field notes · 2024 · 5 min
Nobody shares an announcement
a year of LCS content, and what the numbers kept saying.
AFor a year I was the entire content pipeline for Laurier Computing Society: pitch it, plan it around the academic calendar, film it, direct whoever agreed to be on camera, edit it, post it. That's a lot of hats for one club account, and it meant I saw every single post's numbers, good and bad, with nowhere to hide from either.
The pattern showed up almost immediately and refused to go away no matter how many times I tried to argue with it: 'workshop tonight at 6pm' posts got polite, forgettable engagement. Student interviews, the ones where someone just talked about how they actually felt about co-op or imposter syndrome, got shared. Not liked more, shared more, which is a different and much better signal.
An announcement tells people what's happening. A good clip makes them feel like they were already in on it.
It makes sense once you say it out loud. Nobody sends a friend a poster. People send a friend the clip where someone said the thing they'd also been thinking. So the calendar shifted: fewer announcement-shaped posts, more format built around a real person saying something true on camera, timed around exam season and events instead of just replacing the flyer.
500K+ views across Instagram and TikTok by the end, and the top performers were never the polished ones. They were the ones that sounded like a person, not a club account.
Mobina Tooranisama
written while re-scheduling a shoot around midterms, again