As the first module for this semester comes to an end, it’s time for me to reflect on the progression of my DA and let you all know the ups and downs I’ve had along the way. So, how is it going?

Overall, the evolution of my DA is going quite smoothly and is already reflecting positively within the analytics of our social medias. In case you are new here (in which case, this may not be the post to start on but whatever, I’m not your mum (For my initial pitch, you can check it out here)) my digital artifact for this semester is running the social medias of a small business based in the Sutherland Shire known as iPetStore. Prior to this DA, there was little attention placed on social media as a way of promotion and advertising and I wanted to try and change that. We as a store have been trying to reach more locals in the community to come and see what all the fuss is about when it comes to our pet store over other larger chains. I would say that one of the main appeals of iPetStore in comparison to, say, Pet Barn is that we have a smaller business feel with an affable, close-knit family environment that we pride ourselves on.

Initially, I studied our instagram posts prior to change, targetting mainly the first half of this year to get a gauge of what the audience we have now takes intrest in.

The main challenge for me within this DA was to try and translate this to an online setting while also attracting more eyes to the business using traditional social media techniques (Aestheics, colour schemes, layouts, post format/consistency etc).

The overall target for this project was to increase interaction on our social medias to entice more customers to come and shop with us. Before I focused to heavily portraying the morals of the company, I wanted to start by going back to basics. I started by adjusting the format of our advertisements to flow more fluidly within our feed as well as being easy to read and eye catching to new viewers.

Due to a lack of focus on social medias prior to now, it meant there was a lot of room for improvement in terms of visuals and aesthetic. I started by considered a consistent colour scheme that could flow through all of our graphic content. Our logo contains blues and greys which came as a no brainer to use, and using my knowledge of colour theory I selected the contrasting colours orange and yellow to be used to make certain elements pop.

With this new colour scheme as our base, I was able to mock up some of our first ads that would hit the social media big leagues. I wanted these new ads to catch eyes through larger typography, highlighted prices and adorable pet images that would stop anyone from scrolling by. Since these original designs, there have been even further updates such as minimal wording, larger product images and the removal of our own logo which was upon request by my boss as our logo may be updated in the not so distant future.

Similarly, I wanted to add more candid content into our feed as my research of the first half of this year on our Instagram showed this was the kind of content that received the most interactions. This became more of a job for Dan, who has now been taking photos of the pets that customers bring into store each week and posting a weekly round up of our furry customers on social media, giving them a shout out and thanking them for coming in store.

While this content is not directly linked to promoting the store, it gives back to the customers that we already have, showing our affable nature within a digital platform. We hope that this would encourage more customers to bring in their pets to store to be paparazzied and it has actually increased our doggy walk ins. This not only furthers our friendly, inclusive environment in store but it helps with providing us with even more content for our social media amongst the lull in other promotional material.

We’ve even taken to both Facebook and Instagram to ask for customers to tag us in their cute pet images so that we are able create promotional content with their pets as models. It has not only worked tremendously with providing us with a range of images but has greatly increased our interactions with our social media pages from both existing and new customers alike. I’ve been considering developing this concept further by creating some form of competition surrounding it to add even more incentive to interact with our brand.

Overall, the majority of changes we have made to our social media pages have led to success, however there has been one form of content I’ve yet to successfully translate and that is memes. Initially, our social medias consisted mainly of memes with 22 out of the 40 posts from the first half of this year being as such. I wanted to develop this kind of content to provide some sort of brand recognition so that we don’t just convey ourselves as a meme page.

I had created a prototype that I felt, while amusing, did relate back to the store however it received no traction when put to the test on social media. While this was only one attempt and there could have been a multitude of reasons why it didn’t work, such as being posted at a bad time or perhaps the recent updates in Instagram’s algorithm, it was quite discouraging to not receive any feedback.

I’m hoping to do a bit more research into other brands that are attempting the same thing and coming back to this venture before the end of session to hopefully have a better outcome. I’m also excited to continue research into other ways in which we can experiment with content mediums to further develop a following and interaction amongst our platforms. My next step is to learn how I could incorporate gifs and perhaps video amongst our feeds to provide more variety.

Anyway, that’s all the updates I have for now. I hope that before the end of semester that we will be able to take even further leaps and bounds to really create a name for ourselves.

But until then thats all from me. Thanks for reading 🙂
~Bree