Sections
Project Year:
2017
A 12-week project, where we had to plan and implement our social media campaign. The campaign had to promote a personal website or a client’s website. The project is to gain visits towards the website through the running the social media campaign.
“These days, Facebook users tend to be an older demographic. It is also the platform where most adult users spend their time, particularly those who could be your prospective employers or clients.” (Blake, 2016). After finding out that older demographic are most on Facebook, I felt this was a social media platform would need to include in the campaign because it could be used to target clients, as I feel they would be most likely be using Facebook. Another reason is that Facebook is the biggest social media platform, so it means there is more of a chance of people viewing my campaign and work. As shown in the graph above, younger people (16 – 24) are on Instagram more, and this is one of group ranges which I would like to target, as I feel it age group would most enjoy my content and interact with it the most.
For my objectives, I am going to use them as milestones to show that my campaign is on track and its making progress. My objectives need to be SMART if they are not then they probably not achievable and I would not be able to meet the objective. The objectives give me purpose and motivation to do well in the social media campaign.
The first target audience I want to view my work is other students or people with similar interests in what is being produced for the website. Ideally, they would be aged around 18-24 years old, hence why I have chosen to use Instagram for one of the platforms because that is the main age group for them. The second target audience is older and is people within the digital media industry; in hopes, I want to attract potential clients towards my portfolio and design work..
I am planning to promote my portfolio website; I want to gain traffic to the site and see people reacting to the work I have made. I want to generate traffic to the portfolio through the use of social media platforms, as they are great tools for promoting if done correctly. By posting onto both platforms, I am gaining more attention towards my pages. I am mainly going to be using the 3D models I created throughout University and any other I produced to use in the campaign.
With my two target audiences established it meant I had to find platforms which I could attract each of the target audience. So it meant the Facebook platform is for an older audience, because after the research conducted that the average age of Facebook was higher than other platforms. Instagram has 18-24-year-olds visiting the social media platform, so I felt this platform was best to use to find other people who are like-minded individuals.
Before starting the social media campaign, I had to brand myself, this meant coming up with a logo to suit the platforms. I sketched a few different logos; I liked the 3D logo the most because it fitted the best in what I wanted to do in the future.
I went into Maya the 3D software and recreated the logo I felt best suited me in the software. The reason behind going with a 3D logo is it something I have an interest for, and it is my brand identity. Once, I created the logo I tried to apply different materials and colours to it to see, which one was the best to represent myself.
This is the logo I ended up picking because I felt it best suited me and colours worked well together.
For the cover photo, I just used my logo but repositioned the location of the letters and other elements to give the logo a different perspective to produce a unique cover photo that fitted with the rest of the campaign.
This was the look of the Facebook page; I created for the social media campaign. I wanted both the profile picture and cover photo to be similar but different because then it gives the page consistency. The Facebook was easy to set up and run, the layout of the page was simple, and it meant I knew the right way to deliver the content.
Creating the Instagram was straight forward, I needed a Facebook page to convert the Instagram into a business account, which gave me more access to business tools inside the platform. It allowed me to see the number people who saw my post, who engagement and the demographics etc. This feature proved to be useful as I could gauge how well the account was doing.
These are the first set of Facebook I had done for the campaign, all of these posts were shared through Instagram. The posting flow, it meant I would do the post first on Instagram and use the built in share to Facebook to post on the Facebook page as well. It saved time in posting the same content twice at two separate occasions.
In the set of posts, I tried to share a video from Youtube, which was relevant to my interests but the content did not go down well with my followers. To try and boost engagement into the page, I uploaded my 3D model to ‘SketchFab’, and it allowed me to post the 3D model on the Facebook page, and the followers could interact with the model as in move it around and other gestures.
As expected the most popular post on my page was a 3D model, and the least popular post was a poster I produced in the first year, it did not reach many people. I think it was because people came for a certain type of content.
For the Instagram side of the campaign, the posts got more engagement than the Facebook page. My work received a fair few like through the use of hashtags. The hashtags allowed to make sure the desired audience viewed my content and it also got me followers. In each post I would talk about the post and also try to persuade the user to head to my portfolio in the bio.
The most popular post on my Instagram was a XBOX one model; I created especially for the social media campaign because I wanted content that I felt was worthy of being on the Instagram page. It felt good to know the work I put into the model and it got the recognition I felt it deserved. The least popular was of my logo, I feel the reason why it didn’t do well was that I posted it early on in the campaign and I was not utilising the hashtags, and the followers were not as high in the begin.
This graph is just showing the summary of how the page is done throughout the month; it does not go in depth about page and posts, but it was a quick way to see if the page was not doing well.
Facebook had a great tool which would show the five most recent posts, and it shows how many people the post reached and the engagement with the post, so if they clicked the link or just saw the post and did nothing.
Out of all the people who saw my content, 52% of them were male; I feel this is good because I was targeting both genders and it is good to know that posts did not favour one gender over the other. But I had 63% of my fans, so people liking the work were males. I did not expect the age range for Facebook to be 18-24 on my campaign because one of the reasons why I picked the platform.
For the Instagram account, I achieved 121 followers throughout the social media campaign. Most of the followers I had were male, I guessing the content I pushing out, they felt it related more towards them. The highest age range I had was 18-24 just like on the Facebook page, so it was a similar audience between the two platforms; so the research beforehand came true in terms of Instagram. 8 pm is when my followers were the most active, this reason could be they could have just left work or education.
Traffic to my portfolio started well, but then over the coming weeks, those hits started to decrease. I do not know why this happened; I tried to use different ways to increase the hits, but that clearly did not work.
I am quite surprised to see the age range for the portfolio was 25-34 considering how both of platforms had the age range of 18-24. Again over half of the gender are males; I feel this is because of my content.
I felt I ran a pretty successful campaign, but I could have put more effort when it came to posting the content and producing. I feel I have achieved the objectives I set out and I am proud about this. The project has given me experience on how to run a social media campaign and in the future, I can know what is expected of me.