Reaching Generation Z through Instagram Stories: What I have learned.
During my time on social media, I have been able to learn more about my audience and the kinds of content that they want to see. Today, I am going to be focusing on my photography Instagram page (@natsphotos_18) and trying to target Generation Z into seeing my page.
I have been creating content on this page for almost three years now and I have been able to use Instagram Insights to learn all about my audience. What I have come to learn about my audience is that 49% are 18–24 year olds and about two-thirds of my audience is female. In order to be able to reach Generation Z and have them become a part of my audience, I have tried a tactic on Instagram Stories to see if they would come check out my page.
For my Instagram Story, I have decided to post a screen recording of how I edit my photos since I have done before/after edits on stories before. I decided to screen record my editing process so it feels like the viewer is actively editing the picture. I used the #behindthescenes and #editing during my five chapters of my stories. These were hashtags that I thought that were relevant to the content that I was posting and also for those who follow those hashtags to see my story. I have also saved this as a highlight on my Instagram page so people can still send me their content that they wanted edited.
While I did not get anyone in 24 hours to send me content to edit, I did however gain some information from my insights to see how well the story and post performed.
I think that my Instagram Stories did pretty well after posting them. I did notice that my impressions were a bit higher than my reach, but when looking at my overall platform, I did notice that within the past seven days, I have been able to reach 86 accounts and gain two more followers.
For my Instagram post, I used the first photo of when starting out the story to be able to keep its consistency and for it to be easier for those who viewed my story knew the topic of it. I also linked the post in my Instagram story so it would be very easy for people to click on the post and find out how they can get their photos edited and featured. I wanted to create a post so I can also include more hashtags for people to find my Instagram account and to include hashtags that are relevant to my post and story.
And while seeing that this post may not have performed as well as my usual posts, I still wanted to see the insights on its performance and if I was able to gain people to join my page.
Overall, the Instagram post did pretty well. I gained two followers and also one share of the post. Because of my use of hashtags, I was able to gain a really large reach and also impressions when comparing to the results of my story. While this post did not get as many likes as I was hoping, I at least noticed that more people were seeing the post at least, which is a huge bonus.
What I have learned about trying to reach Generation Z was how important hashtags and also timing of the post is. I think that if I could go back and redo this story and post series, I would have posted this earlier in the week since I posted it on Halloween where people are busy celebrating the holiday. I think the other thing that I have learned was trying to figure out a way of wording this to make it seem more attractive towards Generation Z. I think my wording of this post and story sound more like a marketing ad rather than something that Generation Z would want. Since I want them to be included in the editing process, I think the next time if I was to do this idea again is to include a way of having people send me their photos and do the edits as a live viewing. This I think would have been a better way of going at it rather than just me editing their photo, screen recording it, and posting it to my story.
