Research

Abstract

As the prominence of social media has increased (Finley-Bajak, 2016), it has also moved into the business world as a platform for marketing and branding. It is important to understand the best way to use social media apps, specifically ones such as Instagram that have added features designed to help businesses expand awareness of their brand and identify their target audience. The goal of this study was to implement features of an ideal business profile to the Instagram account for the East Cobber Magazine in order to measure the effect of these features on follower engagement. The Instagram account was modified to have a new profile photo, a new post format, and a more comprehensive biography link; then, using Instagram Insights, the engagement factors were measured. The demographics were also noted before the study using Instagram analytics as well as the most active times users were on the app. Each week, new changes were made including conversion to a business profile, use of more stories, a new profile photo model, a new post model, and a more comprehensive link. Over the course of 4 weeks, data was recorded once per week using a spreadsheet, and the results indicated that there was at least a 10% increase in all engagement factors. The changes were concluded as successfully reformatting the EC Instagram to an ideal business profile and increasing engagement from their followers. This study provided a better understanding of how to increase Instagram engagement for the East Cobber and other magazines marketing on Instagram.

Rationale

Because Instagram is a relatively new social media platform in the business world, there is not a large amount of data available pertaining to marketing with it (Virtanen et al., 2017). Instagram offers several features meant to help businesses with branding and marketing such as ways to track engagement and many promotional features (Instagram, 2020). Small companies such as the East Cobber can especially benefit from taking advantage of Instagram for marketing because it is not only one of the fastest growing social media platforms (Chen, 2018), but it also has several features such as the business setting designed for marketing. This study will observe the engagement of the Instagram account as is and compare that to the opinion of Instagram after several adjustments relating to a business profile are made. The results of this research will show which techniques work best to increase the overall engagement for the East Cobber magazine Instagram and could provide insight as to what users want to see from the magazine's social media.

Research Poster

Research Paper

View the final paper HERE!

Legacy

My legacy at the East Cobber will be shown through the changes in the Instagram account and the work I did as an intern. I created a voter's guide and Holiday Happenings guide which can be seen at any time on the website, and I created several changes to their Instagram posts. I am so grateful for the time I got to spend at the East Cobber, and I hope that my work there was impactful.