The Boring(ish) Stuff

Hi! My name is Abigail Simpson and I am a public relations and advertising major with a minor in communication studies. A fun fact about me is that I run the social media pages for the Duquesne Men’s ACHA D1 hockey team, which is one of the main reasons I decided to take this class, to help with my current internship and hopefully help me land one with an NHL team. I used to play hockey for a very long time, which is essentially why I cannot let it go and while look for every opportunity to work in the hockey industry.

This is actually a subpar angle for TikTok content… do not reccommend

My school project approach is what I would describe as the exact opposite of procrastination. I am full steam ahead at all times, partially because I am not someone who thrives under pressure. I think more people would be surprised by how productive they can be when they just sit down and decide to bang some work out. Eight times out of ten I will just randomly sit down and almost finish and entire project in one sitting, it’s actually concerning.

Keeping Up with Me

You can find me on Instagram here: Abigail Simpson (@abigailsimpson04) • Instagram photos and videos And here on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/abigail-simpson-04228b274 The work done for my internship with the hockey team can be found @Duquesnehockey on Instagram and Facebook and @Duqhockey on TikTok.

The Deep Stuff

Something readers should know about me is that my favorite Taylor Swift era is Reputation, which I think says a lot about me as a person. I also went to the Eras tour in May, so yes, I am insufferable. However, I think that the social media strategy and content published on a variety of platforms by Taylor Swift’s personal account and the Taylor Nation account is actually incredibly interesting. The number of clues and easter eggs that people think they’re finding in specific posts but actually aren’t and vice versa. While this drives a lot of people insane, everyone has to admit it is pretty genius.

Looking Forward

In this semester I would like to gain more knowledge about building a concrete but adjustable social media strategy that I can apply to my everyday work with the hockey team. I would also really like to learn more about analytics, specifically how they can be used to better cater content to the target audience. Along with analytics, I am interested in SEO and all the ways it can help promote a brand or team without exactly running an advertising or social campaign.

In 2024…

In the past year, I adopted a sort of “screw it, I’m just going to do it” attitude that I feel has led me to a lot of success. When you don’t take the time to second guess yourself, it’s quite amazing to see all the things you can accomplish that you never thought possible. Of course, it may be reckless at times but I’ve had more positive results than negative.

My Portfolio

Throughout this semester, I have had the pleasure of seizing opportunities to write and complete blogs spanning a variety of topics across the field of social media and digital marketing. If that interests you, check out the work below!

Social Media Audit

Questioning Digital Media Ethics

Writing an Engaging Social Media Strategy

2 Things I Learned About My Work, From Digital Analytics

An important thing I learned from my work is that taking the extra time to create or write more engaging content pays off. For example, it does not really matter how many people visit your page if your bounce rate is extremely high and the time spent on the page is quite low. When working with my group for the earlier project, our group home page had only 18 viewers, but the average time spent on the page was two minutes and two seconds. Another noticeable statistic was that our bounce rate was 0% and the exit rate was only 16.67%, which is low compared to other blogs and pages on the same site. When writing my blog, I wanted to pick a more controversial topic, like community guidelines, because many strongly agree/or do not agree with them, which often engages people and makes them want to read more on it, even if it’s a hate read.

A screenshot from Squarespace Analytics showing page views during our group’s allotted posting time.

Another thing that I found to be vital to my learning in the past semester was making sure to optimize pages, specifically this blog, to be just as useful on mobile as it is on the web. However, regardless of mobile versus web, all sites need to be appealing. A site being appealing is necessary to attract an audience, but it is also necessary to make sure the audience stays on-site. According to Nahai, the appeal of a website can be measured in aesthetics and dynamics. Appeal encompasses visual appropriateness, elegance, harmony, and overall attractiveness of the website. Dynamics relate to the universality of the website, its interactivity, how attention-grabbing it is, and how user-friendly it is. Regardless of what platform viewers visit the site on, making sure the site is something users enjoy visiting can be a major point of success in digital marketing.

Meet Abigail