Anti-Social Media
This blog post was inspired by the following video by Prince Ea titled, "Can we auto-correct humanity?"
I was once a social networking junkie; from mIRC, to MXIT, to hi5, and eventually Facebook. Every social networking site that would be launched I would be what they called, "an early adopter". But then things changed; I started to live life, not comment and share on other peoples' lives. I completed my degree at university, moved away from my hometown, got a job, got married, had a child - you know, the natural cause of events when you live life.
In those 6 or 7 years, I have been somewhat off the "social networking radar". I have missed joining Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, and all the other new "trending" social networking sites. I have recently started joining these sites as I am told that for my business it will assist in advertising products, gaining new customers and most importantly increasing sales.
Being from the "old school" or "older generation", I am still inclined to advertise a product with words not just with pictures. Ads now seem to have a prefix that we used to call the pound key (#) when I was growing up, and very little words are used. I have also noticed that the use of words in an advert doesn't seem to work very well.
I then thought of conducting a test to see if my suspicions, were actually true.
A simply exercise with a post such as the one below:
This was posted on all social media sites a few days ago, and according to Facebook statistics it reached 76 people and only 7 people engaged. Some people whom engaged posted comments on the picture like, "how do we get in contact with you?" and "where can we purchase this?".
The e-mail and the web address are quite clear on the advert I think, or maybe it's because I designed it that it looks right to me. Then again, Prince Ea has mentioned in his video that the majority of people today have an attention span that is worse than that of a goldfish. This could mean that most people probably didn't even look at the rest of the advert, or at the advert at all, resulting in so few people engaging with the post.
I then took this picture to compare notes and see if my results were concrete:
By just posting this picture (a day after the Raw Honey advert above), and only tagging words like: #tbt, #throwbackthursday, #worlddonutday, and #chocolate, it reached 97 people and 30 people engaged, and those numbers are increasing while I am typing.
For those who are not clear on the terms, "reached" is how many people whom actually saw the post, and "engaged" is how many people who have commented, shared, or just clicked on the post.
After all the adverts for my products posted for the week, this picture of chocolate donuts (that was not even an advert), ranked No.1 in our Facebook statistics.
I don't need to say anything more, the pictures speak a thousand words….
