It all started off with an idea and too many promises. Looking back now, wanting to engage with consumers across five different social media platforms was way over our heads and this quickly became apparent to us. Cooking is a passion and interest that we all share, but more importantly our love for health and nutrition is what prompted our digital artefact idea. Because of this we decided to create an online health journey called CHOMP. As university students we first handedly struggled to find healthy recipes to cook and this shared struggle was evident in our project pitch. After narrowing down our target audience, we started to eliminate the platforms that weren’t attracting much attention, leaving us with Instagram and Reddit as our main accounts. We found these two platforms really complimented each other and worked in a circular motion where we were constantly using ideas from Reddit and turning it into visual content for our viewers which fitted perfectly with the layout of Instagram. Through a combination of visuals and sounds we found consumer engagement levels to be much higher than writing lengthy blog posts. The concept of F.I.S.T has taught us to utilize the resources that are already online. Once we realised we didn’t need to think of original ideas, we started to gather information from other websites and blogs that gave us inspiration for our videos. We were then able to produce a lot more content because of this, and although we had to get rid of Facebook, Sound cloud and Tumblr we found a way to condense all the information we were reading online onto one platform. For example, attaching links to websites at the end of our captions, gave our audiences the option to read more about the ingredients we used or nutritional facts we found interesting.
Structuring our project like this allowed for the information to be more digestible and easier to understand, which was the whole goal for our project.
At the start of our DA we made a lot of promises, wanting to do an interview with local chefs, give discounts for cooking utensils and collaborate with accounts. Looking back at the goal we made it was unrealistic as our business needed to grow more until we reached out to other accounts. This was evident in the lack of response we received when we tried to reach out to other accounts through Instagram.
Seeing as we have such a small following, (under 100) accounts that had over 10k followers would be less likely to give us a shout out because we wouldn’t be able to give them much in return.
Although, we did find another way to attract attention from accounts with a bigger following. This was done through hashtags which turned out to be more time effective than sending individual messages to every single account. Using hashtags allowed for our videos to be posted on a public page, which pop up on the feeds of people who were interested in healthy eating. This gave us an opportunity to be found by people outside of our followers.
Constantly being engaged with our audiences was the main focus for our DA. Throughout our DA our audiences was helping shape our project with their suggestions and constructive criticism.
It was important that we showed them we were listening and this was achieved through incorporating their ideas into our videos. And the biggest thing I have come to learn throughout this whole digital artefact is the importance of being in touch with your audience, seeing as they are the ones using the product it’s important that they our involved in the production stage. The production stage needs to be an ongoing process that is flexible and adaptable to change. Once we understood this our videos became more personal and they moved away from incorrect assumptions of what we thought people would like.
Switching our account from personal to business was a strategic move as it allowed us to see when/ what time our followers were looking at our account. When we had these statistics we were able to set up a scheduling time for our posts and we straight away noticed our videos were getting more likes and views. It also showed our followers that we were being consistent with producing content. Overall I think what we struggled with the most was gaining followers and I think if we had teamed up with other students that had similar DA’s we would have really benefited from it. It would have exposed us to new ideas and more creative ways to show our DA.
Mil's Blog 