Split teaching week this week, always a weird situation when they split the week in two rather than just have a full week off but anyway. Prior to going on break, we had our catchup class on the first Tuesday, discussing assignments and ironing out any queries we had as usual. This class proved extremely valuable in giving me direction for further research ahead. I was going to discuss upload patterns and associations with brand trust this week but I’m going to push that back to week 7 whilst the ideas discussed in this week’s class are still fresh. During our breakout groups when I was talking about my idea, Emily Collins suggested I look into the social media strategy of other photography businesses on Instagram. It was later brought up in class discussion the importance of Instagram’s hashtag system, so I’m going to be exploring both of those topics this week.
Please note that I am talking about stuff today in terms of upload frequency that I am elaborating on next week. Apologies for the confusing order of things.
The first business I’m looking at today is Barwon Drone Photography, who are direct competition based in Geelong and operating across Victoria. They are the closest source I have to my own work, and I know them personally as they live across the road from my nan and pa. It is also noteworthy that they’re a very well established and successful photography brand, so it will be interesting to view the effectiveness of their social media marketing strategy.
They do not have a Facebook presence, and after inspection of their Instagram account, I can see there is much room to improve. They upload very infrequently, and when they do, it’s in sets consisting of whatever work they had done since their last upload. For example, their most recent posts were on the 7th of April 2018. On this day, they made 11 separate posts, one after the other in quick succession. They made three posts before this in July 2018, and prior to that, there most recent activity was 5 posts in June 2016. I have compiled their upload history below:
The inconsistencies in their uploads are extreme, we no apparent patterns appearing. As informed by next week’s research, routine uploading skills should be developed whereby your content should be spread out into a constant stream. Whilst it is apparent that they haven’t uploaded enough to build and then maintain any sort of viewership, the bundling of information into big clunks is an ineffective method of engagement, so what work they are uploading isn’t being utilised properly.
A good way of thinking about it is like a Facebook upload consisting of lots of photos in one post. People are not willing to go through and like each picture individually, they will just like the main post and move on. The same applies to people’s interest in that post. If you make a Facebook post with 13 pictures in it, it’s unlikely each individual photo is going to have the same effect on the consumer as one photo uploaded by itself, since each photo, particularly those towards the back of the album, get lost in an overflow of information. The same principles apply for Barwon Drone Photography on Instagram, their followers are getting lost in a sea of 13 daily uploads once a year whereby posts lose their individual impact and don’t garner the attention they probably deserve. As I discuss in the next post, this is an extremely ineffective strategy.
Likes are consistent across the range of their posts, averaging out at about 8 likes per post since they don’t post frequently enough to build an audience. I would like to focus on the post below in particular, which gathered 30 likes, making it their most liked upload.
Nice photo for sure, but there’s more to it than that, and it leads nicely into a brief analysis of the Instagram hashtag system and the influence it can have. The hashtag system is used for categorising content and making it more discoverable. A recent development for Instagram as of 2019 is that you can now follow hashtags, which means if it’s of interest, picking the right hashtags relevant to the social climate of the time can now have a big effect on whether or not your content gets discovered. Using a long list of copy and pasted hashtags for each post is a bag idea too, as Instagram’s Community Guidelines state that “posting repetitive comments or content” is not okay. A good idea is to set up my Instagram account as a ‘business profile’, which gives me access to post insights which tell me how many impressions I have received from hashtags. Have a range of hashtags from broad in scope to specific is a smart idea in my experience, as it has the potential to keep you in mainstream circulation whilst appealing to those with a niche interest.
In the case of Barwon Drone Photography, they tend to only use one or two hashtags per post, one of them always being their company name, which no one’s looking for anyway because they don’t upload enough. This particularly ‘popular’ post was unique for them because they had #queensland in there. This may be jumping to conclusions but their location hashtags in other posts tended to be too specific, so I believe this hashtag gathered more attention to this post. I would love to see their views for this post compared to the rest.
There are a lot of lessons for me to learn from here.