My Gif that Traveled Nowhere

Looking for a simple gif that was more attention grabbing than narrative, I decided to take a photograph of a piece of art I made and embellish it with movement. I also used effects on Photoshop to give the effect of over-exposed trees in the distance.

The gif was shared on Twitter and with the hashtags: recycle, arbor day, gogreen, green, environment, Earth, conservation. Within one hour I searched went back on Twitter to see the statistics… I had no likes and no shares. I checked 5 hours later… still no responses. I was only a little surprised at this result — I had only one follower (my university’s Career Services twitter account, oddly enough)on my severely neglected Twitter account — but I also thought “hey, the hashtags didn’t do their job!”

I also visited Facebook and put no hashtags, thinking that my 90+ friends didn’t hate the environment, so I’m sure to get a response. I was again incorrect. After waiting an hour the only “like” I received was from my boyfriend — who likely did so because I mention how in my past promotional posts he was apart of my non responsive statistic. So because of guilt — or the support of my research he newly became aware of — I got his “like.”

So I got virtually no responses. What did I do wrong?

Hashtags are not magic. They act to categorize. Social media sites such as Instagram and Tumblr has people leisurely search the hashtags to look at pictures and topics. Facebook and Twitter on the other hand are short-circuited — they often only reach those that are following you and their friends. Social networking sites (like Facebook and Twitter) don’t support shooting-in-the-dark marketing because the hashtags serve no purpose; spying on people and keeping in contacting with your friends was what people use the sites for.

So what is it that I got to do in order to become an advertising guru?

My biggest mistake was that I was advertising to people I knew.

The best thing you can do when advertising is truly knowing your audience and how they may react to it.

I had no call to action. No guilt. No purpose. I essentially threw out an assertion and walked away. I felt uncomfortable and felt like I was bothering my friends by throwing an advertisement in their social networking. It didn’t relate to my life — nor theirs — so they didn’t care and that’s exactly what showed up in my results.

Remember to learn from your mistakes… Happy Designing.