I have always had a love for basketball. I find the sport itself really fun and enjoyable. while the sport is fun and enjoyable, what I really like about the sport is the fact that basketball is so much more than a sport. There is a whole culture and community that surrounds the sport of basketball. There is so many different elements to it. There are the basketball games and the communities that surround it. There is the influence of basketball in shoe culture and fashion. There’s also a huge side of social media that was influenced by basketball.  While I was involved with the shoe culture and the video games related to basketball, I had only scratched the surface of social media and basketball. I wanted to get a deeper dive into basketball-related social media. I have a favourite player and I started an Instagram fan page for that player.

The page was an area where I could share basketball mixtapes that I made as well as to show my appreciation for the player. The page originally started of called “Kyrie got handles”. Almost instantly I was immersed into the world of basketball fan pages. I had been added to Basketball fan page group chats. I meant fan pages along the way that also shared a similar interest in the player and we talked about how to grow out pages and our common interests. One particular conversation I remember was a conversation with another kyrie fan page from Belgium. He helped me change my name to what it is currently and helped me grow my page the most. I changed my name to “Irvingmotion” and the rest was history. I started to grow rapidly gaining around 500 followers in a month or 2. This is where I met my first struggles, I was too focused on making my page grow that working on my mixtapes. I had used hashtags unrelated to basketball to help my page grow and after some time I started to lose my following. I dropped down to 350 followers in a week. I was devastated, I had worked hard on my mixtapes and I was doing well, but it all seemed like it was over. I took a small break and after finding motivation, I started the page again.  I wasn’t getting as many likes as before but I started the slow grind back to gaining followers. I started doing mixtapes again( the reason I had started the page) and didn’t worry too much about the response( likes, comments etc.). I started to grow again and I ended up reaching 800 followers. I got noticed by some teammates of kyrie and his sister too! In the end, I had to give up on the page for a while due to school but home to rekindle the passion to run the page after high school is over.

Running the page taught me a lot. For one it taught me video editing skills as I  had to make my own mixtapes to stand out from the other fan pages. The page had also originally started because of my interest in editing basketball mixtapes with highlights and I just wanted a place to share it. The page also taught me about perseverance as I had lows in the performance of the page but I had to keep on going, and it ended up turning out for the better

 

.(Posts on my page. Mostly mixtapes with picture and videos mixed in.)

 

 

 

 

(Post that blew up to help my page grow)