John Vena Inc. Social Media
When I started at JVI Specialty Produce there was no organized social media effort. Only Facebook was in active use, managed by a rotating cast of college interns. As part of the Marketing Plan I developed for the company, I established low cost social strategies to achieve general brand building and recruitment goals. We focused on professional, but not over-produced, content and a consistent voice. Over my tenure, I was able to organically grow an active following utilizing Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. By Q1 2023, we clocked in at almost 5,000 followers across channels, with an average of over 100K accounts reached and 8K accounts engaged weekly. While data on brand and recruitment impact was limited, we consistently received positive feedback from both customers, industry partners, and staff.
Responsibilities: Content Strategy & Management, Content Creation, Photography, Copywriting & Editing
Daily New & Featured Product Campaign
I established an ongoing campaign of daily updates on product arrivals and peak season promotion opportunities featuring beautiful imagery and simple videos of real product in our warehouse. The goal was not to drive immediate sales activity, but rather, to support our reputation as a trusted industry expert and desirable partner. Many of the images are my own; others were taken by my team under my editorial direction. All captions were written or copyedited by myself.
Key Product Awareness Reels
As Instagram shifted from an image-based platform to a video-centric space, we also shifted our strategy. In order to stay relevant and drive engagement, I launched an ongoing Reels campaign to provide educational information about key products in order to drive awareness and keep engagement up within our traditional image carousel posts. I produced these reels in their entirety, including "acting," scripting, editing, and voiceover. These posts were incredibly successful, with the most popular achieving more than 1.2 million views and over 122K interactions.
Engagement & Recruitment Campaigns
Particularly following the COVID pandemic, recruitment and retention became a major challenge for our organization. As part of an organization-wide engagement campaign, I introduced a program to include staff-focused imagery and video on our social media feeds. In order to ensure value internally, I worked to make social a more prominent part of our culture by incorporating social content features into Trainings and linking to our channels in internal documents.
