Analyzing Social Media Insights to Increase Account Engagement
This semester concludes my year-long internship with Creative Community League (CCL), a New Orleans non-profit organization that supports local artists and fosters creativity through cultural storytelling concentrated on reproductive and sexual health. Over the past several months, I managed and generated content across the CCL Instagram and Facebook accounts and helped expand education on reproductive health topics.
At the beginning of the semester, I collaborated with CCL Executive Director and my supervisor, Amy Irvin, to set a goal of increasing our Instagram engagement and follower count. We decided to experiment with Instagram boosts to increase engagement by promoting posts as advertisements. I especially enjoyed taking on this challenge, since it functioned as a semester-long research project where I could track progress on a weekly basis. Amy and I decided to boost one of our social media series, the Artist Profile Series, and compare the insights with our regularly scheduled posts. Our goal of using the boosts was to expand CCL’s presence on Instagram to a more diverse population outside of New Orleans, specifically the greater Louisiana area. Before the spring semester, most CCL Instagram followers were New Orleans residents and females ages 25-34.
The Artist Profile Series acts as a behind-the-scenes look at the creative processes of local artists who address sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice issues in their artwork. This semester we highlighted five artists with each one receiving two boosted posts spread out over two weeks. As the series progressed throughout the semester, I experimented with the boosted posts by changing the time of day of the post and the amount of money spent boosting the post. We consistently posted each of the series’ graphics on Mondays of each week to hopefully remind people that the series went live at the same time weekly.
A couple of weeks ago, we concluded the Artist Profile Series, and I compiled the Instagram insights from the course of the semester. To best understand the effects of the boosts, I compared the insights from January 16–April 16 and October 18–January 15. Overall, there was a 392% increase in account engagement, which refers to the measure of people who interact with account content, including likes, comments, saves, and shares. By the end of the series, we reached 5,419 accounts and 250 people engaged with our profile, which includes sending messages to the account and sharing and replying to the post. Among the 5,419 accounts reached through boosts, 4,578 of the accounts were non-followers, which was a 649% increase from the fall semester. Additionally, we gained 82 followers during the semester, which was a 5.7% increase from the fall. The insights demonstrated that we were successfully reaching a larger audience of Louisiana residents who had not previously seen our work.
Over the course of my internship, I had countless opportunities to learn about the intersection of reproductive justice work and art, especially within the New Orleans area. My experience at CCL taught me so much about non-profit work, and I am fortunate to have worked with such an amazing organization.
