Making Sense of Social Media | Week 7 Reflection

Heading into the final week in which assessment two is due, and I feel I have an extremely solid understanding of where in heading with assignment three. I was fortunate enough to have enough prior industry experience to know who my audience should be, but my research over the past four weeks has been seriously productive in ironing out the imperfection in my targeting. This week I am conducting my final bout of research into upload frequency, and tailoring this to the usage habits of my audience as informed by the sensis data.

As I mentioned in week 5 based on a reading from The Social Media Handbook, the main gains for businesses on Instagram come from promoting awareness of your brand. One of the most prevalent ways that brands do this by maintaining an active presence through daily uploads. As someone who doesn’t follow any brands on Instagram, I personally question if followers would get annoyed if a brand uploaded too much, or if some people consider it to be spam. If this proves to be true, do the benefits of frequent uploads actually outweigh the negative perceptions I have about it?

To interrogate this point, I created a poll in one of my Facebook messenger group chats. The question was ‘does it bother you if a brand you follow posts on a daily basis?’. I was sure to emphasize this question in relation to Instagram. I received 26 responses:

Yes: 9

No: 17

The results of this poll parallel statistically quite well with the following sensis data into peoples trust in social media-based companies:

The above data stats (filtered for my target audience), reveal that 53% of Instagram users trust companies that update their content regularly, only 18% disagree. Using my Facebook poll and this sensis data, I can determine that people are not fussed by regular uploads and are actually viewed with trust associations. My theory on this is that regular uploads could be the mark of a more dedicated and committed company, whereas those who upload once a month could be a sign of a lack of interest or care for keeping consumers in the loop. A mate of mine commented in response to my poll, saying:

“If I was engaged enough with a brands content to want to follow them, I would probably want them to post lots”

I think this comment summarises these points quite well. Also of note from the above sensis data is that 54% of Instagram users trust companies that interact with their customers on social media (e.g. respond to comments). Martin (2017, p. 52) describes this as a two-way engagement designed to ‘reward’ further conversation. He considers this process to be the most effective ’24-36 hours after your post goes live’. Responding to comments like this builds up a personal relationship between the company and clientele, increases trust and confidence in the business’s ethical and moral standing. Put otherwise, it gives the business a human voice.

So posting daily and engaging with the audience is clearly a good thing. The above graph depicts the times of day my target audience is most active on social media. The clear outliers are ‘first thing in the morning‘ (58.3%) and ‘in the evening‘ (59.6%). Given the age of my audience, it is safe to assume they are probably working full time and therefore ‘first thing in the morning‘ is most likely before 9am. A post at 8am will therefore place my content fresh on the Instagram feed when they wake up and give it the best chance of being seen. As for ‘in the evening‘, given the general clock off time of 5pm, posting at this time will also provide the best chance to be seen.

I observed a reduction in the frequency of posts from pages that rely on content shot externally to stay relevant, photography is a prime example of such. Flashback posts and reuploads are become increasingly popular but require a pre-existing audience who remembers the initial post to have any sort of relevance or effect on that audience. I notice this particularly with the AFL’s Facebook and Instagram streams. I went back through the AFL’s Facebook archives noting every flashback or reupload post they made comparing the last four weeks to the month prior. The results are noted:

February 18 – March 17: 2 flashback posts, 0, reuploads

March 18 – April 17: 64 flashback posts, 11 reuploads

. Increase of 3750% month on month

Example of a flashback (right) and reupload (left):

    

Statistics such as these are an accurate reflection of the current state of the broader media industry and therefore directly relate to me. As I’m setting up a new test account, I am fortunate not to be burdened by this as I can post selective back catalogue images as if they are current. Posting directly to an established account would remove this privilege. Another point of note about the aforementioned upload frequency, the AFL uses these flashback posts to maintain, on average, four posts per day (3.89 per day for the month of April thus far). The effect of this is that the AFL maintains a stringent social media presence even when business is down. This is less-so about feeding the public engaging information, evidenced by a slight but notably uniform decline in ‘likes’ and ‘reacts’, but more so about maintaining relevance. This is an important distinction to make when I consider my reasoning behind each upload, in which presence is vital when kickstarting a page like I am.

Please refer to the main assignment post for a collaboration of my findings for the month.

Reference:

Martin, Gail Z. 2017 The Essential Social Media Marketing Handbook : A New Roadmap for Maximizing Your Brand, Influence, and Credibility, Career Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/RMIT/detail.action?docID=4807028 (Links to an external site.).

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