montanajournalism Best Practices for Journalists on Social Media

Designers on Social Media: Q&A with Freelance Designer Abby Cracraft

By Kaylee Beck

Abby Cracraft is a graphic and web designer based in Portland, Oregon, with a portfolio showcasing her work in merchandise, music, and sports. On a mission to help brands create meaningful experiences through thoughtful design choices, she leverages a multidisciplinary approach that includes computer science, digital design, and sales. Originally from Boulder, CO, Abby has lived in every time zone in the continental U.S. A musician, lifelong learner, and aspiring polyglot, she continues to refine her craft with empathy at its core.

Kaylee Beck, a University of Montana Media Arts student studying graphic design, interviewed Abby Cracraft about their usage of social media in regard to their career. What follows in a transcript of their conversation, edited slightly for clarity and brevity.

Q: How has your personal brand evolved over time? What role has social media played in shaping your online identity?

A: I think that my brand is something that self-admittedly has only come to me recently. I have felt that I have always wanted to be authentic online and share what I create in a way that I would want to watch if I were the viewer and I only discovered it by creating content/designs for myself and clients. I started to be drawn towards a specific aesthetic consistently. Like many people who grew up on the internet and with a screen in their face from a young age, I think I have learned how much it can affect your self-image. Being able to go through the transformative middle to high-school years online allowed me to now be able to deconstruct how impactful it is to who I am as a person and realize I would prefer to be authentic than just posting for engagement and dopamine.

Q: What are your biggest challenges in maintaining a consistent aesthetic and voice across your portfolio, social media, and style of design?

A: I think that maintaining a consistent aesthetic and voice shouldn’t be difficult if you are speaking from your own experience. I try my best not to compare my end result with others because I recognize that the way we got there was different. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with trying out new styles or new ways of doing things – that is the fun part of social media and design! I think the casual nature that social media has been getting back to with photo dumps reminds me to not take it too seriously! Make stuff that makes you happy and others that like it will find you!

Q: How do you manage the pressure to constantly create new content and engage with your audience on social media?

A: I am both lucky and unlucky to say that creating social media content is not my full-time job or even a part-time job. I do it when I want and when I feel like I have the energy to do so. This allows me to not have to put pressure on myself to create when the tank is empty. In the past, I have created content in different aspects (I have a YouTube channel dedicated to playing guitar that I

uploaded on consistently for years) and have felt that once you get into the flow of creating and sharing it becomes second nature. I just have an underlying fear of burning out in graphic design since it is my true passion so I refuse to put too much stress on myself in it.

Q: Can you describe your target audience and clients you try to reach? How do you tailor your creative approach to effectively reach and engage with these demographics?

A: My target audience would be music lovers who notice the little things in their favorite band’s album cover. I try my best to be detail-oriented in the work I create and try to improve on every aspect whether that’s the filming, the editing, or the content itself. Being able to capture a certain demographic can be hard, but I have been lucky to have captured an audience that has found me through working with their favorite musicians. For someone to see a post from a musician they follow, like the design enough to find the person who designed it, and then follow them, means that it almost weeds out the negative people.

Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in using social media to promote yourself as a designer, and how have you overcome them?

A: My biggest challenge is consistency on social media as a designer. I am constantly working with clients on top of holding full-time non-graphic design jobs, and so to add on posting content and filming things that may not return monetarily is difficult. To push through this depends on discipline and starting to form a habit around content creation. In the past, I have had different ventures in social media that required daily commitment, whether that was posting guitar riffs on YouTube or meme posts when I was in middle school. I have learned from those experiences that consistency is what can grow an account. I never focused overtly on quality, but I think as a graphic designer, you tend to always be looking for a higher quality aesthetic due to the artistic creative side. I think if I was to be able to get out of my own head and create more, it would lead to a larger follower count, but I have yet to see if that equates to a larger client base or not.

This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out people in media who are doing social media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.

montanajournalism Best Practices for Journalists on Social Media

Social Media Best Practices: Q&A with Artist Kate Loble

By Eliza Carey

Kate Loble is a 22-year-old Montana-born artist who specializes in crochet and posts regularly on her business Instagram account promoting her work, which includes anything from stylish sweaters to silly hats. Her personal touch shines through each unique piece.

Her business name is GEEB, a childhood nickname that reminds her of wonder. Kate grew up in Helena, Montana practicing theater performance art, found a love for ceramics and utilizing her hands in high school. She then attempted to go to school for theater, but it fell through because of the pandemic. She would then spend the next three years with enough downtime to take up the hobby that would change her life: Crochet. She crocheted every day for a year and a half and then in the summer of 2023, her art really started to take off when she started making reels every day, reaching 78.1K views, and counting, on her most popular video. She is now enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington.

Eliza Carey, a University of Montana journalism student, interviewed Loble about social media recently in a study of best practices on social media. What follows in a transcript of their conversation, edited slightly for clarity and brevity.

Q: What does your process look like for promoting your work on social media?

A: It’s mostly filming. Honestly, my process isn’t that good, it’s very emotional. Like, I’ll start filming, and I’m just awkwardly talking about the piece or what I’m doing for way too long, and it’s like, people just want to see me do it. So then I’m cutting down the video to the very end. And that’s what I want to do, I want to film the final steps of my process, like maybe a little bit of the creative process, but mostly talking about the piece once it’s finished and kinda show that finished product to my audience. I also just work faster when I don’t have to record everything.” Q: What tactics have you seen work best?

A: Reels, obviously, like when I’m ‘making content,’ I’ll make a reel. I’ve done pretty well on TikTok, too, and the key is personality. Some people are attracted to more professionalism, but most people just want to get to know you and see your personality. I mean, one of my videos with the most views is literally just me being goofy and taking the audience along with me while I make a piece.

Q: What is the biggest struggle you have run into with sharing your work on social media?

A: It’s a whole other art form, it’s like a whole other skill. It takes graphic design, modeling, marketing, video editing, and I want to really learn a new skill to help promote my stuff, but the challenge there is that it would take time away from actually creating my art, so it’s kind of a difficult thing.

Q: What is your main goal when you post, and how successful have your strategies been?

A: If I had a more exact goal, I would be posting more effectively, but honestly my goal is just to inspire and maybe eventually be able to sell from it. I’ve never gotten any money from social media as an outlet, I’ve only made money from direct selling, whether that’s at the maker’s market or for a friend. I just want to focus on documenting the process of what I do. At the end of the day, I think my strategies have been successful because in person I get a lot of good feedback about what I’m doing, like, my friends think it’s cool and that feels good. Actually, one of my first days of school at Cornish, I met someone who recognized me from my Instagram account. It was shocking, but it made me happy. People know me by my art, like an extension of my persona, and it’s very validating and refreshing.

Q: What does your future look like with using social media to your benefit?

A: The video editing part of it all has been super inspirational for me. I want to get into video production, filming, editing, design and photo. I think my desire to learn more about those things has truly come from just making my own videos for my art page, and just the current space of social media makes me want to document my work. I don’t see this as long term, I want something bigger to come from it, but it’s helpful to know how to run your own shit, discipline yourself, it’s important for any art field.

This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out creatives who are doing using media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.

montanajournalism Best Practices for Journalists on Social Media

Social Media Best Practices: Q&A with University of Montana’s Hannah Fellows

By Melissa Dickson

Hannah Fellows, a senior marketing student at the University of Montana, has been the social media coordinator for UM campus dining for almost three years. Her roles include creating content for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and the campus dining website. She says she fell in love with the creation process, running campaigns and creating content for anything digital marketing.

UM Journalism student Melissa Dickson recently interviewed Fellows about her work on social media and below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for clarity and accuracy.

Q: How do you build trust with your audience in terms of keeping their attention and engagement?

A: I would say, I think the best way to build trust with your audience is to keep it real which sounds cheesy but is so true. A lot of the projects I work on are very student focused and Gen-Z focused, and I have found in my years of doing this role that people respond to content that relates to them and is more relaxed, content that is real.

For me personally, I make sure that when I’m photographing a campaign or a project that I’m photographing the real food, the real packaging, having real students included and the real atmosphere. The more you try to change, alter and manipulate a campaign, the less your audience is going to engage and look for it. At least in my opinion, I have had great success with campaigns that were more relaxed and chill, and definitely Gen-Z focused rather than the ones I have where it is a big production with a lot of alterations and changes.

To keep my audience engaged, I have a few go to’s. My first is probably using a variety of students, because the more people you feature with your products the more people engage because they know them, they see a friendly face, they get excited to be a part of a UM branded campaign, etc. I also like to follow social media trends, if there’s a trending sound, I’ll try to put it with one of my projects or it will inspire a project. I also definitely love to use features specifically through meta, so on Facebook and Instagram that allow your audience to engage immediately like surveys, polls questions, etc.

Q: What are some strategies that you have used in order to tell a story about what you are marketing? Do you think they are working?

A: I have experimented and tried so many different strategies in my years while working here some things I’ve definitely seen come out positively are tying current trends to what we are trying to market. For example, one of my recent campaigns was to promote our “to go box “ system for The Lodge Dining center, and we decided to tie that to a trend that’s going around on the Internet, called “this and yap” so by combining that trend with what I needed to promote in a 30-second video we were able to have extreme engagement along with around 15k views of our video. It would be hard to say that marketing is the reason why our to-go boxes actually sold out, but I would say that that video definitely helped promote our program and now we are very successful in that department.

Q: How do you gauge what content is most appealing for your audience, making it relevant?

A: would say that I gauge what content is going to be most appealing to my audience because my audience is myself. I am looking at my target market as 18 to 21-year-olds that go to the University of Montana just like myself , because I am so up-to-date on trends and what is happening within my generation what people are liking to see, what people are not liking to see, I feel like I am able to use my own capabilities and my own likes and interest and really put them into my work.

Q: What would you describe is the “product” that you are trying to sell your audience through posts or ads online?

A: We are selling amazing on-campus food, whether it’s retail and found in the University Center or at the Market or its dining plans through the Lodge Dining Center. we are promoting our Montana made products, locally grown products and amazing recipes for everyone to enjoy.

Q: What techniques do you use to foster a strong community around the brand?

A: I would say my techniques for fostering a strong community around the brand is kind of like I said before by keeping it real, keeping it authentic and relating it to my target audience.

This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out creatives who are doing using media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.