Emily's Blog

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ASSIGNMENT #4 – EMILY CONLIN

AN INVESTIGATION INTO INSTAGRAMS BUSINESS ANALYTICS & INSIGHTS

IG: Thrifts.by.Emily

Post One: Reinforcing the idea

Post Two: Concluding the idea

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.

ASSIGNMENT #2 – EMILY CONLIN

AN INVESTIGATION INTO INSTAGRAMS BUSINESS ANALYTICS & INSIGHTS

IG: Thrifts.by.Emily

Post One – Forming an Idea

Post Two – Fine-tuning the idea

Post Three – Launching the idea

Post Four – Pushing the idea

POST FOUR – ASSIGNMENT #2

As you can recall from my last post, I have officially launched my small “business” online and have made moves to slowly but steadily create a following. I still am yet to have made a sale on any of my items, but after much investigation I realise that this is extremely common and I shouldn’t be stressed. As said in an article by Alyce Cowell,

“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want all the junk removed from your wardrobe and all the cash in your bank account, without having to do much at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t really possible – I know, because I tried it already. Just like most real-life companies, you have to actually put in some effort” (Cowell, 2018).

However, with the affordances of Instagram and a sense of community online, starting up a business can be much easier than you think.

I so far have a total of over 200 followers now, with it not even being two weeks since my official launch. My engagement has gone up quite significantly, with my impressions on my account doubling! But what exactly is an ‘impression’ on Instagram? Tom Law from Oberlo explains that it is “the total number of times your content is displayed to people on Instagram, including repeat views” (Law, 2019). That means that whenever your post is displayed on someones screen, it counts as one impression. My impressions now stand at 1,130 when only a few days ago they were at 551. This to me is great feedback, as it shows people are seeing my content quite often and frequently.

One thing that I wanted to improve, even in the slightest was gaining more Australian followers. I am pleased to announce that my Australian following has gone up by 3% and my American has gone down by 8%. Now, 20% of my followers are Australian and 80% are not. I have achieved this by finding similar Australian accounts and following their consumers. This is a small win and I hope to get it up to at least 50% Australian in the next month or so.

Here are some more figures for this week:

• 261 people have access to viewing my content (which is interesting since this is more than how many people follow me).
• 306 profile visits in the last 7 days (up by 71)
• 48% of my followers are 18-24 which is down 2% from my last post.
• There are now more 25-34 year olds following me.
• My most popular post stands currently at 131 views. However, only 22 people have liked the post, with one comment and one reply. Something exciting, nevertheless, is the fact someone has pressed the ‘save’ icon on this post – meaning they want to come back to it later and may be interested in it. You can see this above where it has “post insights.”

REFERENCES:

Cowell, A 2018, “How I Used Instagram to Sell My Wardrobe,” Fashion Journal, accessed 17 April 2020, https://fashionjournal.com.au/fashion/used-instagram-sell-wardrobe/

Law, T 2019 “How to Use Instagram Insights to Accelerate Your Growth,” Oberlo, accessed 17 April 2020, https://au.oberlo.com/blog/instagram-insights-guide

POST THREE – ASSIGNMENT #2

This week was focused on launching my business account on Instagram and dedicating my time to trying to grow some sort of audience. By understanding from the Sensis data that young Australians use Instagram frequently to look at fashion and clothing, I firstly decided to follow similar accounts to mine. This led me to understand how HUGE the “thrifting” community is on Instagram. Particularly huge in the U.S, many young girls have made successful business online by selling their old clothes. Once I began to follow some of the big accounts (some girls had over 100k followers!) I began to receive followers myself, even without launching my account yet. Accounts began to contact me asking if I wanted to follow them back and be apart of the community. I discovered that the more people I followed who were in the business, the more that followed me. However, because most of the big accounts are American, I now have a lot of American followers who are unable to purchase my clothing. I am now in the midst of wondering how I am able to find more Australian followers (I want to avoid promoting my account on my personal social media as I feel that is cheating).

Setting up my account took quite awhile as I needed to figure out how I was going to curate my posts (this took time as I set up my own backyard photoshoot and needed the weather to be sunny), how I was going to set my policies in place and how I was going to set up my BIO. I ultimately set up my account by following the template of other accounts around me, how were they setting up their posts? How were they posting?

So here is where I am at and some analytics from my account ONE WEEK from launching!

From the info provided by Instagram’s business analytics, here is the key parts!

• I have 147 followers, with 551 people being able to reach my account.
• 235 interactions were made on my account in the last week.
• The USA is where 68% of my followers are from, with Australia only at 17%
• 50% of them fit my target audience of 18-24 year olds.
• I generated 7 posts and stories on my page in order to enhance engagement. You can see how many times each clothing post was viewed above ^

For next week, I want to research how I can sell to more Australians and find them on Instagram.

POST TWO – ASSIGNMENT #2

This week I was able to think more deeply about what I wanted to create for this assignment and delve into what my target audience may be. I already have my big question: How does a business brand themselves on Instagram and target their consumer audience?

But what is my consumer audience?

Well, to answer this question I need to fine-tune what my business on Instagram will be. This was a tricky task as I wanted to be ethical in what I was doing but also didn’t want to hold back. After much pondering, I realised that I had found the perfect idea for me: Creating a “thrift store” on Instagram. As someone who is passionate about fashion and styling, I figured I could sell my used but well loved clothing items on Instagram and also incorporate other fashion content in between. That way, my business will be legitimate and ethical and it could ultimately become a way for me to make some cash after losing my job due to COVID-19.

However, that isn’t my main goal. I am really using this business to try and see how much engagement I can get on my page and if I can grow some sort of following and activity on my posts. If this essentially fails, it isn’t much of a loss to me. At the end of the day this is an experiment. Next, I went to the Sensis data to find key information to formulate my target consumers.

I already knew my consumers would be predominantly female as I will be selling female clothing items. These consumers will also be 18-29 years old as these people use Instagram the most (74.8%). Here are some key statistics that will be relevant to my business:

• 33.4% of 18-29 year olds use social media 10-20 times a day.
• 67.5% first thing in the morning (MAJORITY) while 56.9% in the evening. (I will use this information to guide when I post.
• 71.4% use Instagram to search for clothing and fashion.
• 41.8% were trying to find clothing or fashion items last time they were wanting to purchase something. 56% confirmed this research led to a purchase.
• Majority of this age group use Instagram 20-49 times a week, with 50-100 times a close second. On average, 11-15 minutes is spent on the app per use.
• 86.7% of users use social media at home the most (social media use at home would now have spiked due to the pandemic. More time at home = more time online).
• 57.4% follow a business or brand on Instagram with 59.8% being CLOTHING OR FASHION BRANDS.

All of this information comes together to conclude that my target consumer is:

A woman, 18-29 years old who is interested in fashion but is a low-income earner (looks for deals and discounts).

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?