Project Summary / TL;DR
After noticing that many individuals around my local region (Hunter Valley) didn't know of many good roadtrip locations, especially the case between people between 16 - 24, as they are young and haven't had much of a chance to actually explore much. I began developing a solution. After brainstorming ideas and surveying my audience, my digital artefact was born. My Instagram account @itsjamesmct aims to fulfil a lack of photography social media accounts for my local area, showcasing some of the Hunter Valleys' magnificent locations and providing ideas for weekend road trips. Largely inspired by pages such as @visitNSW and @BarringtonCoast.
To fulfil this gap, I have been posting various locations within the Hunter Valley on my Instagram account @itsjamesmct to showcase and promote areas I believe my followers and newcomers may find attractive for a weekend road trip. Selecting Instagram due to its popularity and affordances that allow both the sharing of still images and videos (reels). Assisting me to better achieve my initial goal of reaching my audience and local region by showcasing beautiful areas around the region suitable for weekend road trips.
As my account continues to grow, I have established an online print store where individuals can purchase framed prints of the locations that I have documented on my account. I am continuously collaborating with my Dad, who has experience making wooden frames. Making my entire product 100% made within the Hunter Valley, which I believe adds a special level of care to the final product, that most other print stores overlook.
Why did I choose this project?
I am passionate about photography and videography. To hone in on my skills in this area further, I focused on opportunities to develop within the photography/digital media space.
What will this report cover?
This report will explore my digital artefact's progression and development over the past 10 weeks, and identify notable milestones along the way.
Project Milestones
#1 Audience Research
As the user should be at the core of any human centered design, it's essential to have a strong idea on what your audience wants. Knowing your audience well will often lead to more followers, engagement, sales, and a stronger overall brand. To gain a deeper understanding of my followers, I decided to opt into distributing surveys among them. This allowed me to ask more narrow questions regarding my project than what Instagram and Hootsuite's analytics could provide. I noted my most engaged followers and distributed a survey to them as they will be most likely to see my content, whilst also sending to accounts that have had zero to limited engagement with my account, with hopes to understand how I needed to adjust and pivot my project to better suit my entire audience. With a total of 1668 survey responses between my two audience research surveys. I was able to gain details of what locations they wished to see content from, if the content was achieving its intended goal of inspiring people to get out and explore whilst also informing me of which posts were being shown more on the algorithm, helping me to understand what content performs better. I have taken all this data into account when continuing my project, directly following the location suggestions from my survey.
#2 Monetisation
Due to identifying relatively early on that monetisation wouldn't come easy on Instagram, I began exploring external sources. It's ubiquitous for content creators to sell their content in various forms on external websites. Using their social media to promote and direct traffic to their other monetised platforms. Allowing for much more control over things like % cuts, design, shipping, pricing and much more. As a result, I launched an online store at the commencement of my project, selling my photography as framed prints and collaborating with my dad, who has experience with frame-making. Whilst writing this report, I have had four orders total, which, although isn't crazy, is much better than receiving no compensation for my efforts. The feedback of online orders helps me understand whether my content is visually appealing, acting as another feedback loop for my project. As my DA has evolved, I have switched postage providers from AusPost to Sendle, as I aimed to achieve leaner production and logistic costs. Meaning more profits to put towards further content endeavours.
#3 Cross-Platform Marketing
To assist with the growth of my Instagram account, I posted some of my content on Unsplash.com. This method of "cross-platform marketing" helps to attract more of an audience by uploading content to more than one platform. Fortunately, some of my posts were featured on the Editorial Feed (Main Page), attracting over 500,000 views. I noticed that people from my Unsplash page have visited my Instagram account, following, liking and commenting on my content there. Even some DM's from more prominent photographers congratulating me. I received over 13,000 profile views during the few weeks after my post was promoted to Editorial.
#4 Instagram Compression
I noticed very early on that there was a flaw with my project plan. Initially, my total workflow was completed in 4k. After my first weekly post, I realised that this wasn't a necessary feature to my project due to social media platform compression. Shopify partner Oberlo suggests the best video format for Instagram is 1080x1920 /HD. As a result, I began filming and editing in 1080p or HD, which takes much less time for my MacBook to process and render. Improving the efficiency of my overall content creation process and saving me time. To this date, I haven't noticed any negative audience response towards this change, as visually, it isn't noticeable. My posts after this change actually performed better than my first. Highlighting that the adjustment was overall a valid decision.
#5 Posting Time on Audience Engagement
I learnt that the time that content is posted has a massive impact on its success in terms of likes and engagement. Initially, I was posting on Mondays at 6 pm. I based this decision on my audience activity time, which is available through Instagram's native analytics. As I began to post more regularly, my audience's active-time shifted, pointing to Friday at 6 pm. As a result, I started posting at this time as a trial. I was impressed with the results, as, within 4 hours of posting, my content had performed 95% better than all my other recent posts, being my most successful post yet, with over 130 likes. This highlighted the importance of posting time on the success of my project, and I have been much more mindful of my posting times and their effect on engagement moving forward.
