Turning Movie Bluffs into Movie Buffs

By Caroline Passalacqua

This assignment was one of the most educational and informative projects I have worked on at USC.

I learned a lot about social media best practices, as well as what kind of work I enjoy creating. The freedom we had to pick the topic ourselves, helped me to take the time to decide what I really wanted to do and also what could help my journalism career down the road.

I was surprised just how big of a role the Instagram account played in the success of my project. When I started the assignment, the column was always meant to be the main platform and piece of work, but as I continued to work on the assignment over the past few months, I realized just how important it was to have an Instagram that brought people to my website.

Nobody was going to find my website without the Instagram, so I was surprised to see just how vital it became. I also realized how difficult it can be to create a good Instagram aesthetic when the posts are mostly movie scenes. Creating an aesthetic on a personal Instagram is much easier to accomplish. However, when it came to posting movie scenes and clips, I realized how strategic I must be with the framing of each post and making sure that I select engaging images.

Initially, I planned to post a column every Friday, however this quickly became every Sunday. At first, I thought posting the column on Friday’s would give people to chance to watch movies over the weekend. However, I later decided that if some read the column on Friday they likely would not spend their Friday night watching a movie and then coul forget about the column altogether. My audience has reacted in a positive, yet minimal, way to my project. While I did not receive much feedback, that which I did receive was entirely positive.

I noticed how the number of visits I got on the website directly correlated to the days that I posted a column. This was reassuring as it suggested that people were actually clicking the link in the bio and reading the column. I also noticed how, for the most part, the more recent columns were performing better, which made sense as my follower count grew. I did notice that the ‘Music Man’ column was the lowest performing column, possibly because my posts that week were not as engaging, and neither was the column image itself.

My best performing post was clip from Wedding Crashers. Since I posted a video, I was able to see just how many people viewed it as opposed to simply likes and comments. The post had 68 views and 11 likes, not only a number of views much higher than my other video posts, but also the highest number of likes I received on a post. Similarly, another video was the second most viewed and liked piece of content.

The Mrs. Doubtfire video received 28 views and 10 likes, still much higher than my other posts. I noticed that both of these posts were not only videos, but also maintained a more meme-like presentation than most of my posts did not have. Many posts were simply scenes from movies, with the quotes from that clip written on the image. However, these two posts utilized movie footage with my own attached caption and intention. For this reason, I was able to attach more hashtags that were less specific to the films and more relatable to other posts and content. For example, on the Wedding Crashers post I used the hashtag #sundayscaries and #sundayfunday and for Mrs. Doubtfire I used #thursdaymood. I think this contributed to the high performance of these two posts.

I hope to continue this project following this semester, especially as I will likely be spending much of my time over break watching movies. This column is not time sensitive, so I have the freedom to essentially write whenever I want, and I am excited to see what column comes next!