Make the Stop Instagram

I worked to establish Make the Stop as an avenue to answer the following question:

How can social media become a more honest, open and encouraging place?

My goal was to see if I could inspire people to take a moment each day to spread positivity online. Therefore, I needed to be present daily to set the example; acting as a facilitator for acts of kindness to occur. This was the first hurdle. In order to post daily I needed to plan my content. I took some time to brainstorm the short messages I would share before going onto After Effects to create and bank a week’s worth of content. I find this system worked best however, I still needed to log in to the account each day to post. This is when I learnt about Instagram Creator Studio. Facebook offers the Creator Studio for both Facebook and Instagram; enabling creators to schedule posts as well as monitor their performance. This was useful however, whilst it allowed me to tag accounts in advance with photos, I was unable to for videos. This is one flaw of using this method however, I found it incredibly useful for tracking the performance of my posts.

To track the performance of my account, I published one video each day for a duration of nine days. I posted each video at 6pm with two exceptions when I tested a slightly later time of 8pm. What I found with this is despite posting at a regular time and using the same hashtags and tags, the engagement varied drastically. My post with the best overall performance was the following:

Whilst another post of mine had the highest reach with 942, it is evident that a high reach doesn’t equate to high engagement. As in this case, despite reaching 681 accounts, the video was viewed 95 times and liked by 13 accounts. But I am happy that people saved my post; I saw this here and there throughout the experiment. I also trialled various styles of copy with the hope that people will either share or comment on the post. This was successful once.

In another quest for engagement, I successfully published an Instagram filter. It was new and exciting learning how to operate Facebook’s Spark AR.

I am happy with how the filter turned out. I didn’t expect it to become the next viral filter as I believe it takes someone with a large following to use it in order to inspire others to do so but, I am pleased with the results.

• 64 people looked at the filter
• 28 people took videos using the filter
• 1 person shared the filter

   

Ultimately, whilst I hoped to grow more of a following than the 20 I acquired, knowing that I could have a positive impact on the people who did engage with my posts makes me very proud. My biggest takeaway is that social media’s ability to connect people is powerful; a ripple can become a wave. So whilst we may not always be open, honest and encouraging online, we must start somewhere. So, let’s make the stop that little bit more to transform the online scape.