Week 8B Your Instagram Hashtag Use

 The hashtags that I used on my posts include: plants, houseplants, green, hobby, horticulture, the specific types of plants, and even my businesses name. The ones I used are either labels for or common sense connected terms that will find mutually interested folks to follow. I included my business name for a type of branding. 

I learned from pretty frequently posting that my ideal post times were late morning and early afternoon! Later on at night or very early and the morning and it feels like my audience gets cut down and/or my post gets buried with everyone else's initial posts or everyone is asleep.  The day itself didn’t feel as important, although weekends are more active usually due to other users having more off time. 

This exercise is a good one to help study and interpret the results of weekly posting, scheduling, and metrics. After learning this information this week you would have the beginning pieces of the day-to-day operations of an Instagram manager. 

Alison Lamb

Riot Dude

Week 8A Expanding Reach by Using #Hastags

 Businesses: foodisfreelaneway , gardeningwithdisabilitiestrust , oldmoatgc , horatiosgarden

All but one of the businesses I followed and researched used hashtags. Instagram does seem to be working effectively for the businesses who use the hashtags. Most of the hashtags used are centered around awareness, gardening, plant identification, charity, social welfare terms, and health/disabilities. All of the hashtags are placed at the end of the caption, usually with some space breaking up the text box in between. This seems to be a pretty common practice across the board for hashtags. There weren’t any specific hashtags so if I searched and scrolled eventually I could find them, but they didn’t come up first. 

Gardening With Disabilities- 

Followers: 1247

Last Post: 10/14/2022

Post Frequency: Every five days with the occasional long quiet stretch 

Comment Amount: 3-7 on average 

Food Is Free Laneway- 

Followers: 4062

Last Post: 10/15/2022

Post Frequency: Daily

Comment Amount: 2-5 on average

Horatios Garden- 

Followers: 7826

Last Post: 10/15/2022

Post Frequency: Daily 

Comment Amount: 3-10

Old Moat GC- 

Followers: 1209

Last Post: 10/12/2022

Post Frequency: Every 3-5 days

Comment Amount: 1-3

I think the biggest help I could draw from these pages is their content, tone, and aesthetic overall - not necessarily hashtags. They are all enjoyable to scroll through, positive, happy, informative, and can connect well with their audiences. The hashtags I would choose to use would start with California, then the local area, gardening words, plant words, help/assistance/outreach words, and I would use my business name or shortened name as well.

Week 7B How Other Businesses Use Instagram

 Group Members visited/interacted with: Lamb Screen Printing & Inglorious Bagels 

My group members are definitely using their pages in different ways than I am! My business Instagram page is more about producing content, interacting, and getting likes. Lamb Screen is a small business Instagram with updates on their events, products, some personal posts from employees, and short videos to capture interest. Inglorious Bagels is a true business Instagram - it conveys all the needed business information, markets, advertises, interacts with customers, serves as a voice for the business. 

Through perusing Instagram there are really distinct types of business pages that offer services/products that do a lot good or a lot not so good. For instance, big Fashion Brands like Chanel and Vuitton are very atheistic driven and their pages are not meant for customer engagement or interaction. You can tell that their pages are like a free advertising event - a digital walk in front of store windows. 

Smaller businesses like local Oceanside businesses Switchblade Sisters Vintage or Pacific Coast Bait and Tackle use their pages to highlight what they offer as well as highlight their positive customer experiences. They receive and respond to feedback in the comments, share updates, and are very approachable and you get a sense you are truly interacting with the business.  

Week 7A Get Visual With Instagram

 I was unable to create another Instagram (maybe because I have my personal and business already logged on) so I decided to share a previous business Instagram I had. During the initial lockdown phase of the pandemic I began keeping and learning about tropical and subtropical plants. 

https://www.instagram.com/swampelephantplants/

This Instagram was really a way for me to socialize during lockdown and share a new passion of mine. I technically have a Youtube channel linked as well! I post photos and videos. I have 553 Followers and I’m following 1,378 other accounts. This page was never specifically helpful, which is why I gave it up. I used to post every other day or so and ended up having 63 posts. I even paid for an ad once. I made sure to include pertinent plant hashtags to every post to chance increasing the viewing audience. 

Week 6B Creating and Scheduling FaceBook Posts

 Members I Visited: 

GRFFX

Lamb Screen Printing

Inglorious Bagels - I want to interact with yours but my friend request wasn't accepted yet! 

Screenshot of Activity: 

I have two GIF's set to post in a couple of hours and then a morning post at 10AM that is an interactive question/answer style post. My two posts with words have a lot of pertinent hashtags that could definitely grow the audience. My fourth post for the morning after tomorrow morning is a connecting to post to the one that precedes it. It explains our page's interest in fall vegetables, some fun facts, and sets up for a repeating trivia/guessing activity. 

Week 6A Engaging Your Customer's (Facebook)

 Seven Businesses Like With My Business Page:

1. Sole Food Farms

2. The Edible Schoolyard Project

3. Viva Farms

4. Grace Field Farms

5. Urban Bounty Farms, Inc. 

6. The Urban Edge Farm

7. The King’s Roost

I chose these businesses because across the spectrum of urban farms, non-profits, socio economic statues, race, gender, and age these business provide resources into getting started, maintaining your farm, ways to build your business and/or provide supplies you may need. 

Sole Food Farms posts day to day updates, posters/announcements for classes, and information on farmer's markets they will be present at. They are well written, have photographs, and have fairly low customer engagement. This page really helps teach how to connect with your community and advertise transferring your knowledge and skills to help others. 

The Edible Schoolyard Project is a non-profit for school children and that's very much the aesthetic you feel when coming upon their page. Their posts are well written, include photos, have moderate engagement, are cohesive, and inform as well as involve the reader in the organization. This is a well-respected successful nonprofit who could share on their page success methods, potential exposure to other business/partners in the industry, and even chances to volunteer to learn the business.

Viva Farms is a much quieter, almost personnel vlog in a way. The posts are often just around the farm, local events, or tips/tricks for farming. There are pictures, very low engagement, and not a bad page all together. I appreciate this kind of point of view and feel. This page would be good for teaching personal and business relation skills. There are also a ton of resources to check out grant programs, resources, finances, etc. 

Grace Field Farms offers a day to day mixed with business type of page for their business. The posts range from updates on projects, volunteer scheduled events, market locations, and the occasional personal post from employees. They are well written, have cozy bright photos, and have low to moderate engagement. Grace Field focuses solely on farming in a regenerative method which is one of the biggest helps - its an alternative to alternative farming.  

Urban Bounty Farms is a farm to table operation mainly focusing on the back end preparing and serving/delivering farm to table food taken from their urban farm. Their posts are sort of short and mechanical feeling in a way. There are a lot of sales, coupons, ads, etc. but not as much of a personal touch. They have photos and very low engagement. The reason I gravitated to this business and page is because they have the back end of delivery and transporting food down and they would be a good connection and relationship with. 

The Urban Edge Farm is a small to medium sized urban farming operation that has a fairly sparse presence online. When they do post they are personal touches, advertising events, and sharing family friendly experience content on their page. They are well written, the photos and videos are good, and they have low customer engagement. I chose this business because they are California based and local connections are good to have, as well as getting to watch their customer interaction model grow and how they handle those needs of the community. 

The King's Roost is the outlier business from all the ones I listed above. They have a full business centric page that focuses not on urban farming or non profits but on the materials, supplies, and place to sell needed for those two types of businesses. That is the main reason I included it. The posts are written well, the photos and videos are good at demonstrating the for sale goods, and customer engagement is low to medium. 

Week 5B Facebook Data Collection

Post reach and post engagement are both important metrics and measuring tools a business can use to track the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of a business page. Post reach is important because it is the measured number of users who viewed or connected with your post via their timeline. This is a crucial metric because you can see how your words and pictures are effectively traveling from person to person, what markets are showing interest in your post, and how many people you are reaching on average. 

Post engagement is so important because it measures how often and how people the post reaches interact with it. This can be if you get shares, likes, comments, etc. You can use this data to determine customer sentiment, get valuable feedback, and get further post exposure or page exposure as your reach increases. Both being used for customer feedback, measuring customer base, gauging interest/need for your business, increasing visibility and building a customer base, as well as providing useful insights to potential investors. 

A business can use Facebook insights in order to collect valuable feedback and interests from customers, to track successes and failures, understand customer expectation, as well as build brand relationship and confidences, all of these benefitting customers. 

Commented On (Only 3 of my group members besides myself have a Facebook listed): 

GRFFX

Lamb Screen Printing

Inglorious Bagels - Friend Requested, commenting isn’t an option before its accepted as this is a personal page