Week 8 Part B

     My first post was a picture of Stephen King asking, “In honor of Halloween this weekend, what are your favorite Stephen King books?” I posted it at 11am on a Thursday on Instagram. The hashtags I used were: Stephenking, spooktober, Halloween, bookrec, booksellers, buylocal, horror, scary, novels, mustread, autumnreads, classiscs, bestseller.

I had found these hashtags by looking at other booksellers instagram accounts. Stephen King posts tended to get a lot of engagement compared to other authors, and Halloween was coming up, so I essentially tried to combine a crowd favorite with a somewhat trending topic. I also found some other hashtags by typing in hashtags in the search bar. For example, I typed #Halloween into the search bar and I found the “spooktober” hashtag next to similar posts. This post unfortunately did not get a single like. 

    My second post was of a humorous meme that I created. I tried to tap into a relatable aspect of being a reader, which is reading too many books at once. I posted it at 5 pm on a Thursday. The hashtags I used were: Memes, bookmemes, relateable, whoelsehasthisproblem, books, novels, fun, humor, funny, reading, uhd4kmemes.

This post got more engagement than the Stephen King post, with 4 likes. I don’t know why exactly; I only have theories at this point. One reason might be that I posted it a 5pm, the time of day a lot of people get off work. The other reason is that it was humorous, so people were more inclined to like it. I put some generic hashtags that I had seen used on other bookstore accounts for it to get some traction, and I think some of them worked. Some of them were jokes for the audience to read. 

My third post was a picture of William Faulkner with a quote about writing. I probably should have done a quote about reading instead, but it’s too late the post is already up. The hashtags I used were: quotes, authorquotes, books, writing, Faulkner, fbf, books, wisdom, writing, novels, inspirational, inspirationalquotes, soundandthefury, bookrecs, reading, literature, classics, mustread, bookstagram.

            This post has the most hashtags out of all my posts so far. I think that helped it get a lot of reach. Like my other posts, I typed in hashtags to get other hashtags, and got information from other bookstore accounts. I posted this at 7am, a time when a lot of people are first getting up and checking their phones. 

 

 

LESSONS LEARNED

            

I think one of the lessons I learned was to post at times when people have leisure time. My post during the mid-day didn’t take off the way my posts in the evening or morning did. I think another one is to have a lot of hashtags. My post about Stephen King didn’t get any engagement and I think it is because I didn’t use a lot of hashtags. I regret not making any hashtags not specific to my business. I did use the hashtags “booksellers” and “buy local,” but not any that established my brand. I think that might be a goal for my next post.