Calming core – Our progress

Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/calmingcore/

At the beginning of this semester I was adamant to create a page surrounding anxiety and ways I have found to cope with anxiety at home. I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it, but one thing that stuck with me was FEFO and the idea that failing was a normal process. The idea of being vulnerable and providing my audience with my own experience terrified me, but I knew my own experiences and being vulnerable is what makes this project what it is.

At the beginning, Lili and I worked tirelessly to come up with the perfect name and theme. We surrounded our project around this main idea of ‘calmness’ and creating a space people can come to for openness, learning others experiences, and to experience new and creative ways to help themselves whenever they are in a tough situation. Our idea worked well with the concept FIST (Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny) as it’s already something we deal with everyday.

Audience:

Defining our audience, I believe, was one of the hardest parts of this process. People who suffer from anxiety or experience overwhelming stress don’t have one particular look, we are very sparse, unique, but we share a common feeling. As a community, we focused on building a starter pack that portrayed the common interests or feelings between us and our audience. Due to this idea of ‘framing’ and ‘reframing’ our audience starter pack went from this:

to this:

We focused on identifying ourselves, and as our page grew so did our knowledge of who our audience was. Our audience are people who feel scared, alone, and confused. They don’t feel in control and are searching for natural ways that don’t ‘cure’ but they help to calm ourselves down and to help cope with the emotions that can overwhelm our body and minds.

Feedback:

Over this process we have received various amounts of feedback across all media platforms. Our most recent feedback came from ‘R U OK day’ where we used our platforms to start a conversation surrounding anxiety. We did this through sharing a post, as well as engaging with our audience through instagram stories where we reached out to our audience to provide some insight into the biggest advice that was given to them, and we shared their responses via instagram stories anonymously. This was to provoke our audiences to engage with each other and to help each other anonymously…we plan to continue this sort of engagement further and hopefully increase audience engagement.

We have learnt the best way to engage with our audience to keep our page as realistic and relatable as we strive to curate, is via instagram stories. We have done heavy research into what works best in order to keep audience interaction, and articles such as ‘Increase Your Instagram Engagement in 8 Easy Steps‘ by Caitlin Hughes has been extremely informative and provides points that we have been attempting to try.

Just a few messages we have received ^^^

Collaborations:

We have so far featured in the Chàe media magazine which was a lot of fun to be involved in.

We are hoping that throughout this semester we can have more engagement with other accounts and possibly be involved in more collaborations overtime.

What’s in the future?

As stated in the pitch we are hoping to expand our page onto a bigger platform such as a blog, but the time has not be right just yet. What I mean by this is, we want our audience to be invested in our page, to engage more, as well as we are hoping for a larger following. We want our blog to be the best it can be. Instagram a great place to start and to build an audience as well as creating a connection with our audience. However, as stated by in ‘The Blog Design’,

Even though talking in the long run, the audience base generated on the blogging website is more genuine as compared to social media platforms such as Instagram. The reason being, a blog is more accessible and useful to readers, so they will tend to visit the site regularly when they like the content.

As I am still only learning how to cope with anxiety, and as my anxiety grows worse, we are not only helping others with this page, but we are also helping ourselves. Coping with anxiety is not an easy task, it’s something that takes time, experimentation and a lot of mental strength. This is why we strive to be as honest and truthful as we can be, and also why we encourage our audience to provide their own insights. We are each on a path of learning and healing, and we are all doing it together. We still have so much work to do but I am super happy with what we have pulled off so far. I’m excited to see how much more we can do with this project.

References:

Blog designer, “Blogging vs Instagram: Which one is better?”, https://wpblogdesigner.net/blogging-vs-instagram/#:~:text=Even%20though%20talking%20in%20the,when%20they%20like%20the%20content.

Caitlin hughes, “Increase Your Instagram Engagement in 8 Easy Steps”, https://blog.iconosquare.com/increase-your-instagram-engagement/