Spectrum South is a Texas-based online magazine that celebrates the lives and experiences of queer people across the US South. I collaborated with the founders to choose their branding, identify their ideal audiences, define their brand voice, choose relevant social media platforms, and establish a content strategy. We regularly revisit our strategy to determine what has been impactful and what needs to be updated. With all of this, the mission to elevate voices of the queer South has stayed the same.
Find your people.
There are a lot of platforms out there, but we wanted to ensure that the publication’s energy is being put in the places where it will get the most impact. Spectrum South’s audience mainly spends time on Instagram, so that is where we chose to focus, with a smaller presence on Facebook and Twitter. Instagram continues to be the platform that sees the most growth in engagement, reach, and followers.
Bring Pride to everything you do.
Spectrum hosts, sponsors, and participates in events to raise awareness and actively be a part of the queer community in the South. For each event, we come up with guidelines to best promote it before, live-post during, and recap afterwards, which creates a more dynamic social media presence and strengthens our relationship with the community.
Share your story.
A big part of what Spectrum South aims to do is to share stories. To do that, they needed to build their audience up regularly. While local networks, events, and hashtagging helped expand their reach, at times, we needed to use paid ad campaigns to expand outside of their network and reach new people. I helped create and manage paid advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to raise brand awareness and increase website clicks for specific events and stories. Partnering with the founders, I created a strategy for distributing and optimizing their content, tracking analytics, and incorporating ads to promote events. I also helped coordinate their successful Kickstarter campaign to fund more writers and their podcast.