Practicing With My Social Media Tools
I have an Instagram account specifically, for my acting and creative endeavors. The more I practice with it, the more fun it becomes. I’m currently trying to obtain Instagram business status, which I can do as soon as I hit 100 followers. My goal for the account is to grow a community of actors, merge the account with a few of my other creative accounts, and finally access the Instagram Business account and Hootesuite.
Here is what my account currently looks like. I have 79 followers and I am following 97 accounts, basically my following is a palindrome. Of those followers, most are female, but only by a small margin. I currently have 12 posts, which is approximately the equivalent of 1 post per week, if I am going from when the account was created.
Of those posts, one-third of my posts are videos, and my videos garner more audience attention. Another third of my posts are selfies, and those get the most audience interaction. The last third of my Instagram posts are miscellaneous; they’re landscapes of a set for a show I am currently working on, poster for a film that I did work on, and an inspirational quote. Surprisingly, I found not as many people interacted with the inspirational quote, I expected actors to be drawn to something positive.
Truth is, actors are drawn to other actors who are successfully acting! That is part of the reason why I believe my videos and headshots do so well. They are evidence of me actively participating in this field. If I am to grow a community page for actors and bring attention to my page, my target audience needs to see video evidence of my capabilities, work, and projects. This thinking makes sense, as my target audience are also ages 18–35, which is a key online influential group. I am beginning to understand this page will need to be less of branding as a community page, and more as a page of me.
In order to do this, I will need to create way more content than I originally intended in beginning this page. This has led me in my search for tools that provide affordable social media calendars. Prior to now, I was using my google calendar, without Google Business, to keep me on track with posting. The only issue with that is writing “Post on your social media at 7pm” isn’t helpful when it’s the day of your post and you aren’t quite sure what to post. Google Calendars isn’t helpful with pre-planning what you need to post, the order you should post it, and remembering that amazingly hilarious caption you thought of during your workout.
Of course, I looked into social media tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, as those are both top names for social media tools.
Unfortunately for me, it turns out accessing each of those costs money. Furthermore, the free version of Hootsuite asks that your Instagram page is a business account. I attempted making my Instagram account a business account, however, Instagram asks that you have at least 100 followers in order to access that feature. As I previously stated, my current following is the palindrome of 97. Although I was disappointed I wasn’t able to create a business account through Instagram, I look at this as a growing experience and a hurdle to jump.
As I am unable to get access to bigger social media tools, I will have to continue to analyze my own data to the best of my abilities. One thing I cannot operate without, is a social media calendar. In my next step, I tried using Microsoft Excel as a social media calendar. It does work. Below is a video I found that piqued my interest. Formatting the calendar was slightly tricky, I still have difficulty with it. I would post my own calendar to this article, but I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.
Essentially, it’s a matter of adjusting the format so you are able to get a bird’s eye view of what is to come in the upcoming month. Additionally, I am able to create tabs that are associated with my calendar for analyzing likes, comments, and followers. For that, I have to keep an eye out myself. I rely on my Instagram notifications to see the time people are interacting with my feed, but that can only give me so much information. It’s slightly easier as I have only 100 followers for now, but as my page grows it’ll become increasingly difficult to analyze data points individually. That’s why it’s imperative that I grow the page enough to have each data strand constantly being monitored.
As I have had to strategize, compile all feedback, and then re-strategize, I took a few days to plan for the upcoming week. I’ll begin with my #monologuemania posts, and it’ll hopefully encourage other actors to interact and post their own monologues. I’m hoping it will gain enough viewership to gain 21 more followers, and I’ll be able to officially join Instagram Business and thus Hootesuite.
