Assessment 2- Community…

As I am blogging about travel I am always uploading photos along with my posts and this allowed me to come to the conclusion to create and hopefully establish an Instagram account dedicated to all the photos I have taken along my journey. I speak about this in my blog post My People.

When creating the account @just_go_there I had to consider multiple details. From the name, which required a lot of thought because I had to ensure that it was catchy, easy to remember and somewhat relatable to the way my posts were going to be set out, to ensure I was noticed. This led me to think of the ideas of Jay Bolter. He speaks of links and how they connect people, “add photos and tag them (forging implicit or explicit links), tell your friends that you like a page, a song, a tweet (leading to further ramifications as they connect to that page), and so on.”(Bolter,p208) This allowed me to understand the power of hash tags on Instagram and by using them I will open my self up to more followers in turn more traction on my account. Then in conjunction with this idea of Bolter’s was what Jay Oatway spoke of in Mastering Story, Community and InfluenceHis idea of trying to communicate with the people who don’t have lots of followers instead of going to the ones with hundreds of thousands. This will allow you to create connections and understand who is following who and why. The other detail he speaks of is that you need “social currency” to break the “big five” because when they “notice you, you want them to be able to check out your stories and see that you have value to offer” (Oatway, p99) This is what I really tried to do, to upload regular content, it showed to work as I got people with nearly fifty thousand followers to follow me and hopefully at some stage repost my content.

Instagram as a platform I found to be quite accessible and easy to use. It really emphasises the use of pictures as a means of communicating the meaning of what one is trying to say. It really shows through if you are passionate because the quality and the presentation of the photos are quite appealing. I felt quite surprised when I uploaded my first photo that I managed to gain almost five to six followers and also get over twenty likes on the photo. I think this was largely to do with use of the multiple and generalised hash tags which allows people to see the photo by simply searching the word. I felt that in terms of actually communicating with other users it was harder as it is such a large photo based social media site. This is not to say that you receive no communication as I did receive comments and commented on others photos. Some examples in my blog post Contributing and Commenting and Instagram Pictures. There is obviously a reoccurring theme where if one has more subscribers then they will receive more of a reception on the photos they publish. However, there is a repetitive theme that the people with the highest amount of followers also post in large volumes, a tip I tried to emulate. Overall, it was an experience that I enjoyed and feel as if I am apart of the travel bloggers of Instagram community and will definitely be establishing myself further on @just_go_there.

 

References:

Bolter, Jay David. “Social Media and the Future of Political Narrative.” Travels in Intermediality. Lebanon, US: Dartmouth, 2012. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February 2016. 206-226

Oatway, Jay, Apr 26, 2012, Mastering Story, Community and Influence : How to Use Social Media to Become a Socialeader Wiley, Hoboken. 97-109. ISBN: 9781119943457.

https://www.instagram.com/just_go_there/

 

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