I decided that, as well as having my short film on YouTube, that it would benefit from some other kind of promotion so that people know where to go to see my short film. So, I decided to promote my short film on my make-up artist Instagram, I wanted to promote it here for a few reasons, first because, as well as being the director, producer and every other role, I was the make-up artist for this short film which is what my Instagram is about. And secondly, my Instagram is set to the business setting so I can see all the insights and analytics of my page, including information about my audience like age and gender which shows that the audience I have on my Instagram page is the same audience that I am trying to reach with my short film.

I typically post in sets of 3 on Instagram so that my page is very appealing to look at and looks clean and clear, so to match this style I had to post 3 posts to promote this film in order to not mess up the look of my page. As this page is a makeup account, the rest of my pictures are obviously quite bright and colourful, so to help these posts stand out against this I posted 3 completely monochrome stills from my short film. Each had the same description explaining what this post was for and sending the viewers to the link in my bio that would send the, to my video.

Another advantage to using Instagram to promote my work is that I could utilise the use of hashtags. Hashtags are very important on Instagram and help get your post to people who may not follow your work through using relevant hashtags, you can use up to 30 at a time to increase the chance of getting your post seen by more people. Here is a screenshot of the hashtags I used to promote my work:

Although I am sure all this extra promotion will help my work get seen and I am happy enough with just this, plus shares on Facebook and other social media platforms, to help my work get seen by a wider audience, I do wish the ‘swipe up’ option was available for me to use. The ‘swipe up’ feature is used very commonly but celebrities or YouTubers to promote a video or website or any type of link, I had never looked into this really before now and didn’t really know how to use it but thought it would be a great way of promoting my work some more. This feature makes it a lot easier for people to get to my YouTube link without having to leave the Instagram app or go onto a separate part of the app to find a link. Unfortunately this is what I found when googling about how to use this feature:

This is a real shame because I am neither verified or have over 10,000 followers, I really think if this feature was available for me to use it could have helped a lot but, oh well, its not and I am still more than pleased with the amount of promotion I can do.