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 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.

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.

Here are some examples of audience submissions I posted

Link to my Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/theearthisannoying/?hl=en

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.

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. 

For this semester I decided to switch up my digital artefact from BCM112 and start a new project. I have created an Instagram called the Earth is Annoying where I will post photos and videos things that are annoying in life.

My main goal for the page is growing it as big as I can to try and reach a large audience of people that enjoy the content that I post, that being people that find little things in life annoying. To reach an audience I have used the instagram hashtag generator to create hashtag tags that relate the content that I am posting.

So far I am extremely happy with how the page is going considering that I thought it would be an indefinite fail and I would have to undertake FEFO. I have spoken to a few people that have said they enjoy my content and look forward to the future which I am stoked about.

Follow my instagram https://www.instagram.com/theearthisannoying