Student Spotlight: Meet Moatasem Al Ahmad

October 4, 2018
Teaching Tips, Career Prep

Welcome to another installment of our student-propelled success stories.

Each installment highlights a current or past Stukent student and the cool things he, she or they are doing online. We hope this motivates you to see how other students from around the world are using their entrepreneurial and marketing skills to grow a company.

Meet Moatasem Al Ahmad

Moatasem was the Social Media Manager of Orient News T.V from Sep 2013 to Feb 2017 and was later promoted to Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager at Ghassan Aboud Group https://gagroup.net where he was exposed to the Automotive, Media, Retail, Real Estate, and Logistics industries. Moatasem has a long list of milestones in both positions, however, one of his greatest accomplishments came from his focus on promoting his company through YouTube.

Moatasem was able to grow Orient’s YouTube channel to over 14M views/month without spending a penny to promote it. He found most of his success through the metadata, and the evergreen content.

We asked Moatasem some questions about his story to learn more about his success in his career. You can read his interview below:

Hey, Moatasem. Let’s start off with you telling us a little about yourself.

{Q} Where are you from?

Syria – Based in Dubai

{Q} What university do you attend?

Currently: Al-Madinah International University

Earlier (2009): First Industrial Institute of Damascus

{Q} What are you studying?

Currently: Bachelor of Business Administration – BBA (Hons)

Earlier (2009): Diploma – Electronics engineering

{Q} Why did you want to study business administration?

I have over 7 years of professional experience in social media & digital marketing, 2 years in video editing, and over 2 years in graphic design.

I needed to develop my management skills to strengthen my backbone gearing towards my career path.

On the other hand, I believe that the best source for me to develop social media and digital marketing skills is by attending short to medium courses and tutorials conducted by the industry leaders themselves or specialized institutions.

{Q} What are some of your hobbies?

I enjoy trying new foods, rain chasing, and exploring nature.

Tell us about your cool venture

{Q} When/Why did you start?

I started in 2013 and I decided to do what I’m passionate about so that I would enjoy what I am doing.

{Q} What’s unique about what you do?

Although Orient News is a local & privately held T.V, our social media accounts stand now at a relatively big number of followers, views & engagement rate. It’s leveled with regional News channels in terms of engagement.
One of the unique things we accomplished is growing our YouTube Channel to over 14 million views a month with absolutely no paid YouTube campaigns. Instead, we found that Titles and thumbnails have a magical effect in boosting organic viewership, and here I encourage everyone to never underestimate the power of this tool because no matter how great your content is, people will not discover it unless your metadata triggers them to do so.
The other thing we focused on is evergreen content, and this also helped us a lot in reaching millions of views and made a balance point with news content that has a relatively short life cycle

{Q} What has been the hardest part working with your business?

Orient News is a Syrian T.V that covers the Syrian conflict and stands by the civilians in their call for freedom, dignity, and decent life.
Protecting our online archive and social media accounts from the bulk-reports by the pro-Syrian-regime online army was one of the biggest challenges we faced

{Q} How are you marketing your business?

Currently, I’m managing accounts from different activities such as Retail, Automotive, corporate, media & others, and there is a different practice for each. Mainly it works around a content calendar, corporate and tactical campaigns for each entity.

{Q} What advice would you give to a college student looking to start down a similar path as yours?

Use the power of “share”: be careful not to mix digital marketing with social media, social media is about shareable content, not paid-marketing. Give your audience a reason to share your content with their friends, make it smart, fun or practical. Focus on the organic reach, it is the key factor in why things go viral.

Stay tuned: Make sure to plug yourself into the major industry news feeds, be the first to know the updates, and be the first to utilize them

Always Keep room for development: With tons of updates and new technologies coming every day to the industry, you will need a ton of training to keep up. become certified in YouTube, Google, Facebook. You know what, become certified in everything social and digital.

Think Evergreen: News content gets a lot of attention/views quickly, but it also dies quickly. Consider tailoring evergreen content, it’s going to be your winning card, and will boost your channel/page on the long run.

Mind the publishing guidelines and copyrights: believe me, you don’t want to learn this the hard way

Learn Photoshop and video editing: Although you will not be executing the design or the video editing yourself when you are leading a team, it’s a good idea to know how it’s done. It helps a lot in filtering possibilities.