In BCM241 we have been asked to do an ethnographic investigation on a specific media niche that we have a particular interest in. Niche media involves a specific group of people that possess a distinct interest in a certain topic. There are thousands of media niches across the internet with their being groups for basically every interest an individual can have. I have found that Reddit is a great platform that caters to many peoples niches as there are more than 150,000 active community subreddits which each are based around a specific topic or idea.
Through looking at all of my interests I have chosen to explore the media niche of Cryptocurrencies. I became interested in this topic around the start of 2020 when I made my first investment. Since then I have been observing the niche ecology and all the platforms where you can find information on the topic. Cryptocurrencies have become extremely popular all across the world as people are now finding out how amazing blockchain technologies are and how they can make money from them. The recent popularity can be seen on basically every social media platform the world has to offer. For example there are numerous cryptocurrency based Youtube channels that explain cryptocurrencies in detail and make videos covering price predictions, technical analysis etc. Other platforms where cryptocurrencies are popularly discussed are reddit in which there is a subreddit based around the topic for people to discuss news, prices etc. Facebook is another platform commonly used to discuss cryptos, there are many discussion groups on the app, a few of which I am a part of. A platform that has recently gained attraction to the cryptocurrency niche is TikTok. TikTok is a new and growing platform in which content creators can make short videos with the goal of catching the viewers attention for a short period of time. Many creators have used this platform to create tips and advice about investing and specifically cryptocurrencies. This is where I hope to base my digital artefact around.
Throughout the process of conducting my research for my project I have learned a lot about my topic being the use of social media as a tool for university students but also about myself. I found that my ability to concentrate throughout doing the project was very average. This is mainly due to me not having a lot of motivation because of online learning and not actually being able to interact with other students face to face. I ended up leaving some of my interviews a little late which is why I struggled to find participants for my interviews. Although I lacked a large amount of motivation to do the project, I still found it very useful and helpful in developing my skill set.
I was very interested in doing something to do with social media for my report as it is something I am extremely familiar with and I know other students are. My idea for the focus of my project came from realising how much social media has benefited students in BCM having twitter as a large component embedded within the course as well as many other social media platforms. I was very surprised by some of the results I obtained throughout my research. An example being how many people agreed that they would struggle to complete uni work if they had no access to social media. I think that it would be extremely beneficial to universities if there was more research done on this topic as currently there is not much. Finding out how students feel about social media and what can be done to improve their university experience is something all universities need to consider as we are approaching a world where we cannot function without social media.
Williams, J., 2021. Questioning the Productivity of Cancel Culture in a Time of Extreme Social Change. That’s What [We] Said, 3(1).
Holman, K.J. 2020, Can You Come Back from Being Cancelled? A Case Study of Podcasting, Cancel Culture, and Comedians during #MeToo, University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The aim of my research is to investigate what the impacts are of social media influencers on university students’ mental health and wellbeing. Over the past 6 months I have taken an active interest in the fitness industry which started with me getting a gym membership. Over that period of time it has caught my attention just how many fitness influencers there are across a range of different social media platforms including instagram, Tiktok and Youtube. It was from following a variety of these influencers I was able to get a first hand experience of the effects that social media influencers can have on a person’s mental health and wellbeing. I constantly found myself comparing myself to these people I was watching on social media which inevitably lowered my self esteem and my motivation. This led me to believe that there were other people in the situation as mean which is why I choose to discuss and research the driving question of the effects social media influencers can have on university students’ mental health, wellbeing and lifestyle. Reflexivity will play a role when I undertake my research as I have previously experienced the effects social media influence can have on a person.
There have been previous studies on social media influence on teenagers and people in general however there has not been hardly any studies done on specifically the effects of social media influencers. There also hasn’t been lots of studies done on social media influence on university students rather just teenagers in general. I myself have only really experienced the true impacts of social media influencers as I university students and not just a teenager which is why I feel my research could potentially have completely different results. The BCM212 community would be great participants for my research as everyone is on social media as it is required by the subject to have twitter and most people use other social media platforms.
To conduct my research I am going to be taking advantage of the BCM212 twitter community by posting polls and asking questions. I recently put out a poll on my twitter account and I got some really good insights as a result. From the first poll that I put out it would suggest that there are a few people that like me feel that social media influencers negatively effect their mental health.
Some of the previous studies that I came across when doing research on my topic question included a study done in September 2020 which explored how male Instagram users’ perceptions of body image and behavior are affected by the exposure to fitness hashtags, and the consequences on their wellbeing. The study concluded that the trending body transformational posts commonly seen on instagram has various effects on wellbeing: on one side, they feel anxious and in competition with other peers which often leads to muscle dysmorphia symptoms; on the other side, they feel more masculine with higher self‐confidence, they have higher motivation to stay fit and to eat healthily (Chatzopoulou, Filieri and Dogruyol, 2020).
There is no doubt that social media influencers are having an impact on adolescence as people between the age of 16 and 24 spend around 3 hours on average which is a large portion of their day (Metev, 2021). In 2019 a study exploring if teenagers identify themselves, and choose to identify themselves in online communities and social networks, are heavily impacted by the identity cues they pick up from social media influencers (Cranston, 2019). The study’s main results concluded that social media influencers generally do not have overall harmful effects on the identity formation of teenagers. However negative outcomes are often associated with these cues. The main negative outcomes were concerned with the teenagers mental health.
Another study in July of 2018 surveyed 1000 American adults looked into the effects of social media users obtaining an emotional connection to these platforms versus people that just use them for their social routine. The studies research has brought preliminary data that can help map where social media usage, as a common social activity, can be considered beneficial or detrimental by using a two-dimensional scale that captures users’ integration of social media use into their social habits and their emotional connection to the sites’ use. Overall the study found that while routine use is associated with positive health outcomes, emotional connection to social media use is associated with negative health outcomes (Bekalu, McCloud and Viswanath, 2019).
Chatzopoulou, E., Filieri, R. and Dogruyol, S., (2020). Instagram and body image: Motivation to conform to the “Instabod” and consequences on young male wellbeing. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 54(4), pp.1270-1297.
Bekalu, M. A., McCloud, R. F. and Viswanath, K. (2019) ‘Association of Social Media Use With Social Well-Being, Positive Mental Health, and Self-Rated Health: Disentangling Routine Use From Emotional Connection to Use’, Health Education & Behavior, 46(2_suppl), pp. 69S-80S.
Hi everyone, my name is Dale Ramsden and I am 19 years old currently studying a bachelor of communications at UOW. This is my second year of studying at UOW and although I have loved it I haven’t hardly yet been to the university. I am currently majoring in marketing and advertising and digital social media.
Straight after I finished high school I moved up to Wollongong from my home town in Ulladulla to pursue my passion and interest in social media. Starting BCM I wasn’t really sure what to expect to be honest. I just knew that I really wanted to work in media in the future. Little did I know just how amazing the subject actually is. So far I have thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the communications and media course and especially their different approach to assignments from other subjects.
One of the biggest changes over the last year has definitely been living away from home and my parents and living with my mates from high school. Living away from parents has made me realise just how good it feels to be independent and have freedom to do whatever you want.
I asked one of my mates from high school Nic, what the first thing he thought of when he heard ‘university student’. He replied with ‘I think of hours and hours of sitting at a desk studying.’
My digital artefact that I have worked on throughout this semester is an Instagram page called @theearthisannoying. Starting my digital artefact, I have incorporated the FIST and FEFO methodologies in that I have created an extremely fast feedback loop by posting very often. In doing this I was able to rapidly prototype and iterate my page with the feedback that I was provided. Throughout the process of working on this page I have learnt a lot of valuable lessons in finding an audience and how to best target that audience. For my Instagram page the main target audience for my page are people that find small annoying things infuriating and frustrating to look at. As there is already a large audience for this on reddit I constantly observed the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit to understand my target audience.
My Instagram page
My main target audience
My overall goal was to bring a niche audience from Reddit over to Instagram. As Reddit is not as popular as Instagram with only a measly 11 million daily users as a pose to Instagram’s 500 million daily users my goal was to expose people that don’t use Reddit to this niche culture being infuriating content. Over the last 13 weeks I feel as though I have somewhat completed this goal. I currently have posted more than 50 times and have gained nearly 140 followers. Although gaining followers is a key part in growing your Instagram page I focused more on what I really wanted the page to become. I spent far more time trying to find the niche audience on Instagram than I did focusing on how I could gain more likes and followers which aren’t exactly considered an audience. To do this I used the Instagram hashtag generator to provide specific hashtags that target my audience and posted them with every single one of my posts. I also went a step further and engaged with the hashtags by going through the posts and engaging with different users’ content. I found this to be extremely useful in finding that niche audience I’m looking for as the hashtag directly relate to the content I am posting. Not only was I engaging with the hashtag I was observing it as well as the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit to try and understand trends and patterns occurring.
The hashtags I used in every post
A hashtag I engaged with
Since starting my page, I have received extensive amounts of positive and negative feedback from my audience as well as other members of the BCM community. I have taken on board feedback from comments from my online presence 1 and 2. I was recommended that I try and collaborate with other meme pages on Instagram as they have a similar audience to me. I messaged several meme pages asking them if they wanted to do a shoutout for shoutout and I got a couple of responses. These shoutouts definitely help me broaden my audience as I got an amazing amount of engagement on my page after the shoutouts. To better interact with my audience, I posted multiple times asking people to message me with any infuriating content that they have found. This proved to be successful as many people reached out to me with their content which I then posted on my account. I found this to be helpful in defining my audience and what content they really enjoy.
Feedback I was given from my online presence 2
Negotiating a shoutout
Giving a shoutout to a meme page
Here are some examples of audience submissions I posted
Welcome back to another digital artefact update!! The end of the semester is coming up and I am extremely proud of what I have been able to produce during the semester. Since the start of the semester I have had a lot of positive experiences and feedback from my audience but also a lot of negative and helpful feedback which has shaped my DA to what it is today. I have tried not let my page turn into a page that produces content that filters well into Instagram’s algorithm. Instagram’s platforms has been designed so that content that they approve of and gains likes quickly gets pushed into the algorithm. This is why I haven’t been stressing a lot about my followers and likes on my posts as I know it’s not the most important as it’s not actually an audience. Instead I have been focusing more on posting content that caters towards my target demographic which are people that get infuriated over small things in life. I feel as though over the semester I have definitely reached a niche audience that cannot be found elsewhere on Instagram which is what my main goal was starting my page.
My goals from now till the end of the semester is to broaden my audience a little bit more by promoting my page more on instagram by continuing to use hashtags to find my audience. I also want to get added into at least 1 DM engagement group chat on Instagram by the end of the semester which would require me to DM many more different accounts asking them if they knew any. I will continue to observe my main niche audience on reddit keeping up with all trends and patterns that occur on the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit as it will help me keep my main target audience engaged with what they might like to see.
As of right now my Instagram page has around 130 followers and more than 40 posts. I am extremely happy with how my page is going having been receiving frequent positive feedback throughout the process of developing my Instagram page. Since my pitch I have had to iterate and modify my page as I have learned valuable lessons through looking at how I can better grow my audience.
I have been on reddit a lot lately observing my audience and trying to notice any trends or patterns that arise. One of reddits features is being able to view posts that have just been posted and posts that have gained a lot of attention and have lots of upvotes. By looking at posts that have blown up versus posts that dont gain much attention I can get an idea of what broadly my audience is looking for and what they might like.
I noticed a lego theme in the subreddit so I decided to post lego related content
Starting off my project I wasn’t engaging with a lot of different accounts, I only engaged with comments on my own account which I feel like now is something I could have done better. After I made a big effort to comment on different peoples posts and engage with them, I found a lot more people were viewing my account giving me more exposure. I found accounts to engage with by looking at relevant hashtags to my posts and commenting on different users content that use that hashtag.
Looking at my audience at the moment the majority are from Ulladulla, Sydney and Wollongong. I am looking to dramatically broaden my audience in the future so that hopefully more people can see my content from different parts around the world.
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.
10th August
17th september
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.
Every single social media app on the market has unique affordances that stand out and accustom their intended audience to create personas and personalise their experience on the app. Affordances in communication technology can be described as “the functional and relational aspects of media technologies which frame, while not determining, the possibilities of agentic action in relation to an object (Hutchby 2001a, b, p. 444).” Reddit is an app that I have been using for over a year and in that time, I have created a selective persona that best suits what I want to look at and what I enjoy. ‘Reddit is a data-rich website with a complex network structure (Steinbaur, 2012).’ There are over 330 million reddit users (Archibald, 2020) each having a unique feed that caters to their niche tastes and interests. This is due to Reddit’s affordances that allow for self-expression which are the subreddits or communities of which reddit is built around. The building blocks of Reddit are the 138000 different subreddits that are designed to cater for every single interest or hobby that someone could have.
Reddit allows users to tailor all their interests into the home page. Users are able to customise their feed by joining the subreddits they are interested in and selecting how recent or how old the content they want to look at is. A feature I love about Reddit is it is all user generated, the users determine how popular a post will become and how many people will see it by upvoting or downvoting the post. The more upvotes a post has the more people it will be shown to. As you are browsing a subreddit you are recommended other subreddits that you might be interested in that are similar to the one browsing. The subreddit suggestions often show subreddits that have a smaller audience as they are more specific and have a niche audience compared to the other subreddit which tends to be broader in terms of the content that is shared. For example, if you are browsing the r/Minecraft subreddit a lot of other specific subreddits are suggested such as r/Minecraftbuilds and r/Minecraftsuggestions.
Most social media platforms rely on people making interactions in real life in order for them to interact on their social media website, for example to become friends with someone on Facebook usually there is a connection required between the two people to occur in real life (Squirrell, 2020). Reddit offers something completely different. Reddit focuses more on the actual content moreover who it’s coming from and who is producing the content. Reddit possesses the power to connect random people who share the same niche interests together and look at each other’s content and discuss their shared interests.
Another feature that reddit has implemented is the ability for users to browse the app and look at subreddits and communities without having to create an account. The feature is incredibly simple but effective as it provides anonymity to users. ‘Anonymity is one of Reddit’s differentiators amongst social media platforms and may be the reason that it is one of the most popular platforms (Prakasam, 2020).’ Even when a user creates an account, they aren’t required to share any personal details. Most Reddit users don’t share any details that might lead people to know where they live, what ethnicity they are and even what gender they are. Even when a user shares personal stories and information on topics it is considered standard to create a throwaway account.
References
Prakasam, N. and Huxtable-Thomas, L., 2020. Reddit: Affordances as an Enabler for Shifting Loyalties. Information Systems Frontiers, pp.1-29.
Steinbaur, T., 2012. Information and social analysis of reddit. Retrieved from TROYSTEINBAUER@ CS. UCSB. EDU.
Hutchby, I., 2001. Technologies, Texts and Affordances. Sociology, 35(2), pp.441-456.
Squirrell, Tim. “Reddit Is the Best Social Media Site Because It Gets Community Right.” Quartz, Quartz, 14 Aug. 2018, qz.com/1309562/reddit-is-the-best-social-media-site-because-it-gets-community-right/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2020.
Aaron, J., 2020. What Is A Subreddit And Why Should I Care? An Explanation For Beginners. [online] Neal Schaffer – Social Media Marketing Speaker, Consultant & Influencer. Available at: <https://nealschaffer.com/subreddit/> [Accessed 4 September 2020].
Archibald, M., 2020. Reddit Statistics For 2020: Eye-Opening Usage & Traffic Data. [online] Foundation Marketing. Available at: <https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-statistics/> [Accessed 4 September 2020].
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