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As the newcomer in any job, there’s always pressure to juggle voicing your fresh perspective, and doing it “the way it’s always been done”. After working as the marketing graduate assistant at the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center (UGA SBDC for short) for a few months, I noticed the difficulties of keeping track of all the different social media accounts across the department. The UGA SBDC has 17 offices throughout the state, with almost each having their own Facebook, Twitter, and Constant Contact accounts. Since the mission is hyper-local, these separate accounts make sense, but it’s hard to paint the larger picture of how these accounts are performing as a whole. 

I pitched the idea to my supervisors to let me spearhead quarterly social media reports. They agreed enthusiastically, so I analyzed social media data to generate 17 reports, one for each of our offices. Brunswick, a town on the southern Georgia coast, has one such office. This was the first time I had complete ownership over a project from initial pitch to final presentation, so I’m extremely proud of how the reports turned out.