Hi everyone and welcome back to discussing all things DA related, specifically to my little project @awholesomeblend! 🥗
To follow my project and this journey head to my Instagram page – https://www.instagram.com/awholesomeblend/
From the initial ideating phase of my project it has had the overall aim of providing a health and wellness website to people, particularly uni students living in the Illawarra area. The purpose has remained the same, with me continuing to provide food and exercise ideas, along with adventures around the Wollongong area. As the project is now in the current prototyping phase, how I got here has been a process of gaining user interaction and feedback to influence the decisions I make.
The most obvious form of user engagement and interaction to my project has been the growth of followers on my Instagram account from when I first started the page having no content, to currently, after content has been added.
Initially I was only posting to Instagram directly and I was struggling to receive audience engagement. I then incorporated my DA into my Twitter account by posting links to Instagram posts I’d made, trying to encourage more traffic to my page. A great way to gage whether sharing these links to my Twitter feed was encouraging audience interaction, was through viewing the ‘tweet analytics’ of the posts.
These analytics reflected to me that a post that gained more engagement was my adventure video to Madden Falls. As I have currently created one adventure video, this pushes me to make another video to a different location, to boost my interaction with users.
To checkout my first adventure video head to Youtube- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkAAI6-yffY
I gain user feedback through polls created on Instagram and twitter, however I am still working out which platform allows me to get the most feedback. I noticed that I received more feedback on my most recent twitter poll than I did on Instagram and so want to use twitter as an opportunity for receive more feedback in the future.
Where I’ve lacked tremendously in maintaining audience engagement is struggling to post regularly. Learning about content curation allowed me to overcome this barrier and strive to post more content, by aiming to “Share something excellent already created for you” (Clarke 2018). “Living in the information age demands people manage, organize, and share information with others” (Clarke 2018). This highlights to me that content curation is just as effective as content creation, and so take a deep breath, it is ok to not produce work of your own for one moment. Below are two forms of content curation I have posted that still relate significantly to my project.
Creating instagram polls was also a great way for me to understand what my audience would like to see, and once I received these figures it directed me to the content I shared next, such as a Thai dinner recipe and an arm workout on Youtube.
Aside from audience feedback my tutor made some insightful comments on how to iterate my project without requiring to much more content production:
- Start a rate my plate system where I get audience members to submit meals and I give them a number rating or general feedback for improvement
- A workout rating system as similar to above
- An advice Q&A to make my motivation and inspiration more targeted and responsive to real audience needs
Overall I need to try to encourage my users to engage in my content and share their progress with me.
To improve my project I need to :
- Post more regularly
- Reuse and recycle content from videos
- Consider breaking/ remaking method to produce content
- I need to close feedback loops with my audience and iterate using feedback
My main concern from now is to post more content on Instagram and get user feedback, as without either of these, I cannot move forward with my project.
See you on Instagram! 🙂
Refererences
1. Clarke, T (2018). The Complete Guide to Content Curation: Tools, Tips, Ideas,Hootsuite Blog
Georgia Woods 
I like the idea of your DA and it’s obvious that its doing well through the massive in followers. It shows that you are serving a real and long awaited need and that you are on the right track. stands out with its design and theme in posting so when the audience visit your page they get good motivated vibes from it. I know I did.
Sharing your post links to Twitter is an excellent idea and I’m sure that had a role in your follower gain and positive analytics. Seeing that the Madden falls video got a good amount of engagement I encourage that you further make content similar to this as it what people like. I’m sure you are already doing this. By posting polls on Twitter and Instagram that involves the audience it sorta makes them co developers. Keep doing this it’s smart.
Seeing that you got a large amount of feedback on Twitter perhaps you should make a Twitter account as well as Instagram account for your DA or add links to your latest post through Twitter alerting users that you have posted.
I too have lacked in posting regularly and definitely sharing what are inspired by and “excellent content already created for you” would make regular posting and content creation abit easier.
I believe at the end of the day you should build early and build often to help you post regularly by planning early what you are going to post. For example on Sunday make a plan on what you are going to post and for what day and Time for the new week . That’s something I’ve thought about doing with my own DA. Just a few suggestions. Just chucked you a follow. Good luck! 🙂
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