General insights on content strategy and engagement: 

• When shooting and conceptualising content, it was important to highlight the more personal, behind-the-scenes aspect of working with Arts Centre Melbourne.

• To maximise viewer retention, IG stories were made to feel personal and spontaneous. To encourage viewer retention, I made sure the first story of each set looked like a spontaneous selfie and accompanied by copy that was short and teased the theme of the story set.

• Another important strategy for retaining viewers and encouraging engagement was the variety of media within each IG Story Set. To increase the likelihood of followers clicking through all stories, I balanced still selfies with videos, production shots, and shots of the script/laptop to make stories feel dynamic and exciting instead of repetitive.

• The lo-fi selfies of myself “in the office” or “working from home” were crucial to keeping the posts relatable. This framing allowed me the freedom to explore Miss Peony’s topics using my own voice whilst balancing the posts’ inherent promotional nature.

Posts with highest retention of views across series:

• The ACM Office IG story set maintained the highest retention of views, retaining 89.78% of viewers throughout the 4 stories. 

• This is closely followed by two sets that both retained 89.52% of viewers: the Beauty Pageant-themed IG story set posted on Thurs 20 July at 5:17pm and the Magic realism IG story set posted on Mon 31 July at 3:48pm.

• The time of posting very much influenced the number of viewers. The stories posted between 3:30pm-5:30pm noticeably attracted more viewers than stories posted outside of those times. However, retention rates remained above 86% across all posts. 

Posts with overall best engagement:

• The ACM Office IG story set posted on Wed 12 July at 5:09pm had the best overall engagement with a total of 38 Reacts, 14 Replies, 9 Shares, and 16 ACM Website Clicks. 

• This is followed by the Opening Night Fashion IG story set posted on Thurs 3 Aug at 12:36pm with a total of 67 Reacts, 10 Replies, 108 Poll Votes, and 3 ACM Website Clicks.

• No significant correlation between the level of post-engagement and day of the week.