andrew alimbuyuguen

Responsibilities

As a designer at a startup, I had to balance my time between many projects in any given week at Unikrn. I provided design support to both marketing and product teams, and found myself bouncing around different projects that had me working on motion graphics ads for European and Australian betting markets and designing online assets and banners for the home page and eCommerce section. I even took on non-design roles to support the company, such as managing our company's Instagram account to engage with our audience. While I managed the account, our follower count grew from around 200 followers to 2,000 within the span of a few months.

Instagram Growth hacking & Social Management

Instagram has recently become one of the most popular and fast-growing social media outlets for engaging with an audience. Having a successful Instagram account means barring a large amount of followers as well as a having a large amount of interactions (i.e. "Likes" and “Comments”) on posts. Once you have an engaged audience, you can begin to convert followers to users on your platform. But this is all easier said than done, how does a company meet these requirements and take advantage of social media marketing?

I was approached to manage and maintain the company Instagram when I was first on-boarded as a full-time employee for Unikrn, after my internship with them. I would soon find out that posting pictures every day would not cut it if we were ever to reach a large following. What I found after researching was that a lot different aspects come into play when trying to grow a following on social media.

Audience &  relevant Content

The first and most important point to make when planning your social media stragegy is to identify your audience, whether that be food bloggers, entrepreneurs, or, in this case, gamers. We identify this metric to better cater our content and posts to the audience’s interests. The next step is to produce relevant and visually pleasing content.

growth

Once we’ve hit these points the next point to think about is growth hacking. Growth hacking is the process in which rapid experiments across marketing channels are used to identify the most effective and efficient way to grow an engaged user base. For Unikrn, I experimented with posting at different times of day, using different hashtags, and taking advantage of 3rd party automation services.

First was to find out the best time of day to post content. Instagram heat maps show a large uptick during the hours people commute to work, are on lunch breaks, commuting home from work and in bed before sleeping. These are roughly the best times for businesses to post content. I found that posting around 12:00pm worked best for Unikrn.

#hashtags

Another really interesting trend to take advantage of is the usage of hashtags. Hashtags are a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) used to identify specific topics i.e. #videogames. The use of hashtags on posts captions helps your audience find your content. An active feature on Instagram and other social media outlets is being able to search content with a specific hashtag. If one searches #videogames, one’s feed is aggregated with content tagged with said topic. In its adolescence, an Instagram account with the intent to grow should pack as much relevant hashtags into a caption as possible.

3rd-party automation services

Lastly, another point to consider is 3rd-party services that will automate certain tasks for you. While at Unikrn, we made the decision to subscribe to a service that would automate liking certain posts with certain hashtags for us that would run 24-hours a day. This would, for the most part, be the very first instance of an Instagram user engaging with our account. They would see that we liked one of their photos and would investigate more about what our page is as well as what our company is about. In return, a large follower base would show that our page is credible and if we’ve done all steps right receive a follow.

MARKETING ASSETS

A unique and new opportunity that was given to me at Unikrn was being the marketing team's only designer. This would gave me a chance to sit in on a lot of high profile meetings, offering design support to what would eventually become exclusive offer ad commercials, investor presentations, sales decks, social media assets and event campaigns.

PRODUCT PRODUCTION

Lastly, luckily due to an overflow of work I was able to contribute to our product design. My contributions mainly fell within the field of production design. I was responsible for designing game icons, country icons, link thumbnails, article artwork and general file structuring. While at times tedious and demanding, the work is worthwile once all the moving pieces come together as one.