March 2022
Congratulations to the more than 1,400 Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) members who competed in the fourth annual Stukent Social Media Marketing Challenge. Students competed using the world’s first social media marketing simulation, from Stukent, which is used by top educational institutions around the world.
Participants tested their social media marketing skills by managing a simulated $5,000 weekly ad budget for fictitious bag company Buhi Supply Co. They practiced marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Participants gained experience:
- Selecting content to post
- Targeting specific audiences
- Promoting and scheduling posts
- Analyzing key performance indicators
The Top Three Winners
Each of the three winners is a student from a school in the United States. A special shoutout goes to their DECA advisors, and all other DECA advisors, for giving their students the opportunity to participate in this year’s competition!
First Place: Mina Nazari
“Before the Stukent challenge, I have had little to no experience with marketing. I think this was really about trial and error and recognizing how to better market to your target audience. Paying attention to the results for each round allowed me to better my posts and effectively distribute my budget. This allowed me to build on organization and problem-solving skills.”
Second Place: Thalia Moragana
“After doing the first rounds, I absolutely fell in love with social media marketing and this program. … After my teacher found out about the competition, I knew immediately that I wanted to participate. My three main takeaways from the challenge are learning what posts to spend money on, finding the target audience for the products, and how to construct posts that will gain attraction. What led to my success is already having the knowledge of social media and I have always paid attention to the metrics in my own social media.”
Third Place: Michael Archacki
“In this competition I have increased my knowledge on social media marketing as well as learning the importance of it as well. One of the specific things I am going to take away from this competition is that posting at certain times of the day is a key factor in succeeding in social media marketing.”
Congratulations to each participating DECA student for their accomplishments!
Top 25 Participant Results
Below are the results of the top 25 DECA participants. The adjusted rank indicates the student’s position after they were vetted by DECA and their posts were reviewed by a panel of judges. In other words, it is the DECA student’s ranking after non-DECA students and other participants who did not qualify were excluded from the results.
"I want to congratulate everyone who competed since we were all able to take something away from this competition. It doesn’t matter how much revenue you obtained but what matters is that you learned something from this challenge."
Student Experiences
"Familiarizing myself with my target audience helped me organize my posts to be effective. Applying what I know as a high school student about social media allowed me to make my initial decisions on what platforms I assumed would be more effective. After the first round, I took the time to recognize data such as impressions and engagements and made decisions to satisfy the target audience. ... Also, noticing what customers were at the top of the market allowed me to allocate the number of posts I wanted for each customer.
Thank you so much for this opportunity! Stukent has really helped me develop skills that I can apply to school and the real world."
Mina Nazari,
2022 First-place Winner
"As I head off to college later this year, I am planning on majoring in business and marketing and also getting my certificate in social media marketing. Having the experience from this program, I can’t wait to see what opportunities are offered to me in the future. I want to thank Stukent for creating this beautiful program. I want to thank Sharon Hurley for being an outstanding teacher and providing this opportunity to me."
Thalia M.
2022 Second-place Winner
“The Stukent competition was a very engaging and fun way to learn more about social media marketing.
It was interesting and informative using software that's similar to what actual marketers use in business today. This competition taught me a lot about how important analyzing the data is. Without statistics, I would’ve been lost on how to improve my strategy. I thoroughly enjoyed this competition and highly recommend it to current and future DECA members! Thank you to my advisor Mrs. Jennings for the opportunity she provided and Stukent for the opportunity to compete and learn more about the marketing business.”
Nathan W.
“The Stukent Social Media Competition challenged me to take my marketing skills and apply them to real-life situations. ... This approach to learning social media marketing has given me great insight into the business field, and I want to thank Stukent, DECA, and my advisor, Laurie Jennings, for giving me this opportunity.”
Noah Seiter
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