Assignment 3 – Report
Name: Panayiotis (Peter) Kyprianou s3661871

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration – https://www.rmit.edu.au/students/support-and-facilities/student-support/equitable-learning-services

 

Making Media blog links

Week 9 – Instagram photo
Week 9 – Instagram video
Week 10 – Instagram photo
Week 10 – Instagram video
Week 11 – Instagram photo
Week 11 – Instagram video

 

This report responds directly to the course prompt:

How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?

 

Title: Instagram’s marketing weaknesses and strengths in terms of authoring, publishing and distributing

Introduction

This report will highlight the affordance Instagram provides in a commercial perspective. It will begin with a background on Instagram highlighting features and affordances for users, both casual and commercial ones. Evidence of findings made with support from primary research that has taken place over the last three weeks. The affordance of Instagram in terms of marketing will be discussed in terms of authoring, publishing and distributing on the network for commercial gain. Finally in the conclusion, the strong and weaker parts of the platform as a marketing tool will be explored.

Background

Instagram is a social media networking platform where photo and video content can be shared amongst a network of users. Affordances are an object’s properties that relay to the user how they can interact with it (Norman, 2002). Instagram affords authoring (creating and editing photo and video), publishing (posting photo or video content), and distributing (sharing photo or video content) amongst a network of users on the platform. According to Mayfield, social media embodies five specific characteristics – namely participation, conversation, connectedness, community and openness. (Tan, 2018). Instagram affords these five characteristics by allowing users from all around the world to connect and share photo and video content they generate using features that the platform has built in. For instance, basic editing tools, hashtags, location tags, user tags, stories, carousels and also including features that are built into the platform and have their own stand-alone app like Layout for creating collages, Boomerang for creating gifs and IGTV for uploading and sharing videos that exceed one minute. However, not every user has access to all features. The average user has access to the features listed above, but users with many followers, or ‘influencers’, and businesses have access to more financially minded features. For instance, seeing more in depth statistics of analytics like number of people reached, how many interacted with the post, tagging links to products in posts, posting call to action links on stories, also known as ‘swiping up’ and having call to action buttons on their profile like call, message and/or email. Instagram’s’ visual vernaculars like these are vital when businesses seek to network their products to appeal to users of this specific social media network (Niederer, 2018).

Evidence/What?

Creating media content has allowed me to critically analyse how the affordances of Instagram affect creative processes, in relation to authoring, publishing and distributing on the network. Uploading content to a new account was refreshing as with a very small amount of followers I didn’t feel the need to carefully curate and plan what I was going to upload. For instance, I only took three photos before settling on this one I uploaded and added a few small tweaks in the basic editing suite built in. The process was very easy and frictionless. However, recording video directly from the app proved a little more difficult and had a steeper learning curve than I was expecting when recording this video. Personally, I don’t really find the built in video recorder on the Instagram app particularly useful as it requires you to film exactly what you want in that shot. No trimming, no rearranging clips and only affording filters, muting audio and selecting cover frames. For many users especially ‘influencers’ and businesses, being able to author photo and video content straight from the app is fairly redundant as it doesn’t afford many creative choices. This is particularly an issue for businesses as with advertising campaigns they are often very cinematic and require more affordances that Instagram simply does not offer. Hence, as a brand, it would not be feasible to author Instagram posts in-app; especially on a platform built around aesthetically pleasing and engaging images (Niederer, 2018). I do not use the in-app affordances for authoring posts on my personal account and I know many others don’t do it either with some even using third party editing apps to finish authoring the content.

Evaluation

Authoring

As briefly mentioned before, businesses need creative advertising to engage with consumers on a deeper level, increasing its persuasive power (Sasser and Koslow, 2008). The affordances that Instagram has means to create engaging and creative content, authoring needs to be done externally. The tools are basic and limited in their functions. Video advertising must engage with target audiences creatively in order to motivate users enough to expose themselves with marketing material on social media (Lee et al., 2017). Consumers don’t want to feel as if they are being sold something, hence why many of the most popular, and by extension successful, businesses have social media pages that are carefully curated around aesthetics and evoking a certain feeling with subtle product placement. Engaging video and photo campaigns require high quality cameras and complex post-process editing tools to author creative and engaging content. Instagram’s editing tools simply are too basic for this need especially when businesses are financially invested in authoring content for advertising purposes. As engaging and ‘fun’ as my video is, authored completely using the in-app features, could you imagine the reaction from their followers would be if a famous brand with millions of followers posted this? It definitely would not be what they were expecting.

Publishing

Instagram also affords publishing in the form of captions, hashtags, location tags and tagging users. Utilising these publishing features can greatly help distribution of your posts. Captions are extremely useful and help add context or insight into what would otherwise be an average post. Businesses can use captions by adding a human touch to a corporate entity. These captions aid in forming and retaining the brand’s personality – influencing consumer preference through developing emotional bonds, brand loyalty, and trust (Fournier, 1998). Instagram affords the use of hashtags, collating similar content together – making posts more discoverable among communities that are interested in this genre (Baker and Walsh, 2018). Hashtags are a bit of an unknown entity as some experts propose that fewer hashtags help better with distribution whilst others claim the opposite is true. Either way, hashtags need to relate to the content of the post and their target audiences in order to grow.

Distributing

Instagram affords distributing posts through hashtags, location tags and user tags which are native to only their platform. Instagram also does not have the homepage in chronological order rather has an algorithm that predicts what users want to see. This can negatively impact accounts as it means your content is at the hands of an algorithm. Instagram does allow distributing posts to other social media networks which increases reach of distribution efforts as it connects different websites, providing user access to more information (Weber, 2012). Instagram does this in two ways. The first, is seeing a post on your homepage then pressing the share button, shaped like an arrow, and having options on whether to share to a certain app or just copy the link. The second is sharing a post you upload to another social media network by selecting the ‘share to Twitter’ option for example. Both methods are useful, however when viewing the post on the other social media networks like Twitter, the post is just the caption with a link to the Instagram post. I had issues with this share feature a few times and found that the best way to distribute content from Instagram to other social media networks is to just upload the same content you uploaded to Instagram straight to the other social media network using their app. The only social media network that the ‘share to …’ feature worked seamlessly with was Facebook, which makes sense as Facebook owns Instagram. I suspect this is done to direct users back to the Instagram app and try to keep them on there for longer. When business need to distribute a campaign amongst a few different social media networks, it makes more sense for them to upload the same content from each different social media network app.

Conclusion

Due to Instagram’s highly aesthetics driven and carefully curated culture, businesses have to create engaging photo and video campaigns using external software as the authoring features on the app are limiting and do not afford creative license. The affordances of publishing on Instagram however allows companies to create strong brand loyalty and recognition amongst their followers to positively influence their perceptions using witty captions, hashtags, location tags and user tags. These all help with distribution which in turn creates strong engagement with followers who then hopefully turn into customers. However, the distribution on Instagram can be temperamental as your content is at the hands of an algorithm and distributing onto other social media platforms is not as frictionless as it can be. Overall, Instagram’s marketing affordances are very valuable in creating a business that can thrive and survive in a modern world with strong brand loyalty and recognition amongst users on the network.

References:

BAKER, S. A. & WALSH, M. J. 2018. ‘Good Morning Fitfam’: Top posts, hashtags and gender display on Instagram. New Media & Society, 20, 4553-4570.

FOURNIER, S. 1998. Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research. Journal of Consumer Research, 24, 343-353.

LEE, J., KIM, M., HAM, C.-D. & KIM, S. 2017. Do you want me to watch this ad on social media?: The effects of norms on online video ad watching. Journal of Marketing Communications, 23, 456-472.

NIEDERER, S. 2018. Networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age. In: LECTORAAT VISUAL, M., KENNISCENTRUM, C.-I. & HOGESCHOOL VAN, A. (eds.).

NORMAN, D. 2002. The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books.

SASSER, S. L. & KOSLOW, S. 2008. Desperately seeking advertising creativity: engaging an imaginative “3Ps” research agenda. Journal of Advertising, 37, 5.

TAN, C. 2018. Regulating Content on Social Media: Copyright, Terms of Service and Technological Features, UCL Press.

WEBER, M. S. 2012. Newspapers and the Long‐Term Implications of Hyperlinking. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 17, 187-201.