Applying What I Learned to my Daily Life

Social media is an ever-growing form of communication and information that seems to dominate many people’s lives. As someone attending school for marketing, it’s an extremely important aspect of marketing that continues to grow every year. Overall there was a lot that I learned during the course of this class, and it has caused me to change the way I use my own social media platforms. As I’ve talked about it before, I have an Instagram account where I post about book reviews, book releases, and other book related content. During the last few months I’ve done an experiment with my own Instagram, basing it off of everything I’ve learned from this course, and I’d like to share the results with everyone.

I decided to change several things about how I run my Instagram. First, I used the idea of consistency to switch things up. By consistency I’m referring to having a consistent “branding,” which was something I saw as important from this course. Having a consistent brand helps let potential followers know what you are all about and what you stand for. To do this, I decided to start a theme with my feed, or all my photos that I posted. The theme I used was fall related, so all of my photos had things like fall leaves, fall colors, and fall decorations. This in turn made my page look a lot more professional, in my opinion, as it was extremely consistent and appealing to look at. It also looked like far less of a jumble of random photos. If anyone is interested, I found an entertaining post here about different common themes people use on Instagram, the photo examples are quite visually appealing!

The next thing I decided to change about my Instagram behavior was creating interactive posts. By this I mean I made sure to post a question on each of my daily posts, for followers to respond to. I found that asking people personal questions about themselves and their opinions on different bookish related things worked best, since people seem to love sharing things about their hobbies with other people who share their interests. What I’ve also discovered by doing this is that I now have several followers who respond to my posts almost every single time I post, which is really helpful in getting Instagram to promote my photos. Since more comments equals more internet traction, this has aided in the growing of my page. 

Another thing I noticed during this experiment was how my Instagram page related to the idea of WOM.  Positive WOM helps spread the news about your page, and this is actually true even for my own page. For example, there are a lot of people who will share their favorite posts and photos from other users on their stories. The higher the quality of photos I took, the higher amount of other users are more likely to share my photos with others as well. 

The last main thing I decided to change was how I interacted with other people, both followers and those who don’t follow me. I decided to interact more with people, as I was mainly just posting once per day and only interacting with two to three people per day. Now that I’ve been commenting, responding, and just overall interacting with people more often, I have seemed to gather followers at a fast rate. Overall, it does seem like the more time spent interacting with people, the better the results are. This reminded me of the importance of good customer service that we learned about. Although this was not customer service, engaging with people shows that you have a shared interest with your followers, and it helps you seem more like a person rather than a bot generating posts and reviews. 

One negative thing that I noticed during my experiment is that it has caused me to spend a lot more time on Instagram. According to a study taken, the average person spends 53 minutes per day on Instagram. When checking my own phone’s usage, I found that I used Instagram for only about 20 minutes per day, but that still is a significant increase for me personally. 

Overall there was a lot of useful information I learned during this course. A lot of this information will be really helpful to me for future job prospects, this was just an example of how it is currently useful to me as someone who is still a student and not yet working in marketing. Understanding how social media works is very important even for people who are not going to work as marketers in my opinion.