Think Outside the App

Unit 2 Blog

In Unit 2, we learned all about utilizing social media platforms.  Building off of Unit 1, when we learned the good, the bad, and the ugly about social media, the topic for Unit 2 was all about how you can use and manipulate (in a good way) social media platforms in order to relay the message you want to project to your audience.  For example, on Twitter, you can utilize your 280 character limit in order to write a short post that are guaranteed not to lose people’s attention or, if you have more information to relay, you have the option of using a thread where you can organize your information into categories per tweet.  Also, gifs, memes, and polls are readily available for you to use when you are composing your tweet.  These graphics make your tweets livelier and more interactive with your audience.

The social media presentations may have told us information that we already knew about media platforms however, they also gave the class some insight on how to think outside of the box for our projects.  For instance, the group that presented on Instagram used the saved stories feature in order to organize their information into “folders” where it was readily available to present.  Likewise, the group that presented on snapchat used Bitmojis to illustrate their slides.

For my social media project, I am doing a food memoire since food is the overall theme of my projects for Writing for Digital Media.  I am planning on making nine posts so that my Instagram page is visually appeasing to people reading the story.  My first post will begin the story so that you would have to scroll all the way down first and make your way up to the end.  In order to tell my audience that the posts are multiple parts of a story, I will first acknowledge the fact that I am telling a story on my first post.  Additionally, I will label all my posts as numbers out of nine in the post (ex. 1/9,5/9).

My first post will begin with some of my favorite meals.  Then, I will chronologically begin giving a short story about myself based on meals.  For instance, I will talk about some of my favorite meals as a child, some cultural influences involving food that are important to me, how I became interested in cooking, where I am today in terms of my journey with learning how to cook, and where I want to be in the future.

Another part of Instagram I am planning on utilizing is saved stories.  In this portion of my page, I will post some of the recipes of meals I posted to tell my story.  I think that I will have a separate saved story for each meal that I want to offer the recipe for and each one will be structured so that there is a cover photo giving the name of the recipe, another photo of the recipe, ingredients, and, finally, directions on how to cook the meal.

From Unit 2, I have learned how you can get creative when using social media platforms.  Full utilization of a platform can not only be appealing to your audience but can also aid in keeping your audience engaged and inspired.  In order to fully utilize a platform, must first think about what formats are available to you.  Then, you must think outside of the app!