One last post to sum up my experience this semester...

Through this class I have learned a lot about a variety of social media platforms, and many more intricate details about how they work and how you can make the most of them than I knew before.  I had a strategic sense of a few of the big tools and how they work, but now I have more of a working and operational knowledge of them.  Constant Contact is a good example.  I’ve provided content for newsletters before, but until this class I had never used all the different gadgets in Constant Contact to put a whole newsletter together.  Knowing how to do that and what you can do with Constant Contact gives me a better sense of how to best contribute to newsletters in the future and how I can take on building my own newsletter from scratch.  The same is true for Facebook.  I’ve created content for others to put on Facebook, but I had never built a company page before or used Facebook analytics or created posts that were not timed to go out immediately.  Now that I am more familiar with some of the details of how facebook can work, I can devise better Facebook strategies. 

Overall this class has given me confidence in my own abilities and a sense that if I do take on leadership of social media for a company, I know the basics of how to do it.  It also helped me to see that there is a lot that goes into it.  Just writing one blog can take a long time if you are trying to write something thoughtful that helps your audience and shows that you are a leader or expert in your field.  Also, images are so important.  Investing in collecting powerful images is an important part of a social media strategy that cuts across all of the tools we have been using. 

I have also learned a bit more about social media as a listening strategy and I am beginning to understand how to learn from social media. 

I am glad that I have our texts and lectures to look back on some day if I ever do move forward with a company or take on a greater leadership role in social media for a job in the future.  But I will remember to think about what has changed between this class and whenever I implement these ideas, and I will remember to keep my eye out for what’s next.  I will watch out for where my target audience is engaging and I will go to them there, listen to them there, and create value for them there. I look forward to it!!

Week 14: Tools

I outlined the platforms we would use in the first post of the week.  Those were a blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter feed.  As far as other tools go, I would also want to use an editorial calendar to plan out the content we would develop and post over time, with some wiggle room for responsiveness to whatever is popular or new on the web.  Because our man-power will be initially limited, I would expect to spend an average of about 1-2 hours myself each day (or at least work day) on this stuff and expect about the same from my husband. Whenever we are setting up multiple Facebook posts we might spend more time than on other days.  We each come to the table with different skills.  He has the expertise in our content area, and I have the stronger communications and writing skills.  So I would be the one mostly managing everything and editing and doing a lot of writing, while Chris looked out for important engineering trends and wrote the more complex technical stuff.

I would want to use something like Google Drive, but I don’t really like Google’s actual tools all that much.  For example, I have had a lot of problems with the functionality of their spreadsheets and a lot of times the documents don’t want to open or look different when you “view” compared to download.  If we are doing a lot of things remotely and it doesn’t make sense to just have one computer be our “home base,” I might want to look into something like a sharepoint site or basecamp.  Or we could set up a gmail account and store documents in different archived folders until we grow out of that kind of simplistic system. 

I would definitely want to use some form of scheduling.  At this point I think we’d be ok with just Facebook’s built-in scheduling tools, but we may decide to upgrade to something like a Hootsuite if that plus our editorial calendar are not enough to keep us organized.

I’d definitely use all the analytics I could.  I’d use analytic data on our web site traffic, facebook page, and twitter posts.  I’d see what types of content were most popular on each platform and which types were popular on all the platforms.  I’d test out different things and see what works.  First though, I’d focus on getting our name out there to the right people and building a small cadre of followers whose opinion I felt really represented the opinion of the types of people we are targeting.

The first month would look something like this:

Week 1
M: Post a launch blog, share through FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 2
M: Post a video on Youtube channel, share through blog, FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 3
M: Post a blog, share through FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 4
M: Post something to FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 14: Comments

I posted comments on the blogs of Hillenbrand, Mac;  Jeon, Hyo Yoo; Kalinin, Karl; and Martin, Brittany. 

Week 14: Strategy

My overall aims for social media would be to spread interest in and awareness of the opportunity to increase resource-use efficiency in beer brewing to positively impact the planet and breweries’ long-term bottom lines while positioning my company as the ideal partner for breweries to contract with to achieve that double bottom line outcome.  With that in mind, I would probably want to approach my social media framework as follows…

Host a blog on our home page.  This would be the place where we show our expertise and contribute our own voice to the online conversation.  We would also invite guest bloggers with complementary perspectives, highlight relevant events, share videos (from our youtube channel), and more.  The blog would be our sort of home base.  Anything that we want to push through other channels could have its longer-version in the blog so people could go there for more information and it would be integrated into our company’s main site. We’d probably blog about once every two weeks to start.

We’d also use Facebook and Twitter in order to be where most of the people are.  Facebook would be used as a place to push out blogs as well as other content like photos, videos, posters, and other engaging media.  We would probably use time management strategies (like scheduling posts in Facebook) to set up about one Facebook post a day and then just let it ride unless we see something viral that we could share or comment on.  We’d probably use twitter as another place for pushing out content from our blog, but have that mostly as a place where we see what’s up and make comments or share most of the time.  Also we’d use Facebook and Twitter as ways to listen to the community.  I’d want to do something on Twitter about every day – at least every work day.  This we’d probably do real time since it would mostly be responding, retweeting and the like rather than set up a bunch on Monday to run through Friday, for example.

I would probably not start out with a newsletter, but I would definitely want to have a subscription feature for our blog so that people could get emails whenever we posted a new one.  If we have time for a newsletter, that is something I would consider adding in the future.

I mentioned a YouTube channel.  That seems like a good thing to have that we could just use whenever we have video.  I wouldn’t invest as much in creating videos as in some of the other efforts, but I would want to do some videos and those videos need to be hosted somewhere so they can be embedded in the web and easily shared.  Our YouTube channel would be that location.

Each of these tools I feel comfortable with and I feel like they can suit our company well.  Right now the company doesn’t exist.  At the start, if we start it, it will likely only be me and my husband.  For that reason I think we need to keep our social media efforts lean and targeted, but we should not skip them.  Social media is a marker of a serious business these days.  It is a way for us to prove engineering expertise, which is what we are selling.  That makes social media a pretty valuable strategy for us.  I would expect to spend about 8 hours a week on social media and I would expect my husband to spend about eight hours every two weeks working on the more in-depth blogs.  I can edit them and do most of the other stuff.  I’d need to also build up some engineering knowledge to spot good things to talk about online, and I’d need him to track what’s happening in social media and make sure we focus on the best content to share and respond to.  He loves social media, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too much of a burden to him as he works to get the actual engineering done.  J

Week 13 Facebook Insights

Now that I can see all the Insights, I have access to a lot more Facebook analytics.  Neat!  I can see movement in how many people are liking my page, as well as the total number.  I can see my overall post reach, post clicks, and the popularity of each post separately.  I can see post reach by organic vs. paid reach, how many people are liking, commenting and sharing on any given day, as well as how many people are hiding or unliking my page.  I can see total likes and net likes on a graph by the day, which is pretty cool.  I can’t yet see where my page likes came from.  Demographic data is currently unavailable.  I’m not sure if that’s a facebook error or if I need more likes to see that.  Overall very cool information!!