Hello everyone, for this blog post I am going to present my progress so far for my Digital Artefact. Over the past 35 days, I have been developing an Instagram Page called @theearthisannoying. On it, I have attempted to showcase photos and videos of small things in life that get on my nerve and are just generally infuriating. So far I have gained more than 120 followers which is a lot more than I expected Which I’m extremely happy about.

Starting the page I didn’t have a very strong expectation that the page would do that well and I thought I would have to undertake the FEFO strategy and possibly start a new project. However since starting I have received a lot of positive feedback from people telling me that they love my content which has really helped me to stay motivated and positive about the page. I have also had a few people send me their content for me to share which has helped not only by providing me more content to share but by reassuring me that real people are engaging with my page and interacting. I have also reached out to other students and collaborated by doing s/o for s/o’s to try to further broaden our audiences and attempt to find people that from either of our pages that enjoy the other’s content. 

My DA implements the idea of FIST quite well as I am producing content daily so I am able to gain feedback rapidly and iterate my content to better suit what my audience wants to see. By having around 40 posts in the space of 35 days, I can observe some of the analytics of my posts and find which types of posts are doing better than others. 

For me, one of the biggest problems I have encountered so far has been trying to find an audience on Instagram of people who enjoy viewing the content I have been posting. Although there is an entire subreddit with over 2.8 million members called r/mildlyinfuriating which is actually where I got the original inspiration from, there isn’t a lot of pages on Instagram which post similar content.  I attempted to try and promote my page on Reddit but quickly realised this was a mistake as Reddit definitely isn’t someone to promote Instagram pages. I then tried using the Instagram hashtag generator to find relevant hashtags that I could put with my posts to try and find the niche audience I was looking for. I found this also to not be as effective as I thought it would but continued using hashtags none the less.

I found a YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzv8pYVtYbk  that helped me out a lot as it showed me a great way to promote your page to a specific audience was by clicking on the most relevant hashtags to your post and to comment on other peoples content that uses that hashtag. This strategy works as you are engaging with other peoples content and they are much more inclined to support your page if you support theirs. I found by just commenting on other peoples posts with similar content to mine I easily gained around 40 – 50 followers. I have also used my personal Instagram account and posting about my DA on twitter as a way to gain followers.