Week 8 Part A: How to Expand Your Reach on Instagram Using Hashtags.

    While researching Hashtags and how to expand my own reach on Instagram I took a look at the smaller and bigger creators I follow and work in the same space. Starting a local friend in the same space, I took a look at my friend's (We'll call him Mike") Instagram account. Mike currently doesn't seem to post too much regularly, using just the Stories function on Instagram to tell his followers when he is planning on going live and when he is live, simple and effective, I've checked out a few of his streams on my own before through this. He doesn't post often, nor uses hashtags, when he does he receives good engagement for the small size of his follower base. The last post received about 100 likes from 300 followers, which is pretty consistent with his growth over time, with about a third of the audience interacting with each post.

    Moving to bigger creators, I took a look at Bruce Greene and Lawrence Sonntag. Two gentlemen that I personally have been following since back when Machinima was ruling the gaming side of Youtube in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Today, they are both prominent streamers and run a new Youtube channel on gaming news with their third co-host Charolette McGrawth. A riff on their old channel "Inside Gaming", legally today it is "Inside Games". While running their new channel, they both still manage to host live-streams weekly on their own schedules and use Instagram more as a personal account, rather than a business corporation. They focus on growing their individual brands through mostly posting photos of their personal lives, big events, trips, and occasional promotions for events they are attending and fan meet-ups. Bruce uses the platform less and doesn't typically use hashtags or tags, typically reserving the platform to give his audience an insight into his life. His page reflects this. Still getting quite a bit of engagement from fans and supporters for his previous work and current live streams and channels. What I can derive from this is people follow Bruce, for him. While he has moved from company to company to self-employment. The audience has stuck with him and continues to grow as he is the one that people come for. Lawrence on the other hand has a bit of engagement as well, but his page reflects that of the character that he has portrayed himself as online for the better part of the decade now. "Elite Gamer" is the phrase that I think of when Lawrence comes to mind as he plays this role with comedy, infusing a big part of himself into it to get recognition and laughs. While it is a "bit" he is still an incredibly smart and influential individual. His page reflects that as well, with stream highlights, funny images with clever captions, promotions for games, and insights into his personal life and things he enjoys and his audience can relate to. He uses hashtags and tags, periodically, typically paired with clips from his streams to indicate what game it is he is playing. 

    Now for the big guns, the creators with the biggest audiences that I looked at were T-Pain and Pokimane. T-Pain having already been recognized in many industries as an award-winning and incredibly talented and influential artist has a following in the millions. With his current ventures into live streaming growing exponentially quickly. Having the media training and already understanding the benefits of self-promotions from working in music. T-Pain uses the most hashtags and tags on every post, typically infusing them into sentences or at the end of the post to indicate what he is doing or who he is speaking with. He is currently promoting his podcast where he has various celebrities and other musicians appear, tagging them and using hashtags of his podcast or their name to drive the analytics up. He has good engagement with his audience and has a clear understanding of his position as a musician and celebrity to grow his brand. Pokimane on the other hand is a celebrity in her own right, but one that grew organically online over years of work. She has more followers than even T-Pain and posts relatively frequently online typically a few times a week. Her engagement with her audience is huge, often with hundreds of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments on each post. She rarely uses hashtags or tags beside any post that is promoted or sponsored by a big brand with her "code" for a discount at various websites. She keeps things simple, but effective, honing into the "Cute gamer girl" character in her photos, and always keeps her captions short and concise. She plays the character, but similar to Lawrence the character is derived from her personality more than one created for the platforms.

    What I can gather from all the research I conducted is, what is generally sought after online is authenticity. Playing a character is good when it is tailor-made to you as an individual and not just a mask to cover up yourself. Posts engagement is generally created when the audience feels like they can relate to you the "I'd have a beer with him" feeling and many posts on everyone's pages reflect that, small nuggets of personal life information, trip photos, or big updates on your life seem to gather the most engagement and audience reactions. Hashtags and tags are incredibly helpful when placed into sentences naturally or after the caption at the end, especially when related to the content of the post or the platform you wish to promote. For my specific business hashtags like #Twitch, #NewtoTwitch, or any specific game I am playing or subject I am talking about like #CallOfDuty, #Minecraft, #ApexLegends, would be good to boost my analytics on the platform.