Recently I was scrolling through Instagram when I was served a video of 3255s 2023 bot throwing a ring, to my surprise, the video had around (iirc) 30 million views, and lots of my friends (from around the country, none of which knew anything about frc) had liked it. Seeing that video, and the multiple other 10m+ view videos of theirs made me wonder about how effective those videos are at spreading awareness of FRC. Do you think people are learning anything about FRC after watching them, or just scrolling on?
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yippee!
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I think people are becoming more aware of FRC just as a thing that exists, not necessarily what the organization is. I expect people who watch SuperNURDs will have other teams recommended to them, which then are recognizable as the same type of thing as the other videos. Hey, maybe FRC will become trendy and more teams will skyrocket in views. Yippee!
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As long as people don’t go “hey I love battlebots this is awesome” and keep scrolling.
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I had a video of our 2021-2022 robot doing the level three climb posted on my social media and overnight the video went off and had over 2 million views which is crazy for my account. the comments were engaging, people asking what this is? and even some giving recommendations on how to fix our swinging issue, it was a lot of fun. I tried to answer as many as I could, so I think it helps, especially if just one person looks into it further. I have not had the kind of success on any subsequent videos i think alot of it has to do with the task at hand climbing those monkey bars super exciting to watch
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hey, battlebots is what got me into FRC
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Instagram Reel for those who haven’t seen
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Totally valid. But there’s plenty of people that see FRC and think “wow this is really lame compared to battlebots, they’re just moving cubes around”. Any posts that get people interested in FRC for being FRC are a win in my book though.
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Quick disclaimer: I’m not primarily on our media team. I’m just signed into our Instagram account.
Even on our end, it’s hard to measure how much we are impacting the overall public perception of FRC. There’s no easy way of telling if someone is in FRC or not. However, we do get comments and direct messages asking what the program is, what the robot is for, etc. There are definitely people outside of FIRST who learn about the program through our videos- It’s just hard to get a metric.
All I can (personally) tell you are the numbers that Instagram makes it easy to get; 17.9M non-followers reached in the last 90 days, and 812K non-followers engaged/interacted in the last 90 days. For some reason, Instagram limits you to the past 90 days for general metrics, but its probably possible to get lifetime metrics somehow.
I (or @Eli_Uva_3255) can try to answer any questions you guys have about our socials, but do keep in mind that we’re all new to this. Our Instagram had 2k followers in April. We’re as surprised as you are. I’m still in disbelief that my most popular quote is now “Yippee!”
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Something ive been wondering is whether you intentionally design your reels for a broad appeal. When planning a reel do you specifically consider what would be the most likely to go viral or be interesting/entertaining to non-FRC people, or do you just try to make cool videos involving your robots and hope they see success?
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It’s a mix of both. Most of our media consists of us doing work in our shop, thinking “man, this will/does look cool/interesting,” and then recording it and posting it. On our Instagram and primary YouTube channel, we take further consideration to post things that can be interesting to those in and outside of FRC. Any content that we think will apply to those in FRC but not to a general audience gets put on our second YouTube channel and linked on our build thread.
We aren’t necessarily trying to be “viral”, but we like posting things that can apply to everyone.
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Can’t speak for 3255 but videos in the 10 second range that get right to the action tend to be good for engagement and rewatched.
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Yall guys’ bumper mounting… i’d love to read up on that more.
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hey I love battlebots this is awesome
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I believe we are planning on making this year’s bumpers sometime this week… I’ll make sure we post about them on our build thread. The mounts should be similar or identical to the ones on our off-season robot. Expect a post soon (potentially later today, probably within the week). Never mind, just see Blake’s reply below
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We do consider the length of the reel/short while we film it. Exactly like you said, we prefer filming “short and sweet” videos more, and those typically get put on our main socials. They’re also easier to film and require less editing
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Our bumpers are almost an exact copy of 1678 bumper mounting from 2022. They worked extremely well and were very easy to make. We will be doing the same again this year
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Ah I see. I will say the premise of FRC is a lot more complex than battlebots anyway. We have a totally different game with a 200 page rulebook each year so someone without any knowledge in the field will likely not understand it at all, whereas battlebots is just destruction which anyone can understand without even knowing anything about robotics. It would be great if it was more appealing to the masses but most people just cant follow it, i know for a fact it took quite awhile to explain the last few games to my family and friends since they just don’t seem to grasp the purpose of it all.
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So depending on your settings (account type may have different settings) for Instagram, or if you’re using Meta Business suite you can get these metrics for farther back.
It may only say last 90 days on the specific post metrics because it’s a newer post?
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Thank you for all of the support on our social media! We have been having a blast posting our program and love to share our discoveries/designs!
It is definitely crazy our social media is getting so widely viewed! As @acat mentioned earlier we only had 2k followers towards the start of 2023, and have just recently passed 50k. It all started because of this instagram reel of our robot’s shooter getting jammed in 2021 that unexpected got 49k views. This short video showed us that reaching a semi large audience was possible if we stayed consistent with uploading short easily enjoyable content.
Going further into our instagram analytics, during certain months we have seen upwards of 50% of viewership be from countries outside the U.S. leading us to believe we are definitely reaching a new audience outside of FIRST. There isn’t really a language barrier on videos which allows us to reach a much larger audience. Additionally, we have also calculated our total view count is roughly 60 million, and almost 55 million was over the past 6 months, and we now try to post at least once a week to all our of pages year round. After obtaining a decent following, other large social media organizations like Whistle Sports, And WevolverApp, had reposted a few of our videos which also contributed to some growth. Additionally instagram typically will continue to recommend your page’s videos if you remain consistent, and will even recommend old videos, which is where many of our views have come from.
To speak for our content, we always try to just post short engaging videos that can be enjoyed by most people even if they have never seen anything robotics related. We have found short form content has been great for this! Additionally uploading short from content to our YouTube channel, does a great job of bringing new viewers to our long for videos like weekly recaps.
As a final note, we love to see other teams videos as well and it we have taken great inspiration from their media, especially from 624, 3309, 125, 1619, and 3847.
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