The first social media we took a look at, we used throughout the whole semester and yes, it is blogger. Blogger is Google's blogging site and can be very useful for all types of business'. It also acted as a foundation to all our other social media outlets, meaning there were links to our others sites like Facebook and twitter. We consistently posted in blogger every Wednesday to show that the people running social media sites for companies must keep their audiences informed on a regular basis. Most of our posts were open to us to talk about what we wanted but a few of them had themes. This was perfect for real life business examples because when things like holiday come around, a company should definitely play into them to excite the public. In a real life scenario, I would definitely use this but maybe a different site.
The next site we were introduced to was twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service so like blogger, we can continually post to the piblic but only 140 characters or less at a time. Twitter has become massive world wide and is very important to business' to be on it. It is also a very important social media avenue for individuals like artists so this would be essential to my business if I'm sponsoring and networking with them all day. For class, we were to post 3 to 5 times a day in a logically sporadic fashion, meaning we were to hit our public with the right information not all at once. We also practiced retweeting our other classmates tweets when relevant. This showed us that looking out for one another can greatly increase your followers. Twitter is a very smart idea and will stay around for a long time. We were taught about EEI which stands for entertain, engage, and inform. We were taught that they are all three important and help your social media pages flourish. It is smart to cover the range of them and especially the ones your public is looking for. The high majority of my tweet were to entertain as I was displaying many artists and bands.https://twitter.com/Platform4PG/media
After Twitter, we moved onto Facebook. I am most comfortable with Facebook because I use it almost everyday of my life as does most of the world. I also ended up having a majority of entertainment posts which makes sense for my business. This leads into the buddy media report which we learned about in class. it showed us the correct times for what business' to post. My company technically fell into the entertainment category. The report showed that most of my type of business' post Saturday to Monday when in reality, they should be posting Monday through Thursday. This makes sense to me as most people use their days off to get out and entertain themselves away from a computer. In a real life situation, this would definitely be one I'd use.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Platform4-inclass/1424049521174197
Now, Hootsuite was different than all the others. Hootsuite is a social media aggregator. This means you can sign up all your social media accounts and schedule posts and things through it for future dates and times. This can be extremely handy when you have a business that needs to post a lot on different mediums. It was kind of hard and weird right away but after a couple uses, I became used to it. I also didn't use it much for this class but in a real life scenario, I would use this only if I had a larger business.
We next moved into Pinterest. I personally really like this one! Pinterest is like an open paged board where posts can be placed. They also can be tagged or "badged." People can comment and favorite them and search by key words you tag them with. I like it so much because its much more visual than a lot of the other ones.
A very cool concept Laurie introduced us to this year was niche networks. A niche network is just like other social media networks but it is narrowed down specifically for certain users. We were to find niche networks that connected to our business. I came across a site called Behance.net. After working through it, I found I like the site much, I created a personal profile to use. It has the feel of Pinterest but through your profile, you create an Online Portfolio. All the things you post to the site connect back to the specific artist. You can also search by specific types of art and mediums which I really liked. Another amazing feature to this site the the job listing aspect of it. It contains an area where you can post or search for jobs. The search engine for this has things like area, field, and types. This niche site would be perfect for my business as it brings all types of art together and it helps the artists connect. I really enjoyed this one!!Podcasts come next in the semester. I've done these before and am pretty comfortable with them. I have a few artists I follow pretty closely on their podcasts and am actually listening to one right now. For class, we were guided to a software called audacity. For me, I thought it was really poor and hard to use and because I have done them before, I just used my Garageband software on my mac computer. This made the whole creation aspect of it much easier. I was able to do it in one take which was also very nice. I used my favorite piece of personal equipment for it as well; The Blue Yeti Pro microphone.
All in all, this semester was definitely worth my time. While I already have a really good handle on most the social media avenues we were taught on, I got to find out some really cool information and information that will be very beneficial to me in the future for the work force. The weekly post were tedious but mirrored exactly how it really is. My favorite new information I came across from the class was the niche networks. It's something I truly pulled into my regular life and it has changed it for the better. The things I didn't enjoy the most were the daily posts but they are necessary and we also have things like Hootsuite to give us a path to help this. In the end of it all, I really enjoyed this class. It has given me some information I will use later in life and also helped me build relationships, online and offline.
~PGarry
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