Reflection

Initial Objectives

When I created Through My Eyes, there were 2 main objectives:

• I decided there would be 3 different sections for the blog; Musicals, Netflix, and Where I’ve been and What I’ve bought. My objectives for these were to write from my own perspective and viewpoint, and let readers know about my thoughts.
• Although wanting to be from my viewpoint, I also wanted to posts to be informative and for people to learn from them. Examples being regarding Warner Brothers Studio Tour and Game of Thrones

Promotional Efforts

Posts ranged from week to week, depending on the number of blogs being uploaded. A Twitter account, also called Through My Eyes, was made after the first week of blogging.

The first promotional tool used was Twitter. Deciding on this was based on research I had undertaken that found that using Twitter for this type of personal blog was very successful. For this research, I found blogs similar to my own, both subject-wise and on a personal point-of-view, on Twitter and saw how successful their blogs were. This was the main promotional tool used, having a total of 23 tweets. These tweets included photographs, videos and GIF’s in an attempt to entice more people. At first, there were posts that showed viewers part of a picture and asked what musicals they thought were going to be talked about, hoping for customer engagement. Hashtags were also used as a tool on Twitter in the hope of increasing engagement and making it easier for people to find the post when searching for that specific hashtag.

The second promotional tool used was Facebook, although this was not used until later in the project. This promotion was done through my personal Facebook page and was able to get some friends to share it also, in the hope of gaining a greater reach. This worked extremely well, increasing from 2 views to 43 after 1 post on Facebook.

The third promotional tool can be seen to be the blog itself. A lot of time and work was used when designing the website and making it seem appealing to people, also ensuring the blog posts looked impeccable with a mixture of photographs and videos. People are more likely going to read a blog if the page itself looks professional and enticing.

Challenges

There were 3 challenges faced throughout this project. The first was being able to upload the posts when promised. Tweets would inform followers of when a post was next being uploaded. However, there were problems with WordPress at certain points through the project, so being able to upload the posts when promised was difficult and in some cases not possible.

The second challenge faced had a much larger affect on the project as a whole. Although research found Twitter to be the most effective form of promotion for this type of blog, it was seen, through blog posts statistics, that it was not as effective as hoped. This was shown through many factors such as the amount of likes, comments and followers.

The third challenged faced was using Twitter in terms on the posts themselves. There is a word limit when making a tweet, making it difficult to post certain messages as they had to be condensed.

Analysis of the metrics:

I made a total of 23 tweets on the Through My Eyes Twitter account, and 15 blog posts, averaging around 800 words. The blog gained 8 followers and had a total of 195 views. The best performing posts were when Facebook had started to be used as a promotional tool, showing an increase in reach. From the 18th February to 24th March, with only Twitter being used, there was a total of 31 views.

However, when Facebook was introduced as a promotional method, views increased to 98 in the week of 8th April to 14th April, with 4 posts being uploaded. This was was the highest activity throughout the project.

There was 16 comments overall, with 4 posts having being commented on, all but 1 of which were posted after Facebook promotion had started. The post with the most comments was “Winter Is Here”, posted on 17th April. This gained 8 comments, initially talking about the subject of the post then talking about Musicals, another section of the blog. The amount of comments could have been aided by the number of tags attached to the post, having 39 tags, the highest amount attached out of all of the blog posts.

However, there were 4 posts that only had 1 view, no comments and no likes; “Shopaholic?”, “Bazinga”, “My joint-second: Part 1”, and “Christmas – My first musical encounter”. These posts were all uploaded when Twitter was the only form on promotion, further showing how effective Facebook was with customer engagement.

There was a total of 9 likes, with the most liked being “Me Myself and I”, posted on 19th February. This was posted whilst only Twitter was being used, showing that it did bring some customer engagement, but a very low level in comparison to Facebook.

On Facebook overall, there was 11 likes from 4 posts. Although there was a low number of likes, the statistics show how effective this was, as a high amount of people would have seen it on their timeline.

Overall

In conclusion, I am very happy with how the blog went, and it is seen how effective Facebook was in this project compared to Twitter. However, if this project were to be done again in the future, there would be something I would change in order for a higher success and customer engagement rate. The aspect to be changed would be the promotional tools. Facebook would still be used, as it allows for a greater reach and showed its success, however, Twitter would not be used again. Instead of using Twitter, Instagram could be used either on it’s own or alongside Facebook for promotion. There is a larger word limit on Instagram than there is on Twitter, and you are able to include more hashtags, which could increase customer engagement further.