Media Studies - COMP 3 Social Media Research & Development

This blogpost, written by me (Maxi) includes further research into the social media accounts of artists that we believe we could use and apply into our own artist's (KIARA) social media accounts, as well as the development of KIARA's social media page, including the layout we outlined, the pictures we took, posts we made, etc.  The research in this post differs from the research conducted on artist branding, that can be seen in my research blogpost. 

Research: 

Below are some screenshots from the Instagram accounts of artists from the pop genre who we believe share the same aura that we want to portray with our artist KIARA. These include artists such as Sabrina Carpenter, NIKI, and Olivia Rodrigo.

NIKI's Instagram includes personal pictures of her and photos she takes in her everyday life, which keep her fans posted on what she's doing (1st and 5th most recent posts), appreciation posts targeted towards her fans (4th most recent post), posts that promote the release of her new album (6th most recent post), and fan interaction contests (2nd most recent post).

Sabrina Carpenter's Instagram also includes personal pictures, as well as teasers for her music video, and posts that promote her upcoming album (1st and 2nd most recent posts). She also includes professional pictures that showcase her in awards shows (5th most recent picture), where she writes about how much she appreciates her fans in the captions of said posts.

Olivia Rodrigo's Instagram includes posts that promote her tour, album, and merchandise (1st, 2nd, and 5th most recent posts), as well as personal pictures of herself that showcase her personality and keep fans updated with what's going on with her life, as well as photo dumps of her with her friends.

From what we can see looking at these Artist's social media pages is that they highlight their "real personas", a term coined by Richard Dyer in his theory of stardom; which suggest that audiences become interested/obsessed with celebrities not because of their careers and things they do in their career, but instead due to their personality and things they do outside of their career. This includes aspects such as their love life, ordinariness, and more. As seen in NIKI's and Sabrina Carpenters Instagram pages, they both include a large amount of posts that showcase their "ordinariness". This includes posts where they take mirror selfies, show pictures of them with their friends, pictures of them having fun at concerts, and more, which are conjoint with all their captions seem deeply personal and feel like they were written by the artist themselves, and not a team of social media managers. This is important as it creates a personal relationship between the artist and their audience. Audiences, due to this feeling that the artist has a sense of "ordinariness", feel as if they can relate to the artist, and feel like in reality they're not so far apart. That they're just like any other normal person with their own social life, hobbies, and more. 

We believe that by following this technique we can create a personality and brand for KIARA that will push the belief to audiences that KIARA isn't some out of touch celebrity who's let success take over her, but is really just your everyday highs school student, who somehow has found herself becoming a rising star in the music industry. This will lead audiences to feeling closer to her, and may also lead them to enjoying her music more and be more willing to support her. However, it is also important to remember that it is common for artists (like the ones that we had previously researched; NIKI, Sabrina Carpenter, etc) to include promotional material for upcoming albums, songs, or music videos, which includes teasers, release posters, and more, as this is how KIARA will be able to communicate, promote, and spread the message to her audience that she will be releasing new music, which will play a large factor in gaining traction and hype for her new release.

Development: 

As a team, we decided that this "ordinariness" approach is the path we want to take with building KIARA's social media page. Thus, we started brainstorming ideas about the different line-up of posts that we would be featuring and publishing on KIARA's instagram account. In the end, we had planned out 12 different social media posts, that have been outlined below by Nayana in an Instagram page layout format.

As per the results of the research conducted, we decided to implement both posts that showcase her real persona, like personal pictures, while also having posts that build hype and promote her music video, like video challenges, release date announcements, and music video teasers.


10 Questions with KIARA:

One post that we thought of that would showcase KIARA's real persona heavily would be the "10 Q's With KIARA" post (2nd row from the bottom, in the middle of the layout), an interview style post where KIARA is asked 10 questions rapidly that aim to showcase her interests, hobbies, and personality. This was heavily inspired from VOGUE's 73 Questions series that it does with various different celebrities. An example of the style we want to do specifically would be their 73 Questions with pop artist Olivia Rodrigo, as seen below: 

With this idea in mind, we began planning out and developing a list of questions that we believe would similarly showcase KIARA's personality. My role here was to formulate a list of questions and answers for the interview that would best represent KIARA. I did this along with Nayana, who originally came up with the following questions:

    1. From 1-10, how excited are you for your newest album?

    2. What is your favorite drink to get?

    3. What is your New Year's resolution and have you stuck to it?

    4. What is your favorite trend from social media?

    5. What is the one thing you must have when you go traveling?

    6. What is your comfort food?
    7. Show us your favorite spot in the set

    8. What is the most precious gift you have received?

    9. What is your favorite activity to do in your free time?

    10. Lastly, deliver a short message for those who are watching right now

After creating this list, she had sent it to me and asked for anything to change. I then altered the list slightly, fixing the structure and content of the questions slightly. After which I provided the Answer List that our actor Jasmine will be able read from, as these answers are what I believe would encapsulate and showcase KIARA's personality in the best way as to relate and engage with audiences (As they are able to look up to her since she is seen as ordinary to her fans). I developed these answers based on stereotypes of standard high school girls that go to International Schools in Indonesia, and other Gen Z stereotypes as well. 

Edited questions list: 

    1. From 1-10, rate how excited you are for your upcoming album release!

    2. What is one drink you can’t find yourself living without?

    3. What is your New Year's resolution and have you stuck to it so far?

    4. What is your current favorite social media trend?

    5. What is one must-have item for you when you go traveling?

    6. What is your comfort food?

    7. Out of all the spots in this set, which one’s your favorite?

    8. What is the most precious gift you have ever received?

    9. What is an activity you love to do during your free time?⁠

    10. Lastly, give us a short message for all the fans who are watching right now!

Answer List: 

    1. gotta be a 10! i’ve put in so much work into this and i hope y’all are all as excited as i am!!

    2. ⁠matchaaa!! (she can hold the drink while filming)

    3. ⁠well, i’ve been trying to get to school on time more often and uhm, thats going about as good as u’d           think it is

    4. ⁠uhmm, (whispers) dont tell anyone but… the dont go insane trend by dpr ian…

    5. ⁠can’t leave this island without my film camera!!

    6. ⁠hmm… tough question! i think nothing could beat bakmie after a long day of school though!

    7. ⁠i think filming at the beach was definitely the most fun i had on set!

    8. ⁠actually, i’m wearing it right noww, this necklace was given to me by my dad, back when he was                still with us, and i’ve never taken it off ever since

    9. ⁠hmm, good question, i think either dancing, or watching musicals have to be one of my favorite                   things ever though!

    10. ⁠thank you guys sosososo much for watchingg, and dont forget to save March 3rd onto your                          calenders! see you guys soon! love youu! (blows kiss)

In the final interview, KIARA's actor Jasmine decided that she wanted to change up some of the answers instead into those which felt more natural for her to say, as she didn't think memorizing all the answers would lead to the interview looking natural. We though this was a good idea as it would hence represent KIARA better. Here is a link to the final interview along with subtitles, that was edited by Nayana, with Sharon's voice asking her the questions in the background.

Feather Dance Challenge: 

As a form of promoting her song and building hype around her music video, while also engaging with and interacting with her fans, we decided that a TikTok Dance Challenge would be an effective form of promotion. This is because TikTok as a social media app has proven to be a very useful tool for artists to promote their songs, and by incorporating it into a dance challenge, which is a very popular trend on the platform, we thus create a large possibility for the song to gain massive popularity on the app, and hence more traction and success for our artist, KIARA. We looked at TikTok to find a dance for the song that our actor Jasmine could do, and found this TikTok dance that uses our song, Feather, and decided to use the dance for our dance challenge. 

Behind the scenes of the filming of our TikTok dance challenge, with KIARA in the middle along with 2 of her friends who also appear in the music video. Filmed by Timo at Lapangan Renon Park.

Here is the link to the final posted dance challenge: Dance Challenge

Teaser: 

To further build hype for the release of the song and music video, artists often create teasers for their music videos that work similarly to movie trailers, as they show the expected date of release of the music video, which allows fans to mark the date on their calendars and engage with other fans to talk about the music video, which generates publicity via word of mouth. The release date we chose to promote for the music video was 03/03/2024, (March 3rd), since it was a repeated date, which tends to look more aesthetically pleasing, and looks nicer to audiences. This teaser was made by Timo using the shots we took during the filming of our music video, where most had not been used on the video itself. The link to the trailer can be seen here: Teaser

Personal Pictures: 

As mentioned in our research, personal pictures of artists play a large part in painting the aura of their ordinariness to audiences, as having them post pictures like selfies, portraits, candids, etc, that audiences themselves post regularly as well, will make KIARA's fans feel like they are just like her. In this sense, it makes KIARA feel just like every other high school student who goes out and posts cute pictures of herself and her friends on social media, and not a rising celebrity pop singer. Importantly, we make a clear difference between professionally taken pictures (such as promotions/adverts for magazines), and personal pictures taken by KIARA herself through the quality of said pictures, as so audiences clearly know this was taken on a personal phone, not a professional camera. Some of these pictures were taken on the 27th of January, and the 8th and 13th of February, when we had shot our scenes for our music video. The other pictures we got were attained by asking KIARA's actor Jasmine to send us selfies and pictures of herself that would fit KIARA's style and social media page. The pictures we uploaded can be seen below, along with some behind the scenes pictures of the taking of the photographs:  

Personal picture of KIARA, taken at Pandawa beach by Timo, on January 27th

Another picture also taken at Pandawa Beach

Picture given to us by KIARA's actor, Jasmine

Selife taken and given to us by Jasmine (blurry, low quality, made to seem personal)

Another selfie taken by Jasmine

Group picture of KIARA and her friends, taken by Timo at Pandawa Beach, as they pretend to take a selfie

Picture of KIARA taken by Timo at Lapangan Renon, on the 13th of February

Audience Engagement (Comments): 

To create a better connection between KIARA and her fans, and to make them feel as if KIARA was a humble and kind person, instead of seeing her as a egotistical artist who didn't care about her fans, we ensured that fans who commented on KIARA's posts were replied to by KIARA, which further allows us to showcase her personality. Below is a screenshot of a few replies that I sent while logged into KIARA's account, to fans who commented on her post. I wrote these comments in a manner that fit the way KIARA communicates through the captions of her post, and in a way that makes her seem relatable to her fans. This was done by copying common texting styles of our Gen Z audience, like texting in all lowercase letters, as well as the use of emojis and exclamation marks to make her seem more friendly.

Reflection: 

Through conducting research on different artists of a similar genre to KIARA, we were able to gain insight onto the kind of posts that we should include in our social media page, and allowed us to create a page that was reflective of KIARA's personality, and was appealing for audiences to look at. We believe we did a good job in creating a brand and personality for KIARA using posts that we created which showcase her personality heavily, like the 10 Q's With KIARA post, dance challenge post, and her personal pictures, along with the captions each post has. Each member of the team played their part, where I specifically gave ideas in the captioning of posts, as well as created answers for KIARA in her 10 Questions post that portray the personality of the sweet, humble beginnings, and charming, and talented girl we intended her to be. Nayana did a great job in creating a layout and professional posts that promoted KIARA, Sharon picked out KIARA's pictures that suited her feed best, while Timo took great photographs of KIARA for us to post.

All in all, there were minimal problems we encountered, however one thing we may have wanted to change would be in the 10 Q's with KIARA post, where we should've been more organized and shot the video while we were at the villa, instead of doing it in the parking lot of Peninsula Island, since it would've matched the feed better, and appear more elegant. However, filming it in the parking lot may make her seem as more of an ordinary person, since she's out and about in a natural environment, and not in some luxurious high-end villa. All things considered though, I'm very happy with my team and I's performance in the creation of this social media page, especially for it being the first time we've ever had to curate a social media page for an artist.