Week 8: Visual Content


My brand, IMDUSTINTHEWIND, thrives on the use of videos and photos.  Since my brand focuses on traveling and adventure through the lens of a gay person, I am tasked with presenting my travels and my life, visually.  Via the use of various “visual” social media pages, I have learned first-hand how much greater a response a visual post receives versus a simple text post.  


Instagram   www.instagram.com/imdustinthewind

Followers: 1227

Instagram is highly addictive due to the rapid-fire, highly visual nature of the content.  I receive the majority of my likes and views via Instagram, so I make sure to post a teaser video on instagram for any full-length video I am uploading to YouTube.  One of the easiest and most-widely viewed features on Instagram is the “story” section.  I am an almost daily user of the story; approximately 10-20% of my followers view my story on a daily basis, and a great deal of advertising occurs between stories I watch.  As far as tagging goes, I make sure to maximize the tags I use on my actual Instagram posts (30 tags).  I’d like to begin tagging more frequently on my stories, so try to cultivate new followers and get more views.  Some of the other successful accounts I follow include @gilbertsosa .@nimaidelgado 

Snapchat  imdustinthewind

Snapchat is as stripped-down as it gets and is basically the same idea as Instagram stories.  For a while I used both Instagram and Snapchat simultaneously, creating similar content for both.  After a few months of this endeavor, I realized that my Instagram stories were getting more than double the views of my Snapchat account, so I began to focus more heavily on Instagram.  Snapchat is still fun for it’s filter and stickers, so I still use the account weekly.

YouTube   Bit.ly/imdustinthewind . (I recommend a bit.ly for anybody looking to shorten the otherwise mouthful URL that YouTube provides)

My YouTube account is where I post my travel videos.  I’ve had a hard time converting the viewership of my Instagram account to my YouTube account, as I only have a little over 100 subscribers.  YouTube recently changed their monetization guidelines such that only channels with over 1,000 subscribers or 4,000 hours of watch time are eligible for monetization.  To date, my most recently watched video has over 17,000 views.  This video is about me crossing the U.S./ Mexico Border, from the U.S. into Mexico.  YouTube's algorithm must shine brightly on this video, though I also spent a good amount of time tagging the video, including some of the tags I listed at the bottom of this post.  Unfortunately, other videos of mine have as little as a few views.  I have still yet to unlock the secret of growing a clamoring base of subscribers, however, I recognize that I need to post more often.  Weekly posting is a good goal, but even bi-monthly would be an improvement

Facebook 

I am torn about Facebook. I will admit that it is a wide-reaching and robust social media platform, however, I am far more a fan of stripped-down sites, similar to how facebook was when it was created (in comparison to MySpace).  I feel that my facebook page would be best used for the business-side of my brand, as there are not as many young people using facebook, in comparison with the other social media platforms.  As of now I only have about 73  followers.

Some of the tags I use in my posts are:

  

#Travel #Traveling #Travelers #Traveler #Explore #Exploring #Explorer #Wander #Wanderer #Wanderlust #TravelBug #SoloTravel #TravelBlogger #TravelPhotography #TravelDiary #TravelersJournal #TravelLife #TravelPics #TravelTips  #TravelMore #Iphonephotography #ontheroad #espanol #learnspanish #hike #backpacking #theamericas 

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