Last week at Hastings, many of the posts I made were over sales on video games that we were having. It is Gametime at Hastings this month and we are all about games! I did get to make a few fun posts as usual, it is important to balance the ad related posts and the fun posts that will ultimately stimulate more reaction. More reaction=further reach. In addition to my daily posts, I attended a social media review meeting, which is held weekly with the Advertising Manager, Advertising Executive and Director of Advertising at Hastings. In this meeting we discussed where social media could take the company and sales related figures that is generated from social media.

Early Tuesday morning I went to the Hastings on 45th in Amarillo with my Cannon SLR in tow to take some photos to use for the Hastings Facebook cover photo. I got some really good shots and was able to edit a few of them using photoshop. I checked out some of the cover photos that our competitors have (Barnes and Nobles, Books A Million, etc.) to make sure ours did not resemble theirs and to see some of the ideas they were using. Barnes and Nobles simply had a picture of a women reading as their cover photo, but Hastings has an entirely different brand than Barnes and Nobles. Hastings has more of a fun, quirky vibe that Barnes and Nobles just doesn't have. Hastings caters to the comic book nerds, the video gaming geeks and people who still buy vinyls. I think we have an interesting brand and I want our cover photo to reflect that. This is the image we came up with:

It is currently the cover photo, but I have been instructed to change it bi-weekly, so I hope I can get some even more creative pics to use as the cover photo. Also this week, I created my first ad for Facebook. Facebook has made if fairly simple to create an ad. I came up with the text I wanted, took a screen shot of the image that I was going to use. After I added the basics I was able to pick the audience. I was making an ad for Sun Adventure Amarillo, which is owned by Hastings. I actually made four separate ads, each with the same daily budget, but I changed the audience on two and changed the image on the other two. The ad was then sent on to the Advertising Manager and approved through him. All in all, last week was an eventful week in the world of social media at Hastings.


See you next week!