POST ONE – ASSIGNMENT #2
This week I was feeling a little lost towards going about this assignment. The ultimate prompt was a little vague and for someone who needs structure and direction, I needed inspiration to get me going. Luckily, this week on the class Zoom meeting I was able to understand the prompt and what was required of me. I was encouraged by the idea of making this assignment centred around Instagram as a business tool: How can we use this platform to promote a product or service?
How are current businesses using Instagram to brand themselves and connect with their consumer audience?
So now I am to come up with a plan which will become the foundation for this assignment.
On the Zoom call, we discussed if we could simply come up with a theoretical concept and not actually implement our ideas. Personally, I don’t see myself succeeding in answering my “ultimate question” without putting my research and ideas into practice. I want to be able to play with the business tools of Instagram and use my research to the best of my ability.
For now, I am going to aim to conduct a bit of research about the business fundamentals of Instagram and how they are used efficiently and effectively. In terms of the Sensis data, I will be looking more critically at the answers surrounding brands and advertising; how are Australians interacting with branded content on social media and are these brands succeeding? This begs a bigger question: How do we know if we are being “successful” in branding on social media?
What is Social Media?
To put it simply, social media platforms were ultimately created in order to establish a form of community within the broad and crazy network that is the Internet. As Jan Kietzmann states, “Traditionally consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services” (Kietzmann et al, 2011, pg. 241). Upon the invention of social media, individuals can now interact, create, share and discuss content. News sites can hear from their viewers; brands can interact more closely with consumers. Social media has given all of us a voice without having to show our face. For us Australians, being on these platforms is primarily for catching up with friends and family. To be exact that’s 82.6% of us, according to the 2020 Social Media Sensis report. This is why Facebook is so important and is still incredibly popular, even in this day and age. Although younger generations have switched to sites such as Tik Tok which is founded on content creation, older generations care more for staying connected to loved ones. 89.6% of respondents between 40-64 years old claimed they used Facebook compared to other social media networks. However, social media is no longer fundamentally about creating a community.
Overtime, businesses and brands have discovered the power that social media holds in terms of advertising opportunity and brand movement. Social media “influencers” now exist and Facebook earns billions of dollars a year on advertising revenue. Facebook acknowledges that they have a strong older demographic and uses this to their advantage. 83.3% of older respondents in the Sensis report claimed they follow a brand or business on Facebook, leaving them very impressionable to advertising. For younger generations, social media platforms such as Instagram now incorporate advertising. Influencers are extremely popular on this page where brands use individuals with a high following to promote their products or services. Serra Celebi from Yasar University produced a study in 2015 which involved understanding motives that affected attitudes towards advertising on Facebook. This mainly involved younger recipients and Celebi was able to conclude that individuals who longed for a sense of community and belonging were ultimately more open to advertising (Celebi, 2015, pg.323). I personally, as a young person, can understand this. I have a strong dislike to advertisements popping up on my screen, however, I still continue to follow a lot of brands and businesses online.
Essentially, social media in itself is an extremely powerful tool to both unite in and profit from (business wise). It can be used for good and used for evil, and its progression and evolvement through time is extremely interesting. This is why it is important for it be studied.
REFERENCES:
Celebi, S 2015, “How Do Motives Affect Attitudes and Behaviors Toward Internet Advertising and Facebook Advertising?”, Computers in Human Behavior, vol 51, pp. 312-324.
Kietzmann, J, Hermkens, K, Mccarthy, I, & Silvestre, B 2011, “Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media,” Business Horizons, 54(3), pp. 241-251.
Sensis 2020, Have your say Australia – Social Media 2020 Data Report, Glow, viewed 19 March 2020, <https://portal.glowfeed.com/shared-report/f98c499e-2cfd-4c17-8432-12fa1d4734b6?token=ed8973833e9b454eaf8e6f1babb1464e&emailVerifyToken=5m3vlbjvb>.
INSPIRATIONS AND CHALLENGES
Social media has an enormous capacity to do good; to be used for good. Over the years, companies and brands have utilised the reach of social media in order to spread a message. If this message is positive and uplifting, it commonly will go viral throughout the Internet. With one click of a button, a Facebook user can share a post to all of their friends. Those friends see the post and also decide to share it. Through this process, inspirational videos are able to achieve what they intend to do: Inspire. Something which I have found inspiring on social media is an Instagram account called ‘We’re Not Really 
Strangers.’ This account was created by a woman named Koreen who developed a card game with this same title. The card game focuses on bringing people together and breaking down walls. To engage with someone you hardly know anything about and to surrender to your feelings. With 1.5 million followers, Koreen has a huge audience to interact with. I find her posts incredibly inspiring as it invites strangers to come together on a social network and realise we are more alike than we think.
Here is a video which shows strangers playing her card game:
http://www.instagram.com/tv/B81-0HRAlvK/?hl=en
This video was incredibly inspiring as it reminded me that it is so important to discuss deep questions with other people; to understand our own feelings and how others may deal with them. I always suggest this account to others and it has become my favourite account to view when I’m feeling down and want to find comfort in Koreen’s positivity.
On the contrary, social media also has the capacity to be extremely toxic. I am constantly challenged whilst on social media platforms. Challenged, angered, disappointed, disturbed… the list goes on. A huge comment of social media and what makes it “social” is the involvement of users. To allow for comment sections where individuals can share their opinions, discuss content or even just to support someone. But with support there’s always someone who “hates.” Celebrity News accounts on Instagram are very popular including well known news channel E!News. E! specialises in celebrity news and updates and while their posts are usually positive, their comment sections are notorious for being just the opposite. Here is an example:
If you take a look at the comment section to the right, the FIRST 3 comments which are displayed are all negative. What makes me feel uneasy is that these are all women commenting these negative things. I am constantly challenged by how often I see other women tear each other down on social media. My question is, how do we prevent this? CAN we prevent this?
How will my work be influenced by my own understandings of social media?
I have always been fascinated with social media from a business perspective. I have been using social media since a very young age and from this experience have grown a real interest in how we can use such a tool to push out a message. Since completing the ‘Networked Media’ course at RMIT last year, I have learned a lot about the app Instagram and how its affordances work together to reach and engage with an audience. What I really hope to achieve within this studio is working more hand in hand with Instagram and other social networks through a business lens. This will be extremely beneficial to me as I want to work within a brand’s social media team when I graduate. Instagram has HEAPS of analytics which can help out brand’s towards finding out what their demographic is, what they are doing well at and what they need to improve. All of this information is free, I already use it for my own personal account because the data is quite interesting.
With Sensis, I hope to use their data to help influence how I might adapt my social media for a certain demographic and reach a broader audience. Who am I appealing towards? What are their user habits? How might they find my content? These are the questions I will be asking myself during the process.
With the examples shown in my last post, I will push myself to follow the footsteps of Koreen. Koreen’s account is a business; it’s her brand. But you honestly wouldn’t realise it due to her posts being focused more on positivity. Through her uplifting messages, her card game sells out and she has become extremely successfully without overly pushing her product onto consumers. She has also achieved this without pushing advertising which is quite impressive. I would love to achieve even a fraction of what Koreen has done and although that is impossible in the context of this class, I hope to keep in mind her values when approaching my own work.
