The second phase intervention has been conducting for three weeks. I would like to reflect respectively on the progress of the social media account operation on Xiaohongshu and the campaign The Wandering Camera in this post.

Test on Xiaohongshu

In the past three weeks, I have made 12 posts on Xiaohongshu with different types of content. I have probably experiences three different stages during this period in terms of data performance.

In the first week and the half, I just followed my plan of posting things within the five types as I mentioned in the earlier journal (https://22047852.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2024/10/18/unit-4-start-phase-ii-intervention/), and simultaneously, I shared the link of home page of this account on WeChat Moments, which was an online platform accessible to my friends on WeChat, to get some initial support and network flows from people who knew me.

These helped me get some support from some of the participants in the first phase intervention, my friends and family members, but as a new account, it was hard to quickly attract attentions from the public. The page views were quite low with an average of 100 views for each post, which led me to the data anxiety. Therefore, I started the investigation into the traffic mechanism of Xiaohongshu to look for methods to get higher flows.

Then I did two things. First, I spent 300 yuan (£33) on platform promotions, which helped my post get a higher exposure in home page streams of Wenzhou citizens detected by the algorithm. Second, I participated in some campaigns initiated by Xiaohongshu official accounts by relating my posts with the recent hot topics such as ‘documenting my city’ and ’Fashion is a cycle’ on Xiaohongshu and adding corresponding tags to get more free flows.

After that, even though there were more “likes” from viewers for each post, they tended to keep silent rather than commenting under the posts. The data performance was not satisfying enough to show the engagement of people. This happened in the last week, the time when I almost wanted to define this online intervention as a practice difficult to take effect in a short term.

However, an unexpected twist happened three days ago. I improvised a new post regarding the Festival of MAAI, in which I just shared my concern that I had no idea what I could demonstrate during the Festival. Surprisingly, this arouse people’s willingness to share their knowledge and preference in terms of city culture. The number of both comments of this post and followers of the account has been continuously growing.

This post seems to generate a new type: problem-solving interactions. To speculate a bit more, I guess such a problem-solving interaction provide people with a virtual space to engage in a specific problem under the city cultural theme, thus leading to people’s desires to suggest solutions triggered by their sense of belonging as well as their prides towards the city. At the same time, those citizens who have engaged in the discussion might be curious about the progress of my Festival display and consequently follow the account to track the development.

However, I am not sure whether this can be a new mode for this account to develop further, or this is just a sudden stroke of good luck. I will keep on exploring by continuously posting my progress relevant to the Festival, as at the same time share other types of content.

The Wandering Camera

The progress of this campaign is not as quick as I expected. As three weeks have passed, there were only three photos shoot by the participants and the camera has been held by the fourth participant for almost a week. But fortunately the camera has not been lost, and the online shared document is still alive to document where the participants took the pictures.

Although I should not negatively evaluate this practice just because the progress is slower than my expectation, emotionally I still hope this campaign could be done before the course ends. The only thing I can do is to remind the person who hold the camera to finish the task as soon as possible.

See what will happen next!