By: Kelly Donovan ENGL Dept Social Media Intern (blog 4)
Prior to starting my internship as the English Department’s social media intern, I suspected that I would mostly learn how to attract a broad audience through a process of trial and error. While this has definitely proven to be true, I did not realize the amount of empirical data that would go into this learning process. For my final project this semester, I will delve into this data and explore the ways in which certain demographics have shaped the audience I am reaching through these social media posts. When I was relying solely on trial and error before I began exploring this data, I would think about myself as a college student and ask what kind of posts would attract someone like me. I thought this was a valid method since I am a college-aged student who is an English major; and I figured someone in a similar position as me would be interested in the events and information I was posting about. After exploring some of the empirical data, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was correct in my assumptions about who my main audience would be. When looking at data from Instagram, arguably the main platform that I am utilizing, I learned that 50% of my audience falls between the age range of 18-24. The second highest age group is 25-34, coming in at 24% of my audience. A statistic that really intrigued me was that my audience is 70.1% women and 29.9% men. I suppose this makes sense since Duquesne’s student population is dominated by females, but I would also like to know if females dominate the English major population as well, since this is a statistic I am unfamiliar with. Over the past 30 days, my growth in followers has increased by 2.2%. I look forward to exploring more of this data as I head into my final project; and I am very grateful that this internship has allowed me to adopt this skill of data extraction.
Building Bridges 