During the fall semester of my junior year, I spent a lot of time being directly involved in the strategy, content creation, and overall managing of the social media at The Butterfly Palace. This business is a Branson attraction that sees most of its business in the summer and spring but remains one of the top attractions in Branson even during the slow season. This was a great opportunity to get hands-on experience, see how my original ideas could come to life, and allow the business to reach more people. Before I joined, they already had a strong but modest presence on social media, with around 14K followers on facebook and 1,300 followers on Instagram.

My main focus during this project was to create more engaging content that would elicit a response from the audience. Our social media audience and frequent customers were mostly middle-aged moms; I kept this in mind while making content, knowing that I should appeal to this group. However, I also incorporated content that leaned younger to try and gain more attention from Gen-Z. Most of the content I made was funny in an attempt to connect with the viewer and make the advertising more subtle. This strategy proved to be very effective, especially on Instagram, showing an improvement in reach by over 300% compared to the summer and over 700% compared to the same time period the previous year. Seeing this was a huge motivator that my content was not only funny but also that my strategy was worth trying out.