like with a normal employee, they put in extra hours to more than make up for the time they missed, as well as some work that would be classified as overtime for us “old folks.”
Next steps for us, and them, is that with an established local base on social media and a good web site, we’ll start to look at reaching those areas where renters are coming from and expanding our followers there.
We’re really satisfied with the results and their accomplishments. We encourage you to take a look at the Instagram and Facebook Page and browse the site to see their work. If you like the work you see, liking those pages would be a good way to show them their work is appreciated!
And a big thanks to the teachers at Sandvika VGS. Allowing them to work on this project taught us some things, and we think we were able to help our “employees” as well!