Project/Social Media Analysis and Personal
Reflections.
I produced the video the way I did as it is in an easy to understand format and it mimics the text-message horror style. I have used micro content in the form of Instagram stories to promote my product and showcase snippets of it to the audience. Micro content is easily consumed as it is short and people with only a small passing interest are more likely to consume this so this is the content that often gets the most views so is ideal for promoting small bits of info. This short-form content builds anticipation for the long-form content (the video).
From this project, I have learned that you truly can create and publish what you want online. My project could have been more engaging if I did more videos (like a series) and if I continued to create more visual content. However, what I think worked well was I successfully made my own product and along with that I promoted it successfully (social media campaign skills), I effectively monitored social media analytics and tried to tailor my content accordingly (like if a specific story got more views I’d try to do more content like that). Although in a professional sense this hobbyist fandom kind of content seems less professional it is appropriate for this content as it is a creative venture rather than for business purposes and this content is down to earth and relatable as anyone can create stuff like this and participate. The kind of digital marketing skills demonstrated in this project have been showcased in the horror genre before like for the film Blair Witch Project and the tv show Humans. (For the Humans tv show they set up a website, social media accounts and messenger bots to announce that their humanoid robots were faulty and needed to be replaced immediately).
As well as belonging to the horror genre, the genre of the product can be said to fall into “creepypasta” which is essentially internet horror stories, or a myth passed around other sites, to frighten readers and viewers. The word, "creepypasta" comes from the term, “copypasta”. An internet slang term for a block of text that gets copied and pasted from website to website. Channels like Phony Texts and Don’t Turn Around produce content like this. Basically, the content involves a text message conversation between 2. The narrative can vary but some narratives include a stalker watching someone through the window and texting them and then somehow, he finds his way into the house. Also, it could be like payback from an old friend, for example, a mothers son gets in a car that he thought his mum had sent to pick him up which builds up anticipation and makes the reader want to watch on and see what happens.
When first uploading the part 1 video to Instagram , for some reason the video was blocked because of copyright owned by UMG (universal music group) but the only sounds I had in the video were the Iphone typing and sending sounds. So I removed the sound from the 2 videos (part 1 and 2). However some of the first part of the video contains heart beat sound effects at the end. I tried to include a spooky tense soundtrack that I downloaded from a website with royalty free sounds and more heartbeat sounds for part 2 but the video was blocked again. So after the video being edited and re-uploaded several times and still being blocked i just had to settle with the 1st part being mostly silent and the 2nd part being completely silent.
To promote the Instagram account I posted a screenshot of the profile page on a Salford Campus Connections Facebook group and my own media Facebook page. I also shared the account on Instagram stories on my personal and media Instagram accounts as well as my twitter. I also asked some friends to follow the page via messaging them and a few of them shared it to their Instagram stories.
Here are some screenshots of some social media analytics I have taken from the Instagram page...
Here is a gallery of screenshots showing the amount of followers rising over the first week (use the slider on the right to view all the photos in the gallery , you can also move back with the left slider. in addition click the photo to view the full un-cropped photo. The same applies to the next gallery below this one).
Here are the countries and cities the followers come from. Also the data includes the gender and age of the followers.
One interesting and worrying analytic/insight is how long people watched one of my videos.
The graph seems to show on average people only watched 11% of the video , the graph also shows that from 0 - 20 seconds the attention span of the viewers rapidly deteriorates and less than 25% of viewers watched longer than 20 seconds of the video. This is a problem because my content is mainly long-form. Only the video snippets from the longer videos and stories are short-form.
YouTube analytics (it says last 28 days but the YouTube account was created on the 5th of May)
I promoted the YouTube account in a similar way by sharing it on my personal Twitter and Facebook and my personal Facebook page. As well as that I shared it on the SpookText Instagram as a story and included the link in the bio of the account
YouTube said there was not enough demographic data to show the report for the gender and ages of viewers. This can be due to people viewing the videos without being signed into their youtube account (some might not even have a youtube account).
The audience retention of the long-form video is similar to that for the 2 part videos on the SpookText Instagram. The relative audience retention is interesting though as it is higher at the beginning, in the middle and the end of the video.
These are analytics for the first day of the long-form video being uploaded with an impressive 136.4% impressions click-through rate.