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Happy February! I am Tran Nguyen, a girl scout of Troop 2279, located in Santa Ana, CA. As a senior in high school, I am currently working towards my Gold Award, the highest award in the Girl Scout program.

During quarantine, everything was closed. Due to everything being canceled and closed, we couldn’t earn service hours or perform community service, and this went on for about 6 months. We didn’t know what else to do with our bucket-load of free time that we had during quarantine. We teenagers love spending time on our devices, and our parents couldn’t tell us to get off and do something productive easily. Social media is a HUGE part of our lives. But what if I told you that we, as teenagers, could use social media in a better way?

As a student who has struggled with procrastination and social media addiction from 8th grade to junior year in high school, I understood what it was like to be unproductive and how it was a challenge to balance school, extracurricular activities, and social media platforms. After learning about social media marketing and diving deeper into that skill during quarantine, I was able to find that balance. Knowing how many teenagers also struggle with finding that balance, I wanted to help them through my workshop program.

My online program, the Social Media System, aimed to show and help the teenage population become more aware of how they can use social media as a tool instead of something to waste time on. This program did that by teaching the basic skills of social media marketing – a skill where one could use social media to help other communities, groups, clubs, charities, organizations, businesses, and even grow him/herself to serve the people in his/her community.

The Social Media System taught basic skills of social media marketing including:

• Defining a target audience
• How to run a business page on social media
• How teenagers can apply these skill to help others in their community
• How advertisements work on social media

I was able to share these skills with up to 20 people, and their awareness about this subject grew from 50% to 85%. The feedback I received helped me to become more aware of how I can make the program better for future teenage audiences; I look forward to presenting at more locations. Once again, I’m grateful to The Youth Center and their Emerging Leaders students for participating, and I wouldn’t have been able to be one step towards my goal without their support.

Thank you!

-Tran Nguyen (12th Grade, Troop 2279)