General Info
Project type: Individual Social Media Campaign
Project duration: 13 weeks
Social media choice: LinkedIn and Instagram
Target audience: people interested in game design, 3d, and 3d animation
Overall number of gained followers: 105
Overall number of posts: 25
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG): Goal 17 (Partnerships for the goals)
Introduction
Individual Social Media Campaign is a great project to learn to use the social media of choice, develop a range of interesting posts, find one’s audience, boost creativity and outside-of-box thinking, make connections with people in the preferred industry, get inspired and motivated, and attract people to join the University of Winchester Transmedia 24 (TM24) End of Year Show. Additionally, this campaign is a brilliant opportunity to enhance new skills; demonstrate the already existing ones in a professional manner; communicate design concepts in a written form; gain some feedback on work and implement changes to improve; boost overall communication skills; and understand the importance of professional partnerships regarding SDG 17 .
However, despite all this module's advantages, I was initially not very excited about the project. I did not have any previous experience using social media, so starting a social media campaign to show off my work and promote myself as a game designer was very challenging and stressful. However, in the second half of the semester after the establishment of my LinkedIn and Instagram pages and some engagement with my posts, I realized the importance of this project and the idea of collaboration behind it.
Social Media Choice and Approach
According to the requirements of the module, I had to choose two social media platforms, and one of them had to be LinkedIn. The second one was a free choice, however, the most common suggestions included Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Discord. So, the first step I had to take was to define my audience, find some influencers within my industry to analyse their social media, and research statistics about different social media platforms to understand their general purposes and usage tips to make a wise choice for my campaign.
The easiest task was to define my audience. I knew that I could not be limited just to one age group or to a particular genre of professional background. As a student, I was going to show the process of my professional establishment, therefore, I aimed to attract experienced game designers and animators but also share my progress with other students of similar backgrounds and inspire game design and 3d animation hobbyists.
The next one was to get some general info on social media platforms and analyse it. Before doing this task I already knew that I would probably choose Instagram as my second platform, but still wanted to research to avoid making a mistake and get very little engagement because of wrong audience or platform purposes. Therefore, I looked into some general statistics offered during lectures and dived into it more in my spare time.
The final step was to find some content creators within my sphere and check their social media. My major subjects were Polygon Runaway for low poly and isometric scenes, SothernShotty for simple and cute animations, and Ksenia Starkova for stylized 3d characters. All of them had Instagram pages and YouTube channels where they published tutorials or demonstrated their progress. I knew that YouTube in combination with educational content could turn into a powerful tool that could help me build and focus on my target audience, however, it required certain resources that I lacked like video editing skills and specific equipment to record engaging high-quality videos. Plus, this option would be extra time-consuming, so I could not afford it due to the pressure of the deadline. Therefore, Instagram became my second social media choice.
However, later I discovered some disadvantages that could influence my decision in the first place. The minor one was linked to the files’ ratio and format. During the research I learned that typically videos get more engagement on both platforms, so I tried to create short video renders of my assets where possible. However, once I did my first video, I realized that LinkedIn and Instagram use different media ratios which automatically left me with two options: to drop the quality trying to fit videos to the needed ratio or to spend extra time rendering the same video with a different ratio setting. I chose the latter, but it was not a perfect compromise. Plus, I had to run all the videos in video-editing software to change the format of my videos, as Instagram accepted MP4 and MOV files and Blender offered rendering options only for AVI JPEG, AVI Raw, and FFmpeg Video.
However, the major issue I faced was Instagram algorithms that did not work as I was building my audience from scratch, and it did not even nearly reach 100 followers. Therefore, I did not have full statistics on my posts but had extremely low engagement.
These factors significantly slowed down my progress with Instagram, however, quite quickly I got used to using this platform, so I did not regret choosing it, and I would keep on developing it to see how my progress goes once I reach 100 followers and unlock algorithms support.
Branding and Idea Development
As a game designer, I struggled a lot with understanding how to create my brand and promote it on social media because I was going to demonstrate my 3d and 3d animation progress instead of creating some themed graphic designs or producing some physical products. Additionally, I could not create a colour pallet for my pages and follow selected templates for making posts. However, after checking the social media of the previously mentioned influencers and some other less popular 3d artists and game designers I stopped worrying so much about it, as it turned out to be a common feature to assign different coloured backgrounds to posts based on the demonstrated project. Although I noticed that some of them have logos that are being added to each post, so I decided to create my own.
I thought that logo creation would take much more time and effort since I am not a graphic designer and have quite limited skills in Photoshop and Illustrator, but surprisingly the idea for the logo appeared and developed within a couple of days. In the image below you can see some sketches and logo variants inside Illustrator.
Logo sketches
Logo development
Current logo
I wanted my logo to contain my initials M and H and additionally, I tried to implement some graphic allusion to the trident which is the national symbol of Ukraine. I thought that it could be a good base for the logo animation if I ever want to make one. Plus, later this logo can be developed further in terms of style and colour.
Additionally, to reinforce the brand I created branded business cards with a QR-code to my LinkTree and an introduction presentation with my logo and some major university-related and personal progress highlights for the TM24 End of the Year show.
Business cards
TM24 presentation
Apart from this, I also modelled, 3D-printed, and painted a Funko-inspired copy of me. To make this more obvious, I wore the same style of clothes for the exhibition to attract more attention from the guest and start conversations with them.
Funko Pop inspired version of me
Picture from TM24 tacken by Tina Scahill
Logo sketches
Logo development
Current logo
Business cards
TM24 presentation
Funko Pop inspired version of me
Picture from TM24 tacken by Tina Scahill
Content Creation and Its Analysis
The initial idea for the social media campaign was to create a range of 3D models of a mythological Ukrainian creature called Bavovnyatko. There is an official image of this creature, however, it still left plenty of room for creativity, so with the help of the Microsoft Bing Image Creator AI I generated over 30 images some of which I expected to develop further. However, I really lacked sculpting skills and time to gain them and simultaneously produce creative content. This was a major reason for my worries and doubts about the success of the whole campaign. However, later I discovered that this campaign should not necessarily be dedicated to the one-themed specific project, it can just demonstrate my progress and things that I am passionate about, so I decided to showcase some of the projects from the first semester and all the ongoing or freshly ended projects from this semester. Also, as it was mentioned before, I tried to create more posts in the video format, so I was looking for ways to make content that would fit my preferences.
Therefore, all the content that I created could be divided into spheres that I am passionate or curious about: character design, stylized 3D assets creation, 3D printing, and 3D animation.
Character design (Artificer Wizard for "Tomebound" and Spider for the game workshop)
Stylized assets creation (Aztec-styled statue for "Tomebound")
3D printing (Funko Pop inspired model of me)
3D animation (Scene 1 and 2 for "Tomebound")
As for analysis, here’s some statistics for my LinkedIn:
Posts planned – 17.
Posts published – 16 (videos – 9, pictures – 15).
Number of connections made – 70.
Number of gained followers – 75.
The highest number of views per day – 518.
General engagement over the time of the campaign – 5679.
Most liked post:
Most liked post on LinkedIn
LinkedIn statistics
The graph above shows that my post engagement was much higher at the beginning of the campaign as my freshly created account was boosted with LinkedIn algorithms. Additionally, I was making connections with my groupmates and actively engaged with their posts as well as they did with mine. However, with time my engagement statistics started to decrease even though I tried to publish 2-3 posts per week and got very low when the Easter holidays started. It was rather logical since my audience at that time mostly consisted of students and lecturers, therefore, I realized that to get less disappointment and increase overall engagement I had to lower my expectations bar (as winning algorithms support was getting more and more difficult with time) and expand my audience towards industry experts and professionals who could provide more consistent engagement. That is why I changed my approach and started to spend some time networking, sending connection requests to liked 3D artists, game designers, 2D artists, and illustrators from all over the world and engaging with some of them in comments. The statistics below show that it had a positive impact on both new followers' attraction and my audience demographics.
All the experiments with engagement, audience approach, tone of posts, and publishing times helped me to understand the vector of my LinkedIn profile further development and in general made me more confident in sharing my work and effective communication in a written form. Therefore, I consider my LinkedIn profile development a success so far.
However, the situation with Instagram was quite different:
Posts planned – 20.
Posts published – 14 (videos – 9, pictures – 15).
Number of gained followers – 30.
Instagram page
Fist of the two most liked posts
Second of the two most liked posts
More detailed statistics for Instagram cannot be provided for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that on Instagram, unlike LinkedIn, people tend to use nicknames or their brand names which makes networking much more difficult. This resulted in my audience being over 2 times smaller and engagement much lower. The second reason is that Instagram algorithms only really start working after reaching 100 followers, so before that achievement progression is very little. Plus, brief statistics for posts only become available after switching to the professional account (which I realized halfway through the project), and the full statistics and additional perks unlock after reaching 100 followers as well.
Considering the above, I was not very happy with my Instagram page progress. It was not awful, I am still happy with what I achieved, but it was not as satisfying as LinkedIn progress which means there is still lots of work on my Instagram in the future.
Character design (Artificer Wizard for "Tomebound" and Spider for the game workshop)
Stylized assets creation (Aztec-styled statue for "Tomebound")
3D printing (Funko Pop inspired model of me)
3D animation (Scene 1 and 2 for "Tomebound")
Most liked post on LinkedIn
LinkedIn statistics
Instagram page
Fist of the two most liked posts
Second of the two most liked posts
SDG 17 Relation
I got plenty of engagement through my social media but there were five major points related to partnership that I wanted to highlight:
- I got a freelance AI trainer job offer based on the language proficiency indicated on my profile. I accepted the offer and passed the testing successfully.
- I got an offer to get early access to new software for game designers for testing and giving feedback. I rejected this offer as I was lacking time and details on my role.
- I took part in Arin Goldsmith Social Sunday event. I did not get any feedback on my comment but made new connections through other comments.
- I worked with Christopher Helcoop on my Funko Pop-inspired 3D-printing project for my socials.
- I learned about a game jam dedicated to mental health and I’m planning to join a team to take part in this event.
I got plenty of benefits from partnerships with other people, so I feel like following this Goal was a wise decision.
Further Plans
I plan to keep developing my LinkedIn and Instagram over the summer. Additionally, I’m planning to create a separate Instagram page to demonstrate my learning progress in traditional and digital drawing. If I am satisfied with my progress, I might expand to TikTok as well to grow my audience. Plus, I am thinking about creating game design/3D educational content on YouTube or starting a blog. All of these would help me to grow my audience, make new useful connections, and boost my skills for more successful placement and job search.
Reference List:
- https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal17
- https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-stats/
- https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/best-time-to-post-on-linkedin
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/278322/age-distribution-of-linkedin-users-in-great-britain/
- https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/
