UNLAX is a project created to review and introduce affordable as well as comfortable places for university students to do their work with the best amenities. We are going to go over the progress of the project and the modifications made to fulfil the social utility of introducing study places that suit the needs of university students. We wanted to make use of social media to promote our project and the reviews made. Leaving reviews after spending at least a day at the sites on our website and filming the study spaces to create highlights for our blog and social media were part of each proper review. Our teammates photography skills were used to compliment the reviews and attract potential subjects – university students. We upload a short review video on our YouTube channel that fall under the one-minute mark and promotion videos under 45 seconds.  

Let’s break it down for easier understanding of the project and the changes made. 

1. Platform choices  

The initial plan was to have a website and accounts on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.  

The channel to put up our full reviews was our website – blog. it was to provide an in-depth review of the study spaces and promotional videos of the reviewed spaces. 

We needed traffic to the blog hence the role of our Instagram. The Instagram was very important as it acted as our project – UNLAX’s mean outreach towards the target audience. It was used for conducting user engagement as well, the feature of highlights story and polls could help achieve just that. It also as an effective way to advertise in other study related Instagram accounts. Animated pictures were included in the Instagram post as means of promoting the reviewed study area and a gateway to our full reviews on the blog. 

The YouTube channel was used to promote the reviews with short videos but unfortunately met with inconsistency of producing content.  

2. Content 

•  Instagram  

Posts were put up weekly as well as polls on story to engage with our audience. 

Aesthetic photos were used to attract the target audience and short captions to engage yet not bore them. The feed was made as aesthetically as possible. 

The highlights feature was used to promote the YouTube channel and alert followers when a new video was uploaded.  

We also promoted different study places promotions on Instagram stories whenever we came across them so students could grasp as much as they could from the promotions. 

• YouTube  

Videos ranging from 15 seconds to 1 min were uploaded as part of the content.  

Some of them were merely for promotional purposes (shorter ones) and to attract audiences while some were longer and in-dept about our reviews.   

3. Design and aesthetic  

A change in the logo was made as the first one didn’t fully represent us well. Our second logo did a rather good job in representing the project as it included a workspace. The change in the logo made it easier for target audience to recognize us. The pastel purple used in the logo was calming. 

As for the Instagram posts, we have a clean color scheme of mostly dim colors that associate with most productive study spaces. As it isn’t distracting but allows people to concentrate. The consistency in the color scheme gave the account a professional touch. The posts were designed to come with short, eye-catching captions. 

The videos on the YouTube channel didn’t follow a special color scheme when it came to thumbnails. The videos were quick, and the shots included were aesthetically pleasing. 

There were a lot of changes that came along with the feedback from our mentor and users. We adapted changes to tailor make our social utility as achievable as possible. These changes guided not only us but our viewers better in terms of content and accessibility.  

1. Cutting down on platforms             

                        We soon realized that our Instagram page and YouTube channel was more than enough to promote and bring out our help to university students. A lot people nowadays refrain from reading long articles or texts thus a shorter and direct informative way of bringing out our reviews was better. That’s why we kept only Instagram and YouTube since they’re both commonly used by students. This also helped reduce the stress and workload that was on our shoulders.  

2. Increasing and eventually decreasing the duration of videos  

            At first our video was about a minute long, which was apparently too long and unnecessary. We were suggested to cut it down a notch and make it shorter to not only attract our audience to watch our complete review but also allow it to be more pleasing to watch. Therefore, we cut our second review to be just about 16 seconds and it turn out to be too short and unfulfilling regarding the information included in the video review. At last, we decided to have video reviews not longer than 40 seconds neither shorter than 30 seconds long. Thankfully. It was a great idea and more people watched our reviews completely.  

3. Adding reviews and locations inside the video  

We, at first were writing our reviews on a website created for UNLAX and uploading infographics videos on Instagram and YouTube. Our mentor suggested adding the reviews in the captions and short versions in the video as the pictures come. The idea did turn out to be a good one and our videos got better and better with time.  we also created simple maps to further access our users.

4. Content interaction polls 

We wanted to know more from our followers about how we were doing and if we are useful and so we started creating polls on Instagram and started using the question features on stories. This helped us get more feedback and further gave us motivation continue what we have started. This also increased user interaction and made our page more user friendly.  

5. Feedback and how I managed them  

We started getting comments and direct messages of encouragement and pages reaching out to us promoting themselves for us to review them. This happened since I started creating hashtags to promote our posts with people of similar interest and looking for good places to study. The nice messages and comments were very encouraging and made me realize that we were making an impact and helping people choose better for themselves. Although collaborating with study rooms would have been a good idea but it further made me think if it would decrease the credibility of our reviews and so I had to refuse.  

Overall, I believe that this project was a success and a great experience for me. I always thought managing an account is easy but I turned out to be very wrong. Managing a business (meaningful) account is much harder than I anticipated.  I have learnt a lot of new managing skills and have enhanced my writing abilities through this DA.