Prior to our group presentation, we as a group decided to create a variety of posts to be uploaded on our Instagram page that focuses and raises awareness about the topic of Online Bullying. We started off by making the standard static post and expanded to using the ‘Carousel’ feature and Instagram ‘Story’ to diversify our distribution outlets amongst Instagram. During our group meetings, we had a dilemma on whether we should present our faces on the platform or remain anonymous. We chose the latter and focused on producing more text-based content for our page. The only time our followers could see a member of the group was when Cheryl had her weekly interview video series. We felt that not revealing our identities would allow our followers to focus more on the topic we were trying to raise rather than having their focus on us as a personality.
Furthermore, we also agreed to not show our interviewee’s face during the video interview as a sign of respect towards their identity as well as a way of not discouraging our followers from engaging with us about the topic of Online Bullying. We also expanded our form of publication and distribution by incorporating the ‘Story’ feature as well. We created interactive polls and open questions for our followers to engage with using the available features provided by Instagram. Not only were we collecting secondary data, but we were also able to collect primary data about Online Bullying through our follower’s responses. Though some might say that it would be a challenge to handle numerous different content, we see it as an opening on reaching several distribution outlets. This will allow us to capitalise on our chances of getting our content recognised and reach more people about our topic within the timeframe of our project.
For our videos and posts on the main home feed, we received a reasonable amount of engagement for an Instagram profile that just started. Our followers interacted well with the carousel posts, encouraging them to participate with our content by swiping to learn more about the issue of Online Bullying. As for the video, it is the most liked content within our profile. We realised that our followers tend to engage more with more personal and emotionally connected content, with our video content interviewing everyday people as they share their personal experiences. However, we were having a difficult time trying to obtain a high engagement for our Instagram stories. With the stories, people were more enticed with the polls as it does not require users to type (option of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ variation). We received a lack of responses with interactive stories that required users to provide us with more personal and detailed question and/or experiences about online bullying. We collectively were very interested in presenting. We wanted to receive feedback from SENSIS and Mark about improving our engagement and relationship with followers with our content, especially Instagram ‘Story’.
Cyber Stompers Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/cyberstompers/