By Emma Winters, CSU Social and Digital Media Student Co-Creator
If you asked me five years ago to create content for Colorado State University’s and CAM the Ram’s social media accounts, I probably would have laughed in your face. As a sophomore in high school, I had just been allowed to get social media, and felt so far behind from the other people my age. Little did I know that randomly creating a BookTok account would spur my love for digital and social media.
From BookTok to brand work
I can’t even remember the moment where I decided I was going to try to go viral on TikTok. In fact, instead I remember mustering up the courage to try to explain to my parents how I randomly started making videos about books on social media and was interacting with random strangers on the internet.
For the first few months of posting, my TikToks only got around thirty views on average. Although I wasn’t doing that well, I kept at it. I remember I would rush to get ready in the morning so that I could film at least three videos to post while my dad drove me to school. It’s sort of crazy to think that I didn’t even have my license yet, but was posting on social media and connecting with people in the book community. Then over time, it was like something clicked. My posts started getting thousands of likes and my follower count kept growing. I was learning how to adjust to fast-moving trends and timeliness.
Being in the position I’m in now, I think it’s really remarkable that I was able to teach myself about social media. I didn’t know anything about analytics or social media strategy, I just knew what worked and what didn’t. I was able to use that basic knowledge to grow my account to almost 30,000 followers and 3.6 million likes, with my most viral TikTok contributing to 1.8 million of those.
From personal to professional
When I applied to be part of CSU Social, I didn’t know what to expect. I had only run my personal account, never a business’, let alone a university’s. There have been a lot of learning curves that have come with my internship, which has been both exciting and also difficult.
One of the harder practices that I’ve had to get used to is the content calendar. When I would post my own TikToks, I would just decide at the library at school which video to post and when. To have it laid out on a whole calendar months in advance, with a due date for everything has been a little bit of a tough transition. It’s something that you don’t stop to think about when you see a TikTok, especially from a university.
It also took time to get the hang of the approval process for each form of content. The concept that by the due date you should have already had your pitch, draft and final revisions done has been something that took me by surprise.
What do you mean I need to submit an idea for the TikTok I had and get it approved before I can start on it? What do you mean I have to ask for media credentials a week in advance to get content at football games? What do you mean I don’t have access to CAM the Ram unless it’s at sporting events?
All of this “etiquette” really threw me off at first. As someone with loads of social media experience, why was I so confused and had never heard of all of these rules?
The answer is simple. I was never taught it. Going into personalized social media, most people don’t have much experience. They either went viral by accident or, like me, randomly decided to pick up their phone and just start. They don’t have to follow certain colors or fonts, or even have to go to weekly meetings to discuss ideas. It’s a far more simple path, but it also teaches you a lot about making content and appealing to certain audiences.
Tapping into my energy
Being an intern at CSU Social has been the most fun I’ve had in a while. I love the hustle, creativity and strategy that comes into play. I’ve come to realize that I actually prefer making content that is part of a brand, over just posting videos about myself. But don’t get me wrong- I’ll still pop out with a book video once in a while.
It’s taken a lot of brain power to make the switch from personalized to branded content, but I wouldn’t change my experience for the world. I know somewhere out there, 15-year-old Emma is sitting in her room with a book in her hand, and I’m looking over her wearing my CSU media credential, knowing that she’s making all the right moves, even though she doesn’t know it yet.