Student: Lloyd
Project- travelwithmeingabon
Lloyds digital artefact is centered around the theme of travel, culture, and tourism. He has an Instagram page that is dedicated to his country, ‘Gabon’ and his posts cover topics related to the country’s culture, history, and notable moments. While going through his Instagram I noticed that he has an amazing posting frequency, he posts at least three times a week to keep his audience engaged with his content. His consistency has helped him capture an audience and also boosted his presence on Instagram. I think that Lloyd has come a long way from his initial pitch idea, he is successfully implementing hashtags and keywords into his posts rather than just uploading videos, pictures, and stories without any kind of audience grabbing points.
His Instagram page currently has 428 followers which I believe is an amazing standpoint at this stage of the project, not only has he garnered attention from his target audience, he has very successfully created his very own ‘market’ who he engages with. Moving forward, for the improvement of his digital artefact I feel that he should start creating more original content, he can start posting on Instagram reels, doing this will help boost his reach since Instagram is very focused on promoting and facilitating reels. Posting reels will also help make his content more engaging and entertaining, in today’s virtual society people are looking for content that is both informative and entertaining. So, while informative videos do work, they take a while to capture attention. As we discussed in class, I believe making collaborative videos with his friends or even ‘Instagram celebrities’ will be very beneficial to Lloyd’s account. It brings about a slightly informal note to the page which will help his audience connect with him better. His reels can be about local cuisines wherein he can invite others to try out snacks and dishes from Gabon, this is both entertaining and informative as it is creating awareness on the different kinds of food they eat and have the ‘guests’ react and interact.
He can also introduce his audience to the pop culture of Gabon, he can take part in local social media challenges to make a presence within the Gabonese market as well. Music and film are also a great ways to spice up his page, by talking about current hits and trends in the country he is building a connection between his audience and the country, they will be able to relate more to the country. On another note I think he should start posting more stories, he can post polls, Q & A’s, reshare Gabonese content, etc. this will help him understand what his audience wants to see and can help make his content creation easier.
Lloyd can also contact any Gabonese tourism agencies, either local or government in hopes of collaboration, considering his sizable following, this might prove to be beneficial for both parties. All in all, I think Lloyd is doing a great job on his digital artefact and it has great potential to become something bigger.
Student: Haroune
Project: Business
Haroune has a very interesting idea for his digital artefact and it is very impressive that he was able to identify the scarcity of this kind of content within the field of his interest. As the name very aptly suggests his digital artefact is about business, more specifically, about success stories of start-up companies. Haroune’s goal is to inspire the youth of the middle eastern region by exposing them to motivational stories in the business field. As an upgrade from his initial digital artefact pitch, Haroune decided that the name of his DA would be short and catchy and went with ‘Business’. In this day and age, there are billions of motivational business-related videos on the internet talking about success stories of start-ups and business ventures, but Haroune realized that there were no such videos targeted at the middle eastern market. So, he has successfully narrowed it down to a niche and selected his platforms to promote his content.
As Haroune is targeting the middle eastern market, he decided that he will be making his videos in Arabic. I do not think that this would be the best idea for him, English is the most widely used language within this region, and keeping his videos in Arabic would severely limit his market. The market here is extremely diverse with a large number of expats and youth whose first language is not Arabic. If Haroune still wants to go forward with this idea, as discussed in class I would suggest that he makes two versions of the video, one in Arabic and the other in English so he can access and capture both markets. On another note, to target the middle eastern audience, he could be talking about local success stories rather than of those in the U.S or western countries. This will make his content more relatable to the youth in the region.
As a start after a few good weeks of working on his digital artefact, he showed us a prototype of what his motivational videos would look like during class. The prototype itself was well thought out, he had a video montage of visuals that were complementary to the content he was speaking about, while his idea was clear, there were a few hitches. First off, I thought that the video was too fast-paced, while I understand that this is the current trend of video editing, I was completely confused about the trajectory of the video until 30 seconds in. I think he should add light text into the videos to help avoid this situation, it doesn’t have to be paragraphs but adding or highlighting the keywords in the video would help the audience understand the content more clearly. I also think that Haroune should make an appearance in his videos and not only have stock footage to aid his voice, this would help his audience connect and engage with the content easier. This would also make his videos livelier and more fun. The videos themselves should be kept to a minimum of 2 minutes to a maximum of 3 and a half minutes, this is so that the audience does not lose interest.
Overall I think that Haroune is on the right track, he needs to test and analyze what kind of videos and posting patterns work for him best. Maybe moving forward he could expand onto TikTok rather than only working on Instagram as there is a huge market for videos of this genre on there too.
My BCM workshop 