Scots Media
Carlmont High School, Belmont, CA
NSPA Marketer of the Year Portfolio
ABOUT
Hi, I'm Maya! I am a junior at Carlmont High School and have been a Scots Media Marketing team member for 2 years. During the 2024-2025 school year, I worked as a Marketing Editor and will be the Marketing Managing Editor during the 2025-2026 school year.
SCOTS MEDIA
Scots Media utilizes Instagram, X, Facebook, and Bluesky to promote our online news site, Scot Scoop, and print magazine, The Highlander. Our largest account is on Instagram, where we currently have 1,595 followers. As a marketing editor this year, my goal was to grow our account by increasing our engagement with the student body and to grow our audience by reaching more non-follower accounts.
GAMES PROMOTION
With the growing popularity of sites like The New York Times Games and quizzes and trivia on websites such as BuzzFeed, Scot Scoop began this school year with a new addition to the entertainment section — games. This year, I was tasked with managing marketing for the games section, which publishes a variety of crosswords, trivia, and personality quizzes daily.​ In this position, I was responsible for leading the team of producers who created promotional content for games.
Goal: Spread the word about the launch of the new games section and boost engagement and viewership on the Scot Scoop website. Effectively publicizing games was essential to the success of the new games section and our news site. Using games, I aimed to entice viewers to visit Scot Scoop, increasing the likelihood that they would explore other aspects of our website.
Plan: I created a new social media beat type to ensure weekly and timely promotion of all games. Below is the weekly Monday through Sunday posting schedule.
I created the above posting schedule to help producers keep track of what types of posts to create during their beat week. In addition, I wrote in-depth instructions (pictured below) on how to make each post using templates to maintain consistency.
TRIVIA VIDEOS (REELS)
With the growth of social media platforms like TikTok, short-form content has become extremely popular for its ability to grab the audience’s attention quickly. Taking inspiration from social media creators who post videos quizzing passersby on various trivia, I instructed producers to film similar videos to promote the trivia and quizzes on Scot Scoop.​​​ To keep the videos consistent, I created a template for producers to follow and made sure that videos did not exceed a minute and 30 seconds to retain viewership throughout the video. Trivia and quizzes promoted this way received significantly more views on Scot Scoop.
Over the past 6 months, Trivia Reels have brought the most traction to our account, gaining us 24 new followers, while our other Reels have only brought us 10 new followers. Additionally, out of all of our posts over the last 3 months, Trivia Reels make up five out of six of our top-performing content, reaching more accounts than any other kind of promotional post.
​
Of these five Reels, “Trivia: Disney Movies” and “Trivia: Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” performed the best on Scot Scoop, amassing 333 views on our website. The two Reels reached a total of 4,016 accounts, were played 5,981 times, engaged 176 accounts, and received 163 likes.
Overall, the Reels boosted engagement with the student body as students were more likely to interact with the Reels if they or their friends were featured. Furthermore, these Reels have increased our reach, receiving the most interactions from non-followers out of any other posts.
INSTRUCTIONS
TEMPLATE
The above post is an example of the trivia videos I instructed producers to film and edit.
—
The slideshow to the left is the step-by-step editing directions I created and linked on the instructions document pictured above the slideshow.
GAMES STORIES
In addition to the Trivia Reels, I also instructed producers to promote games through "Trivia/Quiz of the Week" Instagram stories, which were posted twice a week and featured the trivia and quiz published each week. At the end of each week, producers would post a game recap story featuring the games published that week.
Both stories received a total of 28 ink clicks, reached 525 accounts, and resulted in 10 profile visits. These two stories contributed to the 148 views "Quiz: Which high school superlative are you?" received on Scot Scoop.
TEMPLATE
INSTRUCTIONS
This story alone reached 315 accounts and resulted in 12 link clicks. This game was also promoted through a Trivia Reel that reached 1127 accounts, was played 2657 times, engaged 79 accounts, and received 75 likes. These two promotion methods resulted in the 102 website views "Trivia: Squid Game" received.
Above are the directions I made to instruct our team of producers on how to create promotional stories using the templates I created. To the left is an example of a Games Stringer made using the template.
GAMES PROMOTION RESULTS
My approach to promoting the new games section not only grew our publications' social media presence but also contributed to "Quiz:Which Jellycat are you?" and "Quiz: Are you more of a Glinda or an Elphaba?" being our online publication's second and fourth most viewed stories during the last year. In total, these two quizzes brought a total of 12,603 views to our website.
Games consistently remain part of the top trending stories on our site. "Quiz: Which Jellycat are you?" has held the number one ranking for over 6 months.
LEADERSHIP & EDITING
At Carlmont, incoming sophomores can choose to take Media Arts, an alternative English class that is a prerequisite to the Journalism pathway. During the second semester of each school year, students enrolled in the class can choose to explore another aspect of journalism, like social media marketing. This year, the marketing team received 12 new producers, many of whom had little to no prior experience creating promotional social media posts.
In collaboration with my editor-in-chief, we held a meeting with all the new producers to familiarize them with the templates used to make each post and clearly outline the work required for each beat type (Instagram, X/Bluesky, Facebook, and Games). By holding this informational meeting and presenting the slides below, we created a foundation for what would be expected of students and cleared up any confusion to ensure that all students felt confident and comfortable beginning the beat cycle and that posts would continue to be high-quality.
Despite our efforts, there will always be some students who struggle. As a sophomore, I remember it being daunting to text my upperclassman editor and ask for help. However, meeting in person with my editor helped me put a face to the once-intimidating voice behind the screen and gave me answers to questions I had been previously scared to ask via text. Based on personal experience, I met in person with struggling producers so I could visually demonstrate how to do things on their laptops and clearly explain things verbally rather than texting them a long and confusing paragraph.
The above screenshot is of feedback I left on one of my producers' first rubrics. After meeting with this student, I saw improvements in communication, quality of work, and the grades they received in each of the following beat cycles; after receiving a 38/50 on their first beat, they received a 46/50 on their sixth and final beat. By talking to them in person, I built trust by establishing myself as a resource willing to provide them with the guidance and support they need to succeed.
As a marketing editor, I have become very familiar with analyzing and understanding social media analytics. While the marketing team is responsible for promoting published content, students are heavily encouraged to create their own social media accounts for journalism to promote themselves. However, I noticed that many students don't utilize these accounts. To encourage other students to use social media to publicize their work, I created a presentation on how to utilize analytics to promote one's work effectively.
LINKTREE
Goal: Transfer social media engagement into engagement on the Scot Scoop website by streamlining navigation to our various publications and social media platforms.
Plan: Previously, our Instagram bio only included a link to a list of our website’s most recently promoted content. Most people access Instagram through their phones, but I noticed that navigating to another area of our site was difficult when following the link in our bio, which could be limiting viewership across our site. To combat this, I created a Scots Media Linktree, which includes links to all our social media accounts, recently promoted content, our new games section, and our three publications.
​
Results: Our Linktree’s lifetime click rate (the percent of viewers who clicked a link) is 80%. We received the most link clicks on “Scot Scoop” (website) with 233 in total and 156 clicks total to our second highest category, “Read Here” (recently promoted content). We consistently surpass the benchmark link click rate (median click rate for Linktrees with similar views), indicating that we successfully translate social media engagement to views on our site.
