This last post is dedicated to reflect on this semester’s project – and give some insight into what became of it!
Now, since I produced a reel-type short video on the topic of map projections and Greenland as my creative part of this semester’s task, I also wanted to publish this video to gather some insight into if this is something a public audience would find interesting.
For that purpose, I developed a little design framework for myself and transformed two of my existing social media accounts on YouTube and Instagram accordingly.
Because my focus in creating this content was to make interesting, appealing visuals paired with science-related information, I ultimately decided on renaming my accounts to „cinematic.science“.
I changed the bio and profile pictures before finally posting the reel to both platforms. In order to better understand the performance of each, I should mention that the Instagram account had around 226 followers and I had previously used it for sharing my artworks, however, it hadn’t been in use for multiple years. I figured it would be a good opportunity to use this account as it already had an existing audience and hoped that they would accept the change in direction.
The YouTube Account, while also being existent, is one that I had not used previously and sat at 0 followers and 0 videos, so I knew that I would start from scratch there.
Before posting, I did do some research on what social network algorithms like in terms of posting times, captions and hashtags – however, I am not entirely sure that my implementation of these suggestions helped with the performance of the content. Still, I tried to incorporate supposed effective posting times and caption suggestions (shorter, key-word focused) into my publishing process and ended up posting the first video in the beginning of July.
Overall, the results after publishing the video on both accounts varied, however that was to be expected due to the difference in followers.
I would say that the „success“ was mediocre, the YouTube video garnered 283 views as of today, 1 follower and 2 likes.
The Instagram reel performance was a little better, with gathering 950 views, 32 likes, 4 comments and 17 new followers (opposed to 3 lost followers), which is considerably better but I would also attribute this to the fact that I shared the video on my personal account that has a lot more followers and probably had the effect that people that know me personally interacted with it.
I think it leaves room for improvement, but I also believe that building a community based on publishing content of this sort takes time, as there needs to be a baseline trust and reliability in the authenticity of the shared information, so I will definitely try to continue to publish content and see where that journey takes me.
I actually did publish another post, this time it was less informative and more trend-based but tailored to my topics, as I did a „your birth-month – your xy“ post based on map projections. This was a carousel (multi-slide) static posting on Instagram only, which did not receive as many interaction and was also seen by less people(575), accumulating a total of 12 likes and no comments, suggesting that this might be too niche or not appealing enough to my audience. I suppose that further testing will reveal which formats prove to be effective.
The posts and profiles were set up can be found here:
https://www.instagram.com/cinematic.science
https://www.youtube.com/@cinematicsciences
Overall, my conclusion is that getting into this entire research – recording – editing – publishing process is A LOT. There is much more to consider than „just“ filming a video, playing around with edits and putting it out there. I suppose that I underestimated the amount of resources it would take to some extent because the researching and breaking it down into digestible pieces part takes some effort, since I also only wanted to publish something I knew was well researched and reliable. Still, I had a lot of fun diving into all of these little topics and testing out what I could achieve with my setup and my ideas, and it definitely motivated me to keep going and do more even though the results purely based on social media metrics aren’t yet overwhelmingly positive. I did receive some personal feedback from friends and colleagues that was very positive, so I plan on continuing on my way, gather more experience and collect further feedback that can continuously be integrated into new content.
