As someone currently operates and provides aerial photography services, I have already come to understand who my target audience is. Whilst client gender is often varied, the initial point of contact tends t0 be a male averaging young-middle aged (30-60 roughly). Since drones as a general interest tend to be more popular amongst males and are therefore more likely to seek the service out directly. What I aim to learn from the sensis data is the specifics of how I should be marketing to my audience.

Of note is that my business is targeting commercial and retail sectors across Victoria as a means to stay open to Government projects.

I made a filter targeting Victorians who are active Instagram users, keeping it fairly broad to maintain data accuracy as well as a filter that simply monitors the behavior of males aged 30-65. Using these broad filters gives me a large range of data, and drawing conclusions from both together will ensure relevance and accuracy to my chosen field.

I determined that roughly 50% of all Instagram users in my target demographic follow brands on Instagram and a further 83% on Facebook. The reason why I’m targeting Instagram over Facebook then is practical than the statistics can show. Instagram is a creative platform, whereas Facebook is an information stream. Creative works such as cutting edge drone photography, in my personal experience of using both, gain far more leverage on Instagram simply because it’s eye candy, and Instagram is fundamentally a display platform for showing off your talents. Works such as mine are more likely to find their audience on Instagram, whereas people have to seek it on Facebook. So in this sense, 50% of all Instagram users in my target demographic following brands is a positive statistic.

Martin (2017, p. 53), while questioning Instagram’s ability to actively sell products, describes Instagram as king when it comes to ‘building brand awareness’, and that making photos ‘striking, memorable, and unusal’ will make people want to share your content. This is ideal for a media creator such as myself, in which building a digital portfolio is a vital step to developing brand trust amongst consumers. Critically, aerial photos in their very nature tend to be striking and circulate very well on Instagram, which I will elaborate on in a later post. For all of these reasons and more to come, Instagram is a fantastic channel for a creator such as myself to promote brand professionalism.

Whilst I already operate under a brand name, making a test account gives me the opportunity to experiment with naming strategies as informed by my knowledge of the target audience. In a discussion with Mark in week three regarding my line of work, he opened my eyes to the importance of brand naming I hadn’t previously considered. There is more to a brand name than simply sounding sophisticated. Mark opened up on his knowledge of drones and suggested that the word ‘drone’ be in the brand name rather than things like ‘aerial imaging’. The take away from this is that brand recognition is more important than sophistication, and that doing this will isolate my target audience and make them feel out of reach of my services.

For proof of concept, I conducted the following poll with people in my extended family, with each participant being between 30-60 years of age (6 males, 5 females). The poll simply asked them to identify which two keywords are more instantly recognisable as brand services:

. Drone Photography: 9 votes

. Aerial Photography: 2 votes

. Drone Imaging: 0 votes

. Aerial Imaging: 0 votes

These naming strategies extend beyond social media. For example, if I started up a brand website for people to contact me through, the poll suggests that they would be significantly more likely to find my website if ‘drone photography’ was used rather than ‘aerial photography’. This seems like an obvious naming choice then but it wasn’t something I was aware of until Mark pointed it out and I conducted this research, so I’m thankful for that.

Briefly expanding on my idea of splitting the task across assignments two and three, I have this week decided that assignment three will revolve around the establishment of my test business on Instagram as informed by my research in assessment two. I was planning to establish which content I was going to use/edit in this assignment but it seems like thats going to be too much and I should keep the media creation side of things for later to balance things out.

Reference:

Martin, Gail Z. 2017 The Essential Social Media Marketing Handbook : A New Roadmap for Maximizing Your Brand, Influence, and Credibility, Career Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/RMIT/detail.action?docID=4807028

Week four was an unsurprisingly challenging week for all students and teachers alike, as we had to come to terms with the transition to online learning. For this reason, no formal classes were held for this studio, proving problematic given our work for assignment two was set to get underway this week. In many ways, however, my work in this studio is even more relevant, as we as students and content creators are more reliant on social media now than ever before to communicate and share ideas. The importance of staying connected is reflected by current government television commercials, whereby they encourage us to set up social accounts for elderly relatives as a means to encourage interaction and stay in touch. The irony of all this is that we are constantly being told that we use social media too much, and in the current climate if you’re not using it, you’re not socially connected at all.

What this demonstrates is a reliance on social media in the present day, and it makes the logistics of assignment two all the more intriguing as an opportunity to expand my business’s social media strategy as has been discussed in prior reflections.

Having only dipped our toes in a 40-minute zoom tutorial and going over the details of assignment two, I began to elaborate on a strategy for how I would use assignment two as a research project to springboard my production work in assignment three. I refer to a pitch of my idea to Mark via email (heavily modified to a formal level):

Being a sole trader specialising in photography for a few years now, I have always tried to have a presence on social media, particularly Instagram for reasons that will be discussed next week. However, until partaking in this studio, I have never understood the true benefits as a content creator to maintaining an active social media following. Resulting from the vast availability of data resources in this studio, I recognised this assignment to be a one-time opportunity to genuinely grow a passion outside of this course. Working in tandem with my elective subject ‘Managing a Communications Business’, the time is now to consolidate a fresh business plan and marketing strategy by creating a test business separate from the current name I am working under. Using my learnings from assignments two and three, I aim to implement the effective outcomes into my own professional career.

I am very excited to see what I can continue to dig up.

Post 1: What is your interpretation of the term ‘social media’? What have you learned from the Sensis reports?

http://www.mediafactory.org.au/jonah-ahearn/2020/03/10/social-media-assignment-1-post-1/

Post 2: What examples of social media do you find inspirational or challenging?

http://www.mediafactory.org.au/jonah-ahearn/2020/03/10/social-media-assignment-1-post-2/

Post 3: How will your own work in this studio be informed by your understandings of social media, the data from the Sensis surveys and your examples of social media mentioned above?

http://www.mediafactory.org.au/jonah-ahearn/2020/03/10/social-media-assignment-1-post-3/

As a media maker, the role that social media plays not just in my day to day communication life, but my ability to share content and build a portfolio of my work, is insurmountable in its potential to grow what I stand for and what I have to offer creatively. As someone looking to potentially start their own communications business, the role that social media can play in getting my name and brand out there is limitless. Sensis data, when diving into the specifics of my target audience (those living in Melbourne or rural Victoria with access to handheld, connected devices), shows that approximately 83% of them frequently use Facebook, or Instagram on a daily basis. This tells me that having a strong presence on social media could be vital to building myself a strong portfolio to show my clientele. As Mark said in week two, we as young media markers are strongly informed and capable of using social media to its marketing and distributing potential.

This class in many ways will be informed by work in my elective ‘Managing a Communications Business’ and vise versa, as they go hand in hand in helping me create and expand my business, with my learnings from this class about social media being the backbone of my operations in the business elective. Using the broken down Sensis data, I can see that only 25% of my audience trust companies with lots of followers, which tells me that consumers are smarter and more aware of the dangers associated with social media. Conversely, 53% of my audience would trust companies that interact with customers on social media. These sorts of learnings that suggest consumers look for honesty and communication when trusting socially active companies reinforces the value of partaking in this studio in relation to the greater goals of my degree. The ability to bounce information between classes to achieve a common goal will give me great drive and ability in marketing my services through the ever-expanding social media network.

Social media is complicated in its openness to opinion and free speech. Whilst this theoretically creates a mutually inclusive online community for self-expression, it is often abused in a manner that reveals some of the more unpleasant and ethically challenging sides of the stream. The unsubstantiated and untrue information published on social media, known as ‘fake news’, creates blurred lines that diminish user understanding of truth, opinion, lies.

An immediate example of how unverified content spreads and is manipulated on social media is the ‘sale of Muslim girls in London’. It was an illustration demonstrating how extremist Islamic groups are taking over Europe, a dramatization not depicting real events to raise awareness surrounding the terrible acts of ISIS. It was then reinterpreted and reposted across various social media pages and place Britain under huge scrutiny by consumers who ate it up as truthful. This is a prime example of how people place so must trust in the surface level reporting of social media, and how pages and organizations thrive off the vulnerability of one-way reporting to consumers.

Clickbait is another huge problem in mainstream social media reporting that I personally see on a daily basis. Fox Sports, for example, is an organization I follow and regularly get information from on Facebook, yet their content is very often deliberately misleading at the surface level without further digging. Very recently they did a post regarding a Fremantle AFL player who had been sent for precautionary coronavirus testing after catching up with a friend who had returned from overseas a few weeks earlier. The caption stated ‘the coronavirus has finally reached the AFL’, with the subtitle saying ‘could see football go into lockdown’. Clicking and reading the article confirms that the guy he came into contact with had already been cleared from having it, so there was never any doubt the player would be cleared too. Knowing that people usually just glance at most social media articles, the misleading and manipulative captioning led to hysteria amongst the large community who trust the large Fox organization to be blunt and upfront with their reporting. To me, this is the most frustrating and challenging part of social media, in how you simply cannot believe what is stated at the surface level to be true without further digging, regardless of the page’s merits.

Personally, the only part of social media that I can think of about social media that is inspiring is how people can so quickly and efficiently rally together behind a good cause. I recently had someone I went to school with commit suicide, and just last night I got tagged in a post from a friend with a short speech to raise awareness around men’s mental health, with some statistics backing it saying ‘it’s okay to not be okay’, with a photo of themselves. The idea is that I then do the same and tag more people to spead the message and get involved. Just hours later my whole Facebook feed was covered in these messages of support and rallying behind a wonderful cause.

I won’t share a URL below because it’s personal, but it’s just one example of the power of social media to raise awareness around an incredibly important issue, and that to me is inspiring.

One article on ‘Sale of girls in London’:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/britain-first-london-sex-slave_uk_574e9926e4b096898c8da3ec?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACKyB_3wNKK5orC1ciQgaaQ3sCehE6TIM95KYDf0Gwei9s0jxeeapZkEEJip70Ac-w_9sWS-6B_nQvdr_6qiJKpz-Yd-EBXvL31naj_vgtOOcVMlcvvcCeIDaok6QnJlNkRq4w9MgL_bcqxaFiHeHWfLMXSr52cjUCSWCUyX6Yae