FRESH FILM FESTIVAL

Fresh International Film is a voluntary organisation based in Limerick that strive to create opportunities and encouragement for young people interested in pursuing a career in filmmaking. They do this by running a number of workshops, competitions and sending resources into schools all year long. The focal point of Fresh International Film’s year is their main competition Ireland’s Young Filmmaker of the Year. I was approached to become the social media manager for Fresh’s 2019 campaign and so alongside my work for I Love Limerick, I also worked daily for Fresh, managing their social media accounts.

My role involved:

Planning posts for social media.
Editing content for social media ie. videos and images.
Scheduling posts for social media.
Meeting with the organisers regularly to discuss what they would like to see.

For Fresh, I decided to take the approach of giving every day of the week a different themed post. It went as follows:

Monday: Call for Entries
Tuesday: Battle of the Series
Wednesday: Wayback Wednesday
Thursday: Tips ‘n Tricks Thursday
Friday: Film Fact Friday

The logic behind this was, it would firstly create more content for social- I wouldn’t be reliant on solely Fresh archive footage and so wouldn’t risk running out. Secondly, daily themes create more variety and therefore can be more interesting- Fresh archive footage every single day struck me as quite boring and could cause followers to lose interest. Thirdly, it created a platform for engagement- Take ‘Battle of the Series’ for example, this is a segment I run every Tuesday whereby I select two popular tv series eg. Stranger Things and Riverdale and get the followers to vote for their favourite series. Fourthly, it gives followers something to anticipate- followers know that on Thursday’s they will be met with some form of ‘Tips ‘n Tricks’ such as a video or blogpost, and so they look forward to it. As you can see, all days are also related to the key theme of filmmaking so despite sidetracking a little from the core organisation of Fresh International Film, it still comes back around to compliment it.

Every two weeks I set some time aside to sit down and plan the upcoming 2 weeks of Fresh, day for day with all images and captions in a Word Doc. I then begin scheduling each post on Facebook for the upcoming 2 weeks. Each post is scheduled to be published at 3pm on every given day. I chose the time 3pm as I did some research on the best times to post and 3pm seemed to be a hit. Sometime into my work for Fresh I began noticing via Analytics that our best engagement time was 9pm so I decided to start scheduling posts for much later in the day but on doing this, I noticed engagement then declined. The conclusion I drew from this was although engagement is highest at 9pm, it reaches more people when it’s posted at 3pm. I then switched back to the original posting time of 3pm but it was a good learning curve and an example of the types of trial and error I experienced during this process. I also set reminders on my phone for Monday- Friday at 3pm with the alarms labelled accordingly ie. ‘Monday- Call for Entries’. Having the posts scheduled on Facebook sped up the process of sharing on other social media immensely, it was simplified to a case of going onto Facebook, copying the caption, saving the image and then going to Instagram where I could upload the image, paste the caption and publish. The whole process of actually coming up with this technique as well as carrying it out on a daily basis has proven extremely beneficial to me and my growth. I now feel confident enough to put myself forward in social media management roles and know that at the very least, I have a basic understanding of how media management functions. I also learnt a lot about the importance of time efficiency and how spending 1-2 hours every two weeks planning ahead can save you several hours a week in real time.

As part of my work for Fresh, I also made a number of promotional videos.

Attached I have included samples of my work for Fresh.