Trial and Error – The beauty in learning the social media engagement

Reaching the end of the first month, I have generated a total of four postings, marking the end of our theme for the month of June which was sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and we look forward to July’s theme which will be gender-based violence (GBV). While I anticipate a lasting impact of our work and hopefully more success for EBLI’s social media pages, Bernard asked for a mini report or an evaluation of this month.

I would like to share with you the mini-report because increasing social media account engagement was one of the project’s goals, the first month was not only about increasing awareness of SRHR but also to understand EBLI’s social media followers to provide suitable content for the targeted audience.

After taking and sharing screenshots for each post’s insight from Instagram account only, these are the findings:

1. Out of approximately 700 followers on Instagram, each post reached a minimum of 74 users to a maximum of 120. However, all posts had less engagement. This means that not all users liked, commented or interacted with the posts.

Therefore, the number of likes does not mean that only this number read the content, but it could be more (e.g. the first-week post insights: 29 likes, 3 comments, 120 reached)

• Posting interactive stories did not make any difference to improve engagement, the maximum number of story viewers was 34 and the maximum interaction was 4. Meaning post viewers are more than story viewers. Therefore, the focus for the rest of the month was to improve account posts to understand the engagement.
• Reel post insights were similar to the multiple posts
• A huge difference was noticed with the last post, where a personal story was shared. The post got 5 comments specifically applauding Leyla. This means that those viewers did read the full post that was presented as multiple posts in one, with short paragraphs and nice visuals reflecting on the story.

Future campaign considerations:

1. Integrating information through a storytelling format would be ideal to increase engagement
2. It would be beneficial to introduce the social media campaign to the youth in order to emphasize the knowledge translation process and increase account engagement
3. In addition to synchronizing the topics discussed in the club with the ones being posted. Therefore, interactive stories posts that would include polls and questions would get better attention and youth will be enthusiastic to respond.
4. Moreover, a possible collaboration between social media and in-person discussion clubs could be done by announcing winners/participants who interacted with EBLI posts and answered questions
5. This could be done by asking each discussion club participant to follow EBLI’s Instagram and Facebook accounts based on their preference, asking them to pay attention to SRHR and GBV posts and encouraging them to write comments and answer questions. After each post/week, interactive accounts should be announced on social media stories and in clubs to encourage others.
6. Short videos filmed in a reel form, from participants should be added as well, explaining how the discussion clubs are being helpful.

I’m waiting for Bernard’s feedback and I will be updating this post soon 🙂 stay tuned! and thanks for reading.

A heart-touching and inspiring journey!

I’m now 3 weeks into the first month’s health promotion campaign; sexual and reproductive health and rights. The internship is well underway, it is more like a trial and error process and I’m learning a lot. especially with the one-hour Swahili language sessions that we’ve been taking for 3 weeks, I feel I’ve become more familiar with the Tanzanian culture! Alven our instructor did an amazing job! With that being said, I’ve been conducting a lot of research to gather realistic and reflective information and statistics about the Tanzanian community. In addition to trying to be creative with posts and I’ve made it into my first short video or as it is called “Reel”.

Now I would like to take you on the journey of social media planning for the first month. Every week I send to our WhatsApp group a word document of the content for approval and translation. For the first week, I started by introducing HIV/AIDS and adding some Tanzanian-specific statistics. All content was obtained from CDC and Unesif websites. Secondly, I posted what can cause transmission of the disease and what does not, in addition to how to avoid contracting HIVAIDS. This was delivered in a short reel form.

Going into the 3^rd and 4^th week, I planned to have a post about resources in Mwanza to get more information and increase youth’s knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the final post will be about an inspiring personal story.

Upon conducting the research through EBLI’s website to create the last two posts, I can say that my motivation for this internship has grown stronger when I read the personal stories on the website!

I had a plan to share several stories throughout the 3 months to reflect on how EBLI’s resources have helped and supported many young females in their tough journey and how it changed their lives for the best.

I would like to share Leyla’s story:

Leyla is an 18 years old female, who lives in Mwanza Tanzania.

Although she is still young, she knew about EBLI’s initiatives and attended several SRHR and gender-based violence discussion clubs. Shortly she met the boy of her dreams and one day they were about to have sexual contact.

Luckily, she is educated and knows how to protect herself, she asked her boyfriend if he has a condom to use and she convinced him that this is the best for both of them to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and avoid unwanted pregnancy

Although her boyfriend agreed to use a condom, later on, they break up and she realized that she protected herself

Leyla’s friend, Amidah knew about her story and wanted to join the club. Stay tuned for Amidah’s story in the coming weeks

I’m still learning about the youth’s engagement to social media platforms and hoping that in the last 2 week’s posts I was able to make it creative and attractive to Tanzanian youth. So far, Bernard and Andrew are satisfied with this campaign, they approved every week’s content and are happy with the current accounts’ engagement. I’m now more excited about how to present our next campaign: gender-based violence!

Stay connected, send me tips and recommendations and thanks for reading!

Working out a Game Plan-Figuring out the road to achieve the internship goals

I’m now one week into my internship. Maria set a phone call meeting with Bernard and Andrew, Friday the week before the start of the internship. This helped introduce all parties and know what Bernard’s expectations and goals for this summer are. Bernard, the executive director of EBLI seems to know his goals yet he is flexible with how to achieve them. He is clear that for the first month, the sexual and reproductive campaign’s goal is to protect against HIV/AIDS. This also will feed into the campaigns of the following months; gender-based violence and entrepreneurship. Bernard and Andrew suggested using Whatsapp as the main communication channel, this is because of the unstable internet connection in Mwanza. This made our communication as a group extremely easy and fast. Moreover, we discussed that the content should be translated to Swahili from the beginning of the campaign which was one of the challenges of this project last year. Therefore, Andrew suggested submitting the content to him every Thursday and post every Monday. To plan for this health promotion campaign, I’ve explored all the materials and work that has been done the last summer, and the girls did pretty much good work. However, I decided to take a different approach for this year. This is by introducing the main goal of this campaign, HIV/AIDS, which will help me to apply the knowledge I’ve learned in my MPH program especially addressing health promotion frameworks suitable for this campaign as well as addressing the social determinants of health (SDOH) of the community. After our first meeting on Monday, I spent the weekend researching Tanzania’s exposure to HIV/AIDS. I’ve made a clear plan and shared it on our Whatsapp group, they both liked it and gave me the green light to work and take the plan to action. My plan is to post stories and account posts with similar content. The only difference is that the story posts will have interactive quizzes and/or polls at the begging and end of each story. This will help us to engage both users; the story viewers and the post’s readers. Noting that with the difference in time zone, I post stories at the begging of the day ( around 7 am Tanzania time and midnight our time) and post account posts later in the day (4 pm Tanzania time and early morning our time in Canada). This will help us to engage early morning and late afternoon viewers too. Stay tuned for my next post where I will be talking in detail about the actual posts, their content and Bernard’s and Andrew’s feedback on each week.

Join the journey ” From Canada to Tanzania”

Hello and welcome to my blog! where I will be sharing some thoughts on my internship with Western Heads East and especially working with Education for a Better Living program to empower youth and young females and have the opportunity to apply the knowledge I gained during my Master of Public Health studies.