PINPOINT PALS
For my Integrated Social Media & Community Strategy final project, I collaborated with my classmate & friend, Sadie Sorensen, to build our online brand, the Pinpoint Pals. As students studying abroad in Luxembourg at the time, we were looking for down-to-earth resources that made the idea of studying abroad less intimidating and more approachable. Pinpoint Pals was designed for current or prospective study abroad students, like us, to gain inspiration and discover unique channels for tips, tricks, and recommendations for their time abroad.
To create the most well-rounded experience possible, we outlined our ideal audience member, Brooke Watson. Brooke is a 20-year-old student at UT Austin, studying media and communications. She plans to study abroad, but would be the first in her family to do so, and is overwhelmed by the details that go into it. In her free time, she enjoys going out with friends, scrolling on Pinterest, and junk journaling. She has always wanted to see the world, is very Type-A, and has an eye for curation.
After researching a variety of channels, we decided on using Instagram as our primary platform to build the Pinpoint Pals brand. Ultimately, Instagram’s combination of young demographics, travel-friendly content format, trend-driven discovery tools, and community-building tools makes it the strongest platform for Pinpoint Pals. Because its primary user base overlaps with the study-abroad demographic, we were able to effectively use the platform to showcase our destinations, highlight travel tips, and inspire followers to go abroad. Instagram’s discoverability tools that include Reels and Explore, enhance the brand’s ability to reach new audiences interested in travel content.
Additionally, we introduced Threads as another channel for our content to be introduced and for an opportunity to build a community base for the Pinpoint Pals network.
Finally, we used Linktree as our base for our free, downloadable itineraries from our travels abroad.
At this point, we moved forward with creating content and building out a calendar to keep us consistent. After analyzing what was performing well and what was being rejected by our target audience, we were able to polish our calendar and incorporate sustainable posts to keep our brand growing.
These content sample is an example of posts we created after evaluating and supplementing our prior research. We added music, more hashtags, and subtexts on all of our posts to build engagement!
Future steps…
If we had more time with this project, we would continue strengthening local connections, seek additional MUDEC collaborations, and expand our presence within the Differdange community. Throughout this experience, we also learned how important it is to balance quantitative and qualitative data. Metrics like likes, views, and downloads helped us refine our content choices, but the familiar names that kept showing up in our comments, Threads replies, and Linktree downloads reminded us of the value of loyalty, emotional intelligence, and genuine connection. These recurring interactions showed that our content mattered to people in a meaningful way. This also helped us measure the success of our brand growth in addition to the success of our collaborators’ growth.