Week 14 - Final Thoughts

I'm actually surprised to say how much I enjoyed this class.  Up until now, I've done everything to avoid using social media.  I work in the computer field and I didn't want to have to come home and see hundreds of posts from people I knew.  I didn't have a Facebook account at all because of that.  I didn't even really know what Twitter was used for.  I had heard and signed up for Instagram, but I only have a few friends like my daughters and nieces so that I could see pictures they posted and keep up with what they were doing, which by the way I really love being able to do that.

I actually signed up for the class because I run New Song Online Church and social media kept coming up in my mind as a way to reach out to people who aren't in our church.  With 3000 members, if we could get word out to everyone they knew, then that would be a huge reach. The problem I ran into was that the social media for New Song was already handled and I didn't have control over it. So I switched gears and started to think about how we might use social media for a small home business that we have.

Many times along that path I wanted to just say it was too much work for the return on investment, but the week that we had to design ads and target groups really kind of changed my thinking.  In that exercise I was able to see that we could very specifically target different sections of people to potentially get new business, and that we could tailor the efforts to those different groups of people.  Bingo!  Suddenly, it all made more sense and I began to have a vision.

As for where we'll go with this, I think we'll try to target Facebook groups and see if that actually does return enough to make the time investment worth it.  Now that I have a better understanding of the social media tools that are available and what they do, we can see if there's anything else we could do with those. At this point, I'm not really sure.

In the end, I'm really glad I took the class and I feel like I'm much better equipped to forge out into the social media world - something that I was not before the class started. It's been a fun and eye opening experience for me.

Week 14 - Social Media Strategy

This semester has been really eye opening for me. I really had tried to stay away from Social Media.  I work in the computer field and really didn't want to spend all day at the computer and then have to come home and keep up with social media all night. However, I've found myself pretty ignorant and not understanding how to use it.  I started out the semester with the intention to understand more about social media for our Online Church, since I thought that would be a good way to reach new people and let them know that's available, but what I found was that there is really a good social media presence for New Song already... though it's not effectively promoting Online Church.  But that's a topic for discussion with them.

I then shifted my focus to our family business that my husband runs. I was actually surprised that social media will be a good way to reach out for our business.   We don't have any employees besides my husband, and really don't have any budget to invest in paying for advertising.  In spite of this, I do think that developing a strategy for social media is to our advantage.  I think there are plenty of things we can do with no budget that will work for us. However, we will need to probably phase in various different types of social media so that we can keep up with them.

Facebook will be our main strategy to begin with.  I liked the way that you could develop different groups of people and target them with different types of information.  We will develop strategies to reach:

• Individuals that are interested in BBQ and entertaining in our San Diego area. These are people that could genuinely be interested in the covers that we provide.  
• Restaurant owners and managers that have outdoor seating areas as we can and have provided covers for tables and chairs to protect them from getting ruined by sun and salt. 
• Corporation facility managers who may have equipment that need covers that are outside. 

For each of these groups we will develop a marketing strategy, since they wouldn't all be interested in the same types of information. 

I think our posts would probably be once a week, since that is what the search engines look for. Honestly, I don't think we could come up with enough interesting content for more than once a week. Posting pictures of our covers, recipes for people entertaining, tips on how to more effectively use your grill, and calls to action asking for contact about covers will be what we will focus on.  Hopefully over time we'll be able to dream up some other categories that will be interesting. 

Twitter will probably be our next focus, as there can be conversations that occur that would let us know about people interested in finding covers.  The fact that we are such a local business, really limits the reach that we would have with this. We would have to monitor it for a while and see if we would even get any interesting information.  As I searched during class, there really wasn't much that I could find. 

Pinterest may be a place to post recipes and pictures of the covers, so we could look into that, as Instagram might be a place to post pictures. 

So, with our limited budget, we will be looking at doing things that don't cost anything or very little.  Despite our budget, I think we could still benefit from using social media.

Week 14 - Posts I've responded to

Maranda Carlton
Chris Deddo
Tiffany Edwards
Tina Freyberger

Week 14 - Social Media Strategy

For our business I think that Facebook is probably the best strategy. That seemed to be the most effective in the work we've done in class. The marketing segments can target the people that we need to target. I think we would probably do this weekly.  We don't really have that much going on to post daily, although we should check the page daily and if there are comments we could reply to them.

Twitter would be another to check daily and respond to.

For less frequent posts, I think a blog could be used monthly.

Week 13 Facebook Analytics

After getting enough likes on my Facebook page, I am finally able to view the Analytics information. I found it really helpful.  It gives you information on trends for your page. It has information about:

• Likes - Because of the instructions to like each other's pages, I saw a spike in likes this week.  This will be a good statistic to watch to see if we are reaching new people each week.  It will also tell you whether the like came because of a paid ad, or if it is organic.   This would be good to monitor if we pay for ads, to see if they are actually generating any new followers.
• Reach - This statistic will tell you how many people your post reached and whether it generated and likes or comments. This would be good to track the time of day you are posting to see whether it is reaching the intended audience.  If the reach is poor, then maybe we would try a different time or day. 
• Visits - This statistic will show you how many people are visiting your page and when.  This also would help with knowing whether you are reaching people, and then what times might be good for posts.
• Posts - This page will show what posts you have made.  This is interesting because it also shows when the people who like you are online. 
• People - This statistic will show you gender demographics on who likes your page and also what country / language they are from. 

The analytics here are good, but they are not as sophisticated as what Google Analytics provide.

Week 13 - Google Analytics

Our assignment this week was to look at Google Analytics, which looks at web activity and allows you to analyze who is visiting your site, how many people are visiting, how long they stay, and a bunch of other information.   All I can say is Wow!  I'm so impressed that this is available.  I had no idea.

From a business standpoint, this information is gold. For many years our business has had a website. It's old and out of date and pretty ugly (working on re-writing that right now).  Each year the fee for the domain name and website hosting would come around and I'd ask my husband, "Do you really think anyone is using this and do we really have to pay for it?" He would nod and I'd get out the checkbook.  Actually this is why I decided to do this class. I wanted to make sure we were actually getting something for the money. It was always just a guess. Little did I know that Google Analytics was there waiting with more information than I could even handle.   There are a number of different categories that would be useful for us:

• How many people are visiting - This is what I always wanted to know - whether the site we have is attracting any traffic. 
• Where the people visiting are from - Since we are a local business and need to visit the job site, it's interesting to know whether the visitors are local or not. If there was traffic from other parts of the country, then maybe we might consider an e-commerce business of standard size covers.
• What time of day they visit - This would be useful in determining when to post items to Facebook to get attention, especially if the visitors to the site would have a way to like our Facebook page. 
• Browser type - This would be useful to make sure our website is functioning correctly on all the different browsers
• Mobile - The website we are writing will utilize Responsive Web Design, which resizes for mobile. It will be interesting to see if we get more mobile traffic once that's done. 
• New Vs Returning - Is our website interesting enough to get people to return to it more than once, or do they come and leave right away?
• Visit time - Is the site interesting enough to make them want to stay for more than a few seconds. 
• Age - Are we targeting the right demographic of people who might need a cover?

I'm sure there would be much more we could do with this information, but to get started, these would be good categories to cover. 

In real life, I work in the Business Intelligence space. I have to say that the use of BI in Google Analytics is really good, and the fact that it's free to everyone is really amazing.  I look forward to getting to use their tools more. 

Week 12 - Additional Online tools

This week I've spent some time researching various alternative tools that we could use for our business.  The two I've decided to pursue further are Google +  and Instagram.

For Google + I have created a business page. We will use this to build custom cover communities. We will track comments and use it to build relationships with other companies and individuals.

We will also create an account on Instagram where we can add photos of custom covers that we create.