Nicole Shevchenko

Member of marketing department

Managing: SoMe – Instagram

Content

The content of the media posted on AR’s Instagram has to represent a professional level of the organization, its’ development and all kinds of occupations. It can include such posts as:

• Car.
  Ludvig, Solan, or any new AR car from all possible angles, its details and parts. Also, AR taking part in various racing events and competitions.
• Work in progress.
  Moments, where team members are working on their tasks, discussing something, presenting, etc.
• Public events. 
  Pictures and videos taken during the exhibition of AR car in any public space. Team members taking part in various workshops, conferences, meetings related to the development of AR. Events, organized by AR for attracting new team members, sponsors, promoting any specific idea, challenge. Guests, visiting AR workshop and office.
• Social events. 
  Pictures and videos taken during the social events organized for AR members: common trips, parties, gatherings, challenges.
• Announcements. 
  Media that lets people know about any kind of events organized by AR or where AR takes part. Also, recruitment to AR organization or any other invitation to join AR team.
• Articles. 
  Interesting news, press releases, facts, interviews about AR.
• Technical. 
  Posts about new arrivals of the details for the car/car parts, also describing their technical specifications and interesting facts.
• Team. 
  Special achievements of team members, stories or interviews with AR departments, entire team photos, AR clothing.
• Creative. 
  Anything that can represent a nice interesting and engaging idea: it can be any unusual composition on the picture, time-lapses, challenges, any unusual details, regular weekly posts, something fun, something interactive (questionnaires, quizzes in stories) that can engage other teams and followers.
• Throwbacks. 
  This helps when there are not so many new media to be posted. Also, it can be any meaningful moment for AR from the past, from archives. Posts that were published exactly one year ago, or posts about any traditions in AR.

All posts (and further on, posts = picture/video/stories + its written description) should be in English, using the official appropriate language. If there are videos or stories with the original narration in Norwegian, then there should be also a translation to English, e.g. subtitles or in the description. Instagram stories can have both languages (e.g. stories are in Norwegian, but has a short simple title in English). It is important to carefully check grammar before posting.

There are serious regulations for choosing the media content and its description that has to be checked before publishing anything – described in “Media selection” paragraph.

Feed

The gallery of Instagram follows a certain colour palette for a nice first appearance when the new follower opens the gallery. It is not too strict but has to keep consistency and style. Currently, a common preset “2019_ARUiA_General.xmp” is made for editing the pictures and is available on Google Drive. Applying this preset on the pictures helps to keep this consistency.

Instagram is the main platform for communication with other teams, so the posts should also try to invite other followers, other teams
to leave comments under our posts, share, save and repost our media or ask us any questions related to the technical part.

Instagram can show everything about AR, it has both the official posts as on Facebook and, in addition, it has an emphasis on the technical side. So any posts about car technical specifications, parts, etc. are very welcome.

When opening the gallery, the overall look should be balanced as well – an even amount of pictures of AR car, people, car details, videos. It should not be in the way when if you would open the AR profile and see that the last 8 pictures (just an example) are showing the car exhibited in different places, it needs diversity.

Stories

Stories are more suitable for sharing the moments happening in real-time and also letting the viewers know about the newest post in the feed. Stories are also a great tool to maintain the engagement of the followers even if there is nothing to post to the gallery. It is important to use the location and, sometimes, a hashtag sticker in order to attract more viewers, nevertheless, these should not be too noticeable on the story-post itself, they can be placed somewhere in the corner.

Stories can be also used for publishing collages of different pictures, videos made during the event. If there are too much of media and it cannot be posted all to the feed, then collages are a good solution.

Media selection

What is not allowed to post:

• Posts that can be considered as offensive, discriminative, provocative, consisting of non-trustful information. 
• Posts with cursing, rude or impolite expressions, dark humour, sarcasm, any memes. 
• Posts with people, who have not given permission to be taken a picture or video of; Kids, whose parents have not given permission to take a picture or video of them and publish them; Drunk or smoking people (this is especially related to any media taken during social or public events). 
• Posts of the car which is not officially unveiled yet – anything that can release the new design or unique features. It is important to take care of the pictures taken during design presentations, in the office, workshop – so that the not-unveiled car does not appear on the presentation or PC screens even in the background. 
• “Work in progress” posts of technical departments if they are not approved by a technical department leader or HMS leader as “following all safety rules”. Also, any post where team members or other people around the car don’t follow safety rules. 
• Posts that are advertising any product not related to the sponsors who have the “Gold Package”. 
• Posts that are not related to Align Racing UiA. 
• It is important to keep the chronological order of the media taken from different events and prioritize them by importance. For example, if there are new pictures of people working in workshop and pictures from carrier day at UiA – the carrier day pictures should be posted first, even if they were taken one day later because this is a more important event.

Likes

There are some categories of posts that usually get a bit more likes than the others, therefore it is very practical to plan those and publish them regularly:

• Such posts are usually about our female team-members (AR UiA is a big supporter of females in motorsports), e.g. posting pictures of them working, presenting, taking part in public events, having the leading positions etc. It is also important to remember about the 8^th of March – International women’s day. 
• Posts about socially important cases (e.g. COVID-19), if AR takes part in helping other organizations, supports a certain social position, then it should be captured. 
• Since Instagram is chosen to be more about technical things of AR, it works really well posting different descriptions of newly arrived car parts and details. Usually, those become one of the most saved and shared posts. 
• Media that shows something dynamic, something moving. It is more attractive for the viewers to see a frozen “moment of the story” / “of an action” in the picture, so the pictures with the car moving or team members working with sparkles flying around – these receive a lot of impressions. 
• It is always a good idea to show the whole team doing something together – taking part in competitions, workshops, posing all together with the car.
• Posts where AR is somewhere in the recognizable public place, e.g. Ludvig which is exhibited in the Kjevik International Airport – this attracts a lot of likes and impressions too.

Post Frequency

Posts in the feed should be published not oftener than once a day with 24 hours’ difference with the previous publication. Also, it is recommended to wait until the post gets to the barrier of a minimum amount of likes, e.g. minimum 80 likes + 24 hours and then the next post can come.

If there is a need to attract special attention to the post, then it should be posted in the feed and also in the stories. And in the stories, a pause should be taken until the next story. The announcement can be designed in different ways and posted a few times in stories to make people notice something.

Editing

Only media in its’ best quality should be chosen to be posted, pictures and videos with a minimum amount of noise, clear and sharp, not blurred, with a reduced amount of warm white colour that has yellow shades.

For the IGTV videos (videos that are longer than 1 minute), it is recommended to choose, a suitable for the content and for the feed, a vertical picture-cover, or a nice eye-catching moment from the video itself.

AR has a nice contrasting orange colour, so if editing a temperature of the picture in the Instagram editor, it is always better to go for a colder one.

Stories that are posted straight from the location they were taken from, need to have a “Buenos-Aires” filter on and the font called “Modern”. An application that was used for collages (can be checked in the profile’s archive) is called “Unfold”, templates called “CS1” and “CS3” (the last one costs just 11kr), the font –“Playfair”. The application where the frame was made – PicsArt.

How to make the orange frame in PicsArt:

1. Load the image (finished and saved to the feed collage from Unfold) to the app

2. Open “Draw” (symbol with a brush)

3. Choose the orange colour (the most similar to AR orange recommended)

4. “Select shape” (icon with square, circle and plus)

5. Switch to “Stroke” and choose the thickness 5-10

6. Draw the rectangle, adjust its size and place is symmetrically in the middle of the picture so that there is the same distance from each edge to the frame.

Sometimes, media can be also black & white, for this case, it is important to take care of the contrast so that all the elements are clear and recognizable.

Posting one big picture divided into the square-parts, so that when the viewers open the gallery they see one picture (like a puzzle) made of 3-6-9 square pictures. It is a nice and creative idea, but then it is useful to mention under each picture that the viewers should check the whole one in the gallery. In addition, each picture should not look too empty, not understandable – it might lower the number of likes and also affect Instagram’s algorithms.

Insta-Background

The algorithm and structure of Instagram are quite tricky and it still needs to be explored more for developing the best strategy of attracting more of the natural flow of new followers and their engagement.

It is practical to check statistics and insights, try to analyse them and learn the best tendencies. It is always a great idea to keep on exploring profiles of other teams and, especially, professional racing teams and car brands to see the latest trends, to have the option to analyse and compare what looks successful and attractive in the gallery, or what is not so nice.

Followers

The natural flow of new followers requires consistent usage and interaction. It is a big luck to be reposted or tagged by a profile that has a huge audience (e.g. Formula Student), then it attracts a lot of them automatically. It is worth to regularly like and comment on different publications (like all pictures of other teams, do not evaluate it with personal taste). Comments can be simple, even emojis, or, of course, can be questions and compliments – can attract profile visits too.

Mass-liking + following of different profiles works, some of the teams start following back. So the guide is: choosing a team/profile that has a lot of followers themselves and checks who are they following. From the list of profiles, they are following enter different teams – check that they are active (their last post should not be made one year ago), like 10 pictures to be noticed by them, follow them, wait for the response.

Taking part in different challenges and being nominated can also attract new followers.

Besides attracting the new followers, it is also important to take care of interaction with them. Whenever followers ask questions or comment something on stories or posts, they should receive feedback. It might happen that some messages of followers need time to be answered. A good solution for that can be simply choosing a 30-40 minutes a day when replying to all messages in Direct and comments. Those don’t happen every day, but in any case, other profiles should not wait for a response for too long.

Hashtags

Unique hashtags such as “alignracing”, “aruia”, “ar” let find our posts amongst all the other teams. Nevertheless, there are 30 hashtags in total that can be posted under each post.

30 hashtags included in the post’s description look messy and, sometimes, even longer than the title itself. Therefore, a solution can be storing those 30 hashtags in any “Notes” app on the phone, copying them right before making the post and commenting them as fast as possible right under the publication. Pre-copying and posting them as soon as possible in the publication’s comment is needed because hashtags on Instagram update chronologically, so if the hashtag appears one hour later – the publication with this hashtag will be amongst other publications made one hour ago. For instance, some of the hashtags have a big flow – there are a lot of new publications appearing with it every minute, so a belated hashtag under the AR post will get lost under the newest publications.

Here are the hashtags that are used under the media the most:

#alignracing #alignracinguia #team #car #auto #uia #formulastudent #formula #motorsport #design #racing #autosport #teamgoals #sportscar #motorracing #racecar #student #photography #automotive #speed #enginesolidworks #champion #technology #bestofnorway #carlifestyle #supercars #business #racingnorge #teamworkengineering #formulanordic

Of course, all of them can be changed based on the media content and popularity of hashtags.

It works well with Instagram’s algorithms if the hashtags have some diversity under the post, pasting completely the same ones’ every time does not really work.

Hashtags related to a certain challenge, e.g. #12daysofcomp can be included in the post and then 29 other hashtags in the comment.

Hashtags are useful during approximately 24-30 hours after the post has been done – this is the time when the post gets lost under the newest same-hashtag posts and the time when everyone subscribed to a certain hashtag (on Instagram you can follow not only profiles but also different hashtags) has already seen it in their feeds. Therefore, hashtags can be removed after this time, but those that are different from common ones, for instance, “alignracing” should remain.

Following

It is not allowed to follow profiles that are not related to the professional activities of AR, e.g. profiles of personal interest and friends, profiles not related to the automotive industry or at least inspiration for it, e.g. profiles about makeup or gardening. Also, it is not allowed to follow and interact with different bots, profiles that offer likes and followers, suspicious and ghost (empty) profiles.

Once in a while, it is suggested to go through the list of the profiles-following and unfollow those that have stopped their activity, e.g. their last post has been published more than one year ago.

Statistics / Insights

Insights of the profile and its’ subpages “Content”, “Activity”, “Audience” are great tools for analysing and then building a better strategy of Align Racing UiA promotion on social media.

Activity / Audience/ Content

All of them are constantly changing statistics that should be checked regularly, e.g. every week. Basically, Instagram provides a clear and understandable description for each of the statistics in these subpages, however, it is always good to attentively keep track of the tendencies. Posting in the most active time amongst followers is great, but it might be different depending on the situation happening around and be also different every new week. In addition, the most active time of followers cannot always suit the logic of posting a certain category of posts at that time – e.g., posts there might be posts that should be posted in the morning or in the evening but the active time is different.

In general, the analysis of the insights brings more motivation to continue developing the profile and make it really progressing.