Spencer Hammitt

Mikala Price

Toni Soler

Buzzfeed Report:15 Signs You’re An Out-Of-State Student In Southern California

Our article is fairly self explanatory by the title alone, but the reason we chose to write about this topic is because it was personal to us and our transition to becoming Californians. This article highlights some of the quirky, ironic facts that you learn when you move to California from another state. This article is relatable to many students and even non-students who have made the move to the Golden State. We have several different perspectives with Spencer being from Arizona, Mikala from Colorado, and Toni from Barcelona. Growing up, all of us have always dreamed about living in Southern California because this was a popular vacation spot for us when we were younger and not to mention a very popular state throughout pop culture. So we figured we would write about all of the small and  funny differences we noticed compared to the culture from the other areas we grew up in for the last 18 years. There is no place other place quite like California, and we learned that very quickly when coming to USD.

We chose to use the already common numbered list that people love on Buzzfeed to lure in viewers. All of our content is completely from personal observations throughout the last couple of years, and we searched many different GIFs to represent these. We primarly searched giphy.com for the GIFs that we used. It had a very large selection of GIFs to help aid the point we were trying to make for each of the 15 signs.

Facebook Advertisement

Instagram Advertisement

On Facebook and Instagram, we focused on an age range of 16-28 for both males and females and chose to target major college areas throughout Southern California. This included Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego. We also chose to target several large cities in other states where a large majority of the out-of-state students come from. These cities included Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tucson. Due to the humor and focus on college in Southern California, we decided to focus on interests that also related to these topics. These interests included topics such as college humor, Southern California, greek life, fraternities and sororities, and several specific large colleges throughout Southern California such as UCSD, UCLA, USC, and UCSB. We felt that each of these areas were highly related to the demographic of people that we were trying to reach.

The results from our advertising were interesting to say the least. Starting with Facebook we were interested to find that we had more engagement and link clicks through our mobile advertising than our desktop advertising. We ended up with 82 link clicks for mobile devices and only 1 click on desktops. However, our reach for mobile devices was significantly higher at 7,658 people vs. 160 so the results do make sense. What really helped us increase article views was the fact that we had 4 people shared our ad on Facebook, which likely lead to hundreds of more views from the friends of the people who shared. Our Instagram advertisement had 133 likes but only 11 link clicks. Unfortunately, people are unable to share things on Instagram’s platform or maybe we could have had even more views, but overall we were happy with the results of this advertisement.

Twitter Advertisement

The strategy behind Twitter also related to that of Facebook and Instagram. We chose to target the major cities with colleges in Southern California (San Diego, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara) and the major cities where out-of-state students come from (Denver, Phoenix, Seattle, Las Vegas). As with all other campaigns we directed it towards both genders. Our keywords were Southern California, college humor, out-of-state student, and college students. Followers that we targeted included the popular colleges in Southern California such as @UCLA, @USC, etc. Other followers also included college humor pages such as @CollegeHumor, @collegefessions, @totalfratmove, and so on. We also selected a few celebrities such as @danieltosh and @kanyewest. These are pages and people, that we believe that large majority of our targeted demographic is interested in, and many of the pages also related to similar topics such as humor and college.

Twitter Analytics

Behavior: We were ineffective in hitting any particular behaviors. We did get one link click from Lifestyle: Young and Hip.

Gender: Collected 26 clicks from females and 52 clicks from males.

Handle Metrics: Our top two in focusing on clicks were Kanye West with 69 clicks, and Daniel Tosh with 64 clicks. They most likely did better because they had significantly more followers. These celebrities had followers in the 20 million range, while twitter accounts such as total frat move and college humor had followers near the 1 million range. The best targeting link click to impression ratio came from our more specific audiences such as USC athletics and Total Sorority Move. So even though targeting those celebrity accounts had more clicks, the other more specific accounts related to our article were more successful in leading people to clicks.

Interest: Interest was hard to tell what worked and what did not because the data is very random. None of these interestingly exceeded 100 link clicks, but the ones that broke 50 link clicks were mostly interests that college students were interested in such as: anything related to professional or college sports, movies and pop culture, entrepreneurship, technology. Many of these top interest were also at the top interest as Twitter as a whole, according to the analytics studied in class.

Keywords: These were unsuccessful and had 0 clicks. We only used 3 key words and could have expanded our list.

TV Shows: No shows had more than one or two clicks, except for the Game of Thrones, which had 5. This makes sense because it is very popular with the college crowd.

Buzzfeed Results

The last updated results before writing this report indicated a total of 1,467 views since publishing with the majority of them coming from people accessing the article through Facebook (1,269 views) and very few from Twitter (29 views) or Twitter (3 views).

As expected, our largest amount of views came from Facebook. As can be seen in the Buzzfeed dashboard breakdowns, approximately 98% of all views resulted from Facebook. As Facebook is largely popular for Buzzfeed articles, especially when targeting those of our demographic age group from 16-28, this was not largely surprising. In addition, the majority of our marketing tended to be focused on Facebook as a platform. However, this percentage was slightly higher than expected, as we assumed that Twitter and Instagram would account for slightly more than each did, Twitter only accounted for approximately 29 views, while Instagram was only 11 according to the ad results. It was not expected for Instagram to have a high click through rate, but we did expect a few more judging from the amount of likes on the Instagram post (133). A very unexpected twist, was when our Buzzfeed article became viral and reached 67.7x social lift over a one day period. Our article had done fairly well in the beginning reaching around 600 views before any official marketing other than through our personal social networks. However, this significant social lift was very unexpected, as it occurred once each of our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter advertisements had ended, which had only brought us to around 800 views.

As our advertisements accounted for the least amount of views, in the final days, we decided to personally post the article in several groups related to our target market, as we had seen that our initial sharing and posting had been the most successful. Some of these groups included the USC student Facebook page, the College Humor Facebook page, and the USD Class of 2017 Facebook page. Although it is difficult to know which page or posting was responsible for the huge social lift, we can assume that it was from one, if not all, of these postings, as we know that the views came from Facebook. Overall, there are several things that we would do differently if we were able to do this again. Primarily, we would focus on really finding more large-scale influencers to respond and share our post, as none of the ones contacted did. We would do this in hopes of targeting the market on Twitter more efficiently rather than through advertisements. In addition, we would most likely refrain from any Instagram advertisements as it had the most expensive cost per click rate of $4.48 and essentially the same overall cost of the Facebook ad, which reached significantly more people. Instead, we would rather focus that money on making more Facebook advertisements considering that this was the most successful platform for our Buzzfeed article. However, for the large part we are content with the results that we saw. If we were able to make these few changes for another opportunity, we are certain that we would be even more successful.