POST TWO – ASSIGNMENT #4

Today concludes the last official day of my social media experiment and with that, my last reflection- and what a journey it has been! My ultimate goal this week was to not try anything new but wrap up nicely on what has been quite a successful few months growing my Instagram account to what it is now. And to cut to the chase: I made a sale! How ironic that I made a sale in the last week of this assignment. Although that was never the main goal, it proved to me that running a small business can take months of work before anything takes off and that nothing will just grow overnight. With patience and consistency, even a simple thrift shop run on Instagram can be successful!

Before I recap on everything I have achieved overall in the last two months, I want to reflect on some things that didn’t work out perfectly. First off, I realise that with my particular target audience and consumer base, video content performs worse than simple imagery. I think this is because, for my business anyway, consumers want you to cut to the chase and see what the item looks like – statically. However, my videos were quite rushed and not super engaging so maybe if they looked more professional they would be more appealing.

Another issue I constantly struggled with was having over 50% of my followers be Australian and local. Although this shouldn’t matter as I extended my business worldwide, I would have liked to have achieved this. However, you can’t pick who follows you. No matter how hard you try to appeal to local thrifters, Americans and New Zealander’s would follow me constantly everyday! I just had to accept that there wasn’t a huge amount of Aussie thrifters in comparison to other countries. (I did get super close, 48% were Australian).

Now let’s get into the positives! As we can recall from my first blog post, my main question I wanted to answer was:

How are current businesses using Instagram to brand themselves and connect with their consumer audience? 

I can confidently say I can answer this to an extent! Of course I could better explain this if I had more experience than two months running a thrift account, however, I completely understand now the business analytics of Instagram and how any tool on the platform can be mastered to market your business and up engagement. I am currently sitting on 600+ followers which many are supportive, made a sale and have reached thousands of potential consumers in such a short time frame. I have come a long way from starting this experiment “feeling lost” to now feeling confident I could run any sort of business on social media from now on. Although I may not continue this business in the future, this experiment was extremely valuable and I got so much out of it.