Photoshop
2023-24
Pipe Dream, the independent student-run newspaper of Binghamton University, serves a student body of over 16,000 students as well as the local community. As Managing Editor, I primarily worked on building our social media presence as a publication. After taking inspiration from the accounts of legacy media companies, I worked with the photography team to plan more compelling images in a vertical format to appeal better to Instagram’s algorithm. I also brought focus to the text, and utilized our article information to create hierarchies, chose typefaces that aligned with our brand image, a reliable news source delivering facts and covering campus events, and incorporated our logo to increase recognition. These changes made stories easily shareable and we saw a noticeable increase in reposting of content.
Three post formats I focused on to build engagement were:
1. Carousel posts for multi-cultural event coverage to better highlight the eternity of events and the diversity within them
2. Professional news posts for serious topics and breaking news stories
3. Multi-slide posts for list articles
As a result, our Instagram gained over 2,000 followers in one year after remaining stagnant for the previous academic year.