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.

Week 12 - Additional Social Media Outlets

Here are the 4 additional Social Media types that we might be able to use for our Custom Covers business.

Google + - When I read about Google +, the communities and groups, I was excited. I thought this could be a place where we link up with some Custom BBQ contractors and make relationships with them. After searching through the topics, communities and anything else I could find, my general impression is that not many people really use it.  I did find a BBQ recipe community that I did join, mostly to get great recipes that I could post on our site, but I don't really think we will find many people in San Diego there that need custom covers, so I'm not sure how effective that will be.

LinkedIn - I think using LinkedIn will be a good use of time. We could search out corporate facility managers in our area that might have something that needs to be covered, and search out restaurant managers in our area that might need covers for their tables.

YouTube - We may be able to use YouTube to post videos on how to cook dishes on the BBQ, how to clean your BBQ, how to measure for a cover, but there are already videos out there for these things. Also we don't really have great production capabilities, so I'm not sure how the videos would turn out.

LivingSocial - We could come up with some coupon deals for a certain amount off of a new cover.

Since we don't have a storefront, GoogleMaps and Yelp really aren't options for us. I don't think we'd use Groupon because we really can't handle a large number of custom covers at one time, and the profit margin on the covers is already as low as we can get it, so giving Groupon a large cut of that wouldn't work for us.

Week 11 - Marketing on Facebook without spending any money

I do believe that you could use Social Media for marketing without paying for it, though the way you would go about it would be different. It will also take you a significant amount of time to implement this, but in the long run, I believe you would be able to build a more effective base than if you used the social media marketing channels.  Here are some ways that I think you could build your base:

• Search out influential companies and people in your industry.  Follow their pages and get them to follow you by building relationships with them. As they learn who you are and begin to trust your work they can begin to share and endorse the work that you do.  By doing this, you will then be respected by the people and companies who respect them. 
• The biggest influence in social media is building relationships. If you spent time building relationships with the people you do have following you, then eventually you could ask that they recommend your business to the people that they know. When their friends see that they endorse you, they will be more likely to trust you and use your services. Then as you build relationship with them, they could also recommend you to their friends, and the growth in your following will be exponential. 
• In order to build these relationships, you will need to come up with content that will benefit your followers, and you will need to interact with them in order to build those relationships. This will take time and lots of effort and creativity to do.

If you are willing to invest your time in these ways, I think you could definitely do this. But time is money, and if you don't have the time to spend doing this, then you should think about paying to do some advertising.  But even if you do, you will still have to spend time investing in the relationships with those people to keep them around. 

For our business, I think it would be a good use to money to initially target specific groups with advertising to kick start the people who follow us.  Without doing this, I think it would take a long time to build that initial base. Then we could use this plan to build out that base by investing in the relationships. 

Week 11 - Social Media Ad Comments

I commented on the following blogs for the Week 11 assignment.

1. Danielle Kennelley
2. Marilyn King
3. Ben Samsuangco
4. Don Steier
5. Fritz Templin

Week 11 - Online Advertising

This week we're talking about using social media advertising; what it is, what the options are and how to best use it. I have to admit that in spite of the fact that I'm not a person who likes to sell things at all, I found this week very interesting. Mostly, the idea that advertising on social media isn't really about selling, but instead it's about building an audience that eventually might need your services.  Then you build their trust with interesting content and if they do need what you have to offer, they will know where to go.

The creation of ads is also different than I would have thought.  The principles of good ad design include:

• Keeping it simple. Use great pictures and as little text as you can to get your point across. No one will sit there and read an ad for any amount of time. You have about 1 second to capture their attention and make them want more information. 
• Have a clear call to action. Make sure that you have a defined place where they can do something, whether it's purchase a product, get more information, sign up for something or follow what you are doing
• The Ad should look visually similar to the site where you are taking them. You don't want to lure them in with one look and then switch to a totally different look wherever they land. 

Once you have an ad, you have to decide where best to use it. Some choices are:

• Facebook banner ads. You can use facebook to target specifically the people you want to target. The options you choose will depend on the group you are targeting with the ad.  You tell them how much you want to spend per day and they will advertise to the audience you target until the money runs out. You can choose whether the ads show in the newsfeed, or on the right column. The options include:
• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Demographics
• Language
• Relationship status
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic
• Generation
• Parents
• Politics
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Twitter ads - These ads are called Tweet Engagements, and just show up as a Twitter feed in your feed.  Again, the options you choose will depend on the group you are targeting. Here you will bid on the options and whoever bids the highest gets that advertisement.  The idea with the Twitter ads is to catch someone in a conversation about what you provide, and intercept the conversation with a suggestion to use your services. The options include:
• Location
• Gender
• Language
• Device / Platform
• Keywords
• Followers
• Interests
• Tailored Audience
• TV Targets
• Behaviors

After researching the types of ads, I think that for our Custom Covers - San Diego business,  right now we would go with Facebook ads. We are new to social media, so at this point, we'd like to build likes. That will allow us to later on target those people and the people they know to build a relationship based advertising scheme.  We don't have the funds to spend a lot of money on this, so maybe $20 per day is the most we could spend.

I see us having 3 or for groups that will have different ads, each targeted to the specific group.  Here are 3 ads I created. They are similar, but will be targeted to different groups.

The first ad is targeted to a group of homeowners who have invested in their home by adding an outdoor entertainment space.  The interests I would choose for this group are:

• Location - 50 mile radius of Oceanside because all of our work is custom, so we have to be able to get there to measure. 
• Age - 25-65+ - This seems like the age group that would be actively entertaining and maintaining an outdoor space. Most younger people probably don't own homes yet.
• Language - English - We aren't bilingual, so we wouldn't be able to communicate effectively with foreign language speakers. 
• Home Ownership - Homeowners and First Time Buyers. - These are the people that would have an outdoor entertainment space.  Not all homeowners would, but they might be interested in looking at the pictures and then they might know someone, or decide to build something down the line. 
• Generation - Baby  Boomers and Gen X. This category is similar to the age category, but would most likely filter out older people who might not have the energy to entertain. 
• Interests - BBQ, Home Improvement, Home appliances, 
• Behaviors - Entertaining, Purchase Behavior - Home and Garden

The 2nd ad group would be targeted at companies that build custom outdoor spaces. They definitely know people who have these and could be a referral source for the people who would actually buy the covers. Or, they could possibly include the cost of our covers in their overall price structure. 

The interests I would choose for this group are:

• Location - 50 mile radius of Oceanside because all of our work is custom, so we have to be able to get there to measure.
• Age - 25-65+ - This seems like the age group that may own companies that build the outdoor spaces. 
• Gender - All
• Job Titles - Owner, Partner, Manager, Project Coordinator, Project Manager
• Language - English
• Interests - BBQ, Home Improvement,  Outdoor Living, Construction, Management, Retail
• Behaviors - B2B - Industry - Construction

The third group would be targeted at Restaurant Owners with outdoor seating areas. We also make covers for outdoor tables/chairs to protect them from the elements.
The interests I would choose for this group are:

• Location - 50 mile radius of Oceanside because all of our work is custom, so we have to be able to get there to measure.
• Age - 25-65+ - This seems like the age group that may own companies that build the outdoor spaces. 
• Gender - All
• Industry - Food Preparation and Services
• Job Titles - Owner, Manager
• Behaviors - B2B - Industry - Restaurant

I believe these ads would be successful because of the photos that catch your eye and stand out, the simple text that would appeal to each different group, and the call to action button that would get them to like us on Facebook where they can get more information about our company, more information on how to contact us and see pictures of the work we've done.

Thanks for listening!  Whew, that was a lot!

Week 10 - Newsletter Blog Responses

It was interesting to read the Newsletter blogs from the other students. It definitely gave me some more ideas.  The blogs I commented on are:

1. Audra Najera - San Diego Seamless Dry-Wall Taping
2. Taylor Tirona - College Counseling
3. Connor Blackwood - Ultra Gamer
4. Chris Deddo - Bowling Products
5. Tiffany Edwards - Coastal Dreams - Destination by Design
6. Tina Freyberger - Soyology Candles

Week 10 - Business Newsletters

Newsletters can be a great way for a business to communicate with and involve customers in a business. The newsletter can be a way to capture attention and allow a customer to read more about different articles.

For our business, a quarterly newsletter would be a good time schedule. We'd target each season; winter, spring, summer and fall.  A standard set of sections could be used:

• Client success stories - This section would highlight jobs that had been completed within the past season.  Pictures and client testimonials could be included to give clients ideas about how they could use our covers to protect their items from the sun, the rain, the wind, etc. 
• Recipes - This section would highlight recipes that could be made for that season.  For example, recipes to brine and roast a turkey on the grill for fall, or summer  BBQ recipes using garden vegetables for summer, how to roast a lamb leg for Easter in the spring or how to roast a rib roast for Christmas on the grill for winter. 
• Seasonal maintenance - This section would describe the maintenance that should occur on your  BBQ in the different seasons
• Rub recipes - This section could detail various rubs for meats.
• Events - A listing of BBQ related events coming in the next season
• Coupons - This section could contain a coupon for a percentage off for new customers.

We could add a sign-up on Facebook and our website to gather email addresses. We could also encourage the recipients to share the newsletter with their friends. 

Week 9 - Ways to organize a blog with categories

How you organize your blog posts will depend on what your reason for having the blog is. Additionally, there are most likely more than one way to organize your blogs.

What comes to mind first is organization by date or file type, organizing photos separately from text or video, but I think what would be more useful would be to come up with different type of blog posts.  Some examples might be:

• Personal Thoughts - This could be an area where we would detail what current trends we like in outdoor living spaces. It could include our thoughts about spring and how BBQ outings bring people together. 
• Educational / Expertise - This could include videos and instructional tutorials on everything from how to build a custom BBQ to how to measure one for a cover.
• Creative Ideas - This category could include BBQ recipes, photos of BBQ items, how to incorporate BBQ into your personal family meals and entertaining in ways you may not have thought of
• Events - This category could review or announce events that would be of interest to people who BBQ

Within each category, you could organize by date. The use of categories, might prompt you to have thoughts about what new topics you could write about.

The other blogs I commented on are:

• Connor Blackwood
• Audra Najera
• Patricia Tirona
• Taylor Tirona

Week 9 - Personality in blogs

When should personality shine through on a blog? I believe that it depends on the type of blog, whether it's a personal blog or a corporate blog and the situation or intent of the blog.

For personal blogs, it would usually be good to let your personality out, but there may be situations where you wouldn't want to. For example, if you are trying to establish yourself as an expert in a corporate discipline, then being cutesy with your personality may make people not take you seriously.

For business blogs, the culture of the company will most likely dictate whether or not your personality should come through.  Companies like Chipotle and Chick-Fil-A have made personality part of their culture, so if you were writing a blog about those companies then you would want to show your personality.  However if you are representing a company like IBM or Chase Bank, then you would want to represent that company in a professional manner that shows the personality of the company, not of yourself.

Week 8 - Twitter

The assignment this week was to use the Twitter advanced search to find people who may be interested in your business. I went on a quest to find people who need a BBQ cover.  Our business is a local one, so I wanted to use the Places feature to search for people in San Diego County.  The problem that I found is that it only searches a 15 mile radius of a city.   I wasn't able to figure out how to change that range, so I had to put in different cities in San Diego to cover the county.  This was a pain.  I hope there's a way that I haven't found to be able to change the radius. The search terms I used are:

• BBQ Cover
• Custom BBQ
• BBQ Island
• BBQ
• Custom Cover

I found some hits when I forgot to put in the place, but in San Diego I didn't find any relevant hits.  I think this is a search that I will need to continue to monitor.  It's a pretty specific group of people that we are searching for. So the strategy will be to continue to monitor this.

I set up 2 lists:

• Custom BBQ Cover
• Custom Corporate Covers

This will allow me to find, track and segregate individual people who are looking for custom covers and corporations that need covers. We can develop different strategies for each.   The one thing I noticed is that a list does not allow you to send a tweet to only people in the list, so I'm not so sure how helpful this will be other than keeping a list for us to tweet directly to. 

For corporate clients, tweets during working hours to facilities managers would be a good strategy. For individual clients, tweets during the early morning or evening hours would be better because that's when people have time to check their social media. 

Week 7 Part 2 - Similar Businesses using social media

As a followup to the previous blog for week 7, we are tasked with finding other businesses that are similar to ours so we can look at how they are using social media.  I spent an hour or so looking at businesses across the country that sew custom BBQ covers, but I could only find 1 that used any social media besides Facebook. The company is BBQ Smokers and More. Their website is http://www.bbq-smokersandmore.com/Custom-covers .   They are using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus.

This company is also selling dry rubs and BBQ sauces, which is a great idea to keep people coming back to their website. Those same people would be interested in getting a cover for their grill, so it's a great fit, and something for us to think about.

They are using Twitter to basically send short little blasts reminding people to clean their grill, prepare it for winter and send out special coupons. They have about 300 people following them on Twitter.

They are using Pinterest to promote their dry rubs, BBQ Sauces and other grilling utensils that they market. Additionally they have a gallery for skewer ideas, along with the custom covers. I think they've done a great job of bringing together various items that would interest many people. They have a total of 9 boards with 59 people following.  It's not huge, but it's something.

Their Facebook and Google Plus pages are really the same. They have 1160 likes on Facebook and 27 followers on Google Plus.

Looking at this page has given me more ideas than I had before. I think in social media it's all about creativity. The more creative you are the more you can post on various media.

I still have concerns about the return on investment for a small business like ours, though. I'm not sure whether the investment in time and resources would benefit the business enough to justify the investment.

Week 7 - Using social Media for Business

This week we are looking at using various social media types to promote our business. Originally my business was New Song Online Church.  For this application I can think of a number of things we could do with Social Media because there is ALWAYS something happening at New Song. Here's some examples:

• YouTube or Vimeo
• Videos of original worship songs performed by our worship team
• Videos of service projects that are worked on by our members
• Videos of a pastor's interpretation of scripture
• ... the list goes on.
• Pinterest
• Creation of Scripture Cards
• Photos of God's creation
• Instagram
• Pictures and videos from many of the events that are held around the church
• Tumblr
• Blog posts from the pastors

Actually, our New Song website does already have links to YouTube, Vimeo and Instagram, and many of these things are already being done. 

Because of that, I've had to switch my focus to our small family business, where my husband sews custom covers for things. I can imagine a limited set of things that we could use social media for, but my concern is the effort necessary to create constant content. We could definitely add content in the form of pictures on Facebook and Instagram, but the effort to create quality videos goes beyond our expertise and ability to spend the amount of time needed to keep these up to date. We could maybe do some BBQ recipes on Pinterest, but again, I'm concerned with the amount of time required to keep these things up to date. 

Based on these observations, it seems like social media is well-suited for large, active organizations that have new things happening often. I'm wondering how effective it will be for a small home based business. 

Week 6 - Facebook Likes

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you might notice that my original business was New Song Online Church.  While my intent for the class is still to determine how we might use Social Media to promote and reach new people for New Song Online, I don't have permissions to modify or maintain the New Song social media. Because of this, I've decided to use my husband's business, Custom Covers - San Diego as the focus of the social media assignments.  This will give me practice on how to create and use the various social media pages.

The assignment this week was to like different Facebook pages as our business. The pages that I chose were:

• Installitdirect.com/outdoor-living/outdoor-kitchens-bbq-island
• BBQ grill outlet
• Point Loma BBQ cleaners
• IC Integrity Construction
• Savanah Landscape Construction & Design
• San Diego Land Care
• BBQ Depot
• BBQ Blog
• Machetengriller  BBQ Blog
• Outdoor Living Patio/Garden

The reason that I chose these Facebook pages to like is because they would all appeal to people who have or want custom BBQ Islands. Most of the business that we do is making covers for custom BBQ Islands or outdoor kitchens in the San Diego area. These pages are mostly for companies in the San Diego area that either build or clean these custom BBQs. The people who visit these Facebook pages may also need a cover for their island, so while visiting these pages, they may see the like from our company and then follow the link through to see our page. In business any kind of lead may turn into a sale, so we want to get as much exposure to people who are actually interested in the type of products we sell. 

Week 5 - Facebook engagement

For companies that use Facebook to reach new and existing customers, measuring how effective they are at actually doing this is important. The time and resources that are expended to create and maintain an effective Facebook and social media presence should have a return that is worth the investment. Facebook provides statistics that can help businesses measure their effectiveness.

Post Reach is a statistic that allows the business to know how many people have actually viewed their content. As with any type of advertising, not all people who see your ads will respond to them. You will need to have a larger audience than your actual clients to generate new business.

Post Engagement is a formula that is intended to tell you the level of interest those people you have reached have in your business.  The Post Engagement formula is Likes + Comments + Shares.  If someone Likes your page, then something you have said or some content you have provided has caught their attention. It is desirable to get comments because those can be indicators of what people actually think about your company.  These should be read and responded to, so people can see that you are engaging with them.  This makes for a more personal relationship with the person viewing.  Shares mean that the person actually thought that what you posted was worthwhile enough to share with their network and friends. Recommendations coming from personal sources will always have more weight with someone than a blind contact.

Businesses should use these statistics to evaluate how effective they are at actually using Facebook. They should evaluate their Engagement numbers. If they are low, then the business should focus on how to add content that would attract and get people involved. I think that as Engagement grows, the Reach numbers should also grow since personal referrals are happening.  If you have great Reach numbers, but low Engagement numbers, then you should evaluate how your content could capture more interest. Comments should always be read and responded to.

By effectively using Facebook and the available statistics, businesses can grow their companies and impact those companies have by leaps and bounds.

Week 4 - Target Markets

My business will be New Song Church Online. We currently live stream our 9:30 AM Sunday service. There is a chat for people to engage in and build community.

I can think of a number of different target markets.

1. Current members of New Song who can't make it to church. For this target market, we have a definite list of people. Anyone who has attended before or filled out a connection card would be part of this group. While some people know about the online services, I'm sure there are some who don't. We could also work on notifying members at our satellite campuses that we are available. For these people we could also use our current social media; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vimeo to advertise our online services.  We could also request that people attending the online service use their social media to notify their friends. 
2. Shut Ins - These would be people who don't currently attend New Song, but can't physically get out to get to a church. To reach this target market, we could use Facebook and twitter to target the older populations with key words like housebound, lonely, or who are looking for in-home care. 
3. People with spiritual interests - To target this group, we could do Facebook or Twitter searches for people looking for churches or seeking spiritual things. We could possibly create verse cards on Pinterest or videos of our worship team on Vimeo or You Tube with links to our Online Services. 

I'm sure there are more, but these would be good places to start. We can always add target groups later, but I think it's better to focus on a smaller set until we get strategies in place for these. 

Week 3 - 2 Websites I Use Often

www.ebay.com

I am totally a bargain shopper. If I can find a good deal on something, then I enjoy that purchase so much more. For bargain shoppers, eBay is a great site to go to. If you like the thrill of the hunt, then you can participate in auctions where you bid against other people for a great deal. If you don't like to wait for an auction to end, then you can Buy It Now and get that immediate gratification taken care of.

I also am a seller on eBay. They say that one man's junk is another man's treasure, so why just throw something away. I especially like to resell my used college books.

I believe that eBay is effective because they do exactly what they advertise. Their focus is pretty small - Advertise and sell things that people want to buy.  They go to a lot of trouble to categorize the items for sale, so you can put in search keywords and a specific list of products that you want to see comes up.  Then you can easily compare the different options, sort them in different orders, see pictures of them, ask questions about them and finally purchase what you want. They have also developed their branding. Everyone knows about eBay because it is so big and widely used, that you trust that they will not mess up the transaction.

For website design, they keep the main site pretty simple.  The main thing you want to do when you get there is search for an item, so that search box is right on top. Then, if you do need to do something different, they have convenient menu bars for you to get there. 

What makes me come back again is the fact that I can trust that I can get a good deal, and that they will facilitate the transaction. If there is a problem they are there to help you get it resolved.

I think that there are things about their search engine that could be improved. Although you can put in search terms, I've found that people will find ways to get around that. For example, if I want to buy ink for my printer, and I want to see only the ones that are made by the manufacturer (OEM), I can put OEM in the search term, but non-OEM will also show up, and there's a lot more of those than the original that I have to sift through.

www.amazon.com
I never cease to be amazed by Amazon. They have such a reliable and usable website.  I can compare prices from different vendors, see products they sell directly and also products from their competitors right on their website.  Probably the thing I like best is the super fast shipping that is provided when you buy from Amazon.  Sometimes I'm willing to pay more to get something so quickly. Amazon Prime is also a genius concept. I pay one fee and for a year I can get free shipping on anything I order through them. I'm more likely to buy from them because I get free shipping, and it also comes really fast.

Their website is really easy to use. Just put in your search term, and a list of choices appears, then you choose what you want and go to that item. It is consistently built, so I always know where to go to start over. The photos they use are high quality and helpful.

I haven't really got any ideas on how they could improve their website. Everything works so well for me. I'm sure they will come up with some new genius idea soon, though, and then I'll wonder how I ever managed without it.

Week 3 - Principles of Good Website Design

Our task this week was to pick two websites to review that are bad and give reasons why they are bad.  Then we choose 2 websites that have good design and give reasons why they have good design.

Bad Design
http://www.exmouth-view.co.uk/
This is the website for the Exmouth View Hotel in South Devon, UK. This website looks like someone with no web experience designed the page. Some of the problems with it are:

• The page doesn't size to the browser window, so you have to scroll to the right. There are html tags that can resize the site as the window gets bigger.
• The dancing palm trees and waving flags are low quality and look cheap.  Instead, they should focus on quality images that people care about, like what the rooms are like.
• It looks like they tried to dump everything on the first page, and it scrolls down and down. Some organization of the information so you can find what you're looking for would help.
• This is a family hotel, but it doesn't mean you just put up pictures of your family. Most people aren't interested in their family, they should effectively use pictures that people would find valuable.
• I found it funny that at the bottom of the page was this reference. Maybe they should take the hint!

Special Thanks to : Vincent@webpagesthatsuck.com For the Free Advertising !

http://www.roverp6cars.com/
This is the website for MGBD Parts and Services - Rover P6 Parts Specialist in the UK. This site looks like a kindergarten student drew it.  Some of the problems are:

• The colors are horrible. They are really brash and they collide and don't look nice together.  It's difficult to read some of the text and other parts are too loud. They need to look beyond the highlighter colors to the color wheel and choose some that compliment and contrast without being ugly.   Actually their parts store page is designed better, but that just makes it more offensive when you go to any of the other pages.
• The image of a car behind the buttons doesn't work. It's difficult to read the text, it's ugly and it doesn't look professional. At least they tried to give the viewer a way to more directly access the information that they need. They should take the car picture out from the buttons and use a professional button picture, or make tabs or a top menu.
• Their pictures are all off to the side. Maybe they could highlight a few pictures that are relevant and wrap text around them to describe how they are important.
• The length of the web page is too long.  They need to leave some of the content from the first page for the menu items. It's just too much to absorb.

Good Design
http://www.apple.com/
This is Apple Inc.'s website. They are leaders in computing and design, and it shows.

• The web page is clean and crisp with vivid images.
• The branding for Apple is clearly visible. The brand is so well known and trusted that it makes you feel at home when you visit their site. The clearly show the Apple branding everywhere.
• There is an easily visible and easily accessible menu at the top of the page. This menu bar and the apple logo are consistent on every page.
• There is a nice collage of high quality photos that allow you to drill into their product lines. This is a simple way for viewers to easily find where they need to go.
• The website resizes with the window so you can see a complete picture of the page no matter what your screen size.

http://www.ford.com
This is the website for the Ford Motor Company.  This is also a large professional company, and their website reflects that. Some things I like about this site:

• Clean, simple design. The focus is on the cars they make and nothing else. The photos are high quality and attractive.
• The Menu Bars allow visual choices. When you hover over a menu item, it visually shows you the breakdown. For example if you hover over the Car menu item, a further drill down is shown for each of their car lines, complete with pictures, so you know where to go.
• It's interactive. It will allow you to custom tailor the car that you want. You can see everything from specs to detailed photos of the car, so you can decide what you want. Even color variations are available.
• It knows where you are. It auto magically fills in the zip code where you are and tailors your experience to that zip code.

Week 2 - 5 business websites and their social media

My goal in this class is to improve our social media presence for our Online Church. Because of that, I decided to look at the social media presence that our church, New Song Community Church already has, and compare that to 2 other similar or larger churches in our area, Calvary Chapel Oceanside and North Coast Church - Vista, and then look at two of the mega-church sites, Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Il and Saddleback Church in Mission Viejo. (by the way, I've attended multiple services at each of these churches in the past, so I already knew of them.)

Here's what I found. Compared to the other similarly sized churches in the area, we are doing pretty well, at least hanging with them in terms of volume and are actually ahead in terms of different social media used.  Compared to the mega-churches, we have a ways to go.

New Song Church
http://newsongchurch.com
Social Media

• Facebook
• 2398 likes
• 5644 visits
• Last post 14 hours ago
• Twitter
• 277 tweets
• 145 following
• 134 followers
• 2 favorites
• 4 lists
• Last tweet Feb 11
• Vimeo
• 345 videos
• 6 following
• 1 group
• 1 channel
• 29 albums
• Last video – 2 days ago
• Instagram
• 32 posts
• 113 followers
• 101 following
• Last post – April 2014

North Coast Church
http://www.northcoastchurch.com
Social Media

• Facebook
• 5,626 likes
• 19,342 visits
• Last Post 18 hours ago
• Twitter
• 781 Tweets
• 536 Following
• 1,437 Followers
• 103 Favorites
• Last Post 19 Hours Ago

Calvary Chapel Oceanside
http://www.calvaryoceanside.org
Social Media

• Facebook
• Page not available
• Vimeo
• 76 Videos
• 0 likes
• 0 Following
• 0 Groups
• 0 Channels
• 4 Albums
• Last Post 1 month ago.

Saddleback Community Church
http://saddlebackchurch.com
Social Media

• Facebook
• 115,260 Likes
• 81,318 Visits
• Last Post – 16 minutes ago
• Twitter
• 16.9K tweets
• 21.8K Following
• 30.5K Followers
• 16.6K Favorites
• 5 Lists
• Last Post 9 hours ago
• Google +
• 608 followers
• 141,773 Views
• Last Post Yesterday
• You Tube
• 14,533 subscribers
• Last Post – 3 days ago
• Pinterest
• 17 Boards
• 1,451 pins
• 204 Likes
• 2,767 Followers
• 931 Following
• Instagram
• 915 posts
• 12K followers
• 7,003 Following
• Last Post – February 2015

Willow Creek Church
http://willowcreek.org
Social Media

• Facebook
• 43,181 likes
• 80,343 Visits
• Last Post 29 minutes ago
• Twitter
• 4,429 Tweets
• 58 Following
• 19.3K Followers
• 3,664 Favorites
• 3 Lists
• Last Tweet 1 hour ago
• Google +
• 3,551,488 Views
• Last Post  - 4 weeks ago
• Instagram
• 207 Posts
• 2,995 Followers
• 16 Following
• Last Post – February 2015
• FourSquare
• Total Visitors 2850
• Total Visits 14,308
• Last post December 2014
• iTunes
• 61 Ratings
• 173 Podcasts
• Last Post 2/8/2015

Week 2 - Communicating with Business

A couple of years ago I had a problem with a phone service from Cox. Our answering machine had died and I didn't want to spend money on a new machine since I wasn't sure whether I wanted to keep our land line or switch to our cells. I saw on the services that Cox provided that they offer an answering service for a fee. I decided to give it a try, so I went out to the Cox website.  A chat window appears where you can have a conversation with a representative. They listened to what I wanted, of course charged me a fee to set up the service and pointed me to a document with directions on how to set up the service.  I spent about an hour trying to set up the service on my own, and it didn't work. I had to call and ask for a live person, who found out that something in their system wasn't set up correctly. I asked for them to deliver an email to me when a message was left so that I would know one was there since I no longer had a machine to beep at me to let me know. They said that when the phone rang it would ring differently if a message was left, or I could call to check every day. I preferred to be notified when the message came in. They never did get the email delivery to work, so I ended up back at the store buying an answering machine.

Some form of social media was included in the process in the form of a chat, but all they did was point me to a document.  That seemed pretty useless.  If there had been some type of reviews that I could have read before paying for the service, I could have decided not to do it in the first place, and maybe Cox could read those reviews and fix their "Service". It seems strange that a company with Communications in it's name wouldn't have better communications.

Week 1 - Social Media types for Business and Personal Use

I think that given the right circumstances, pretty much any social media type could be used for either business or personal use. That doesn't mean that every type is appropriate for every business, but it just depends on what and how you want to communicate.

One of the ideas that I read in the text is that we need to think about marketing on social media in a different way than we normally think about marketing.  It's not about shouting 'WE'RE HERE', but instead of using the various media types to create interesting content that will draw people to your website. So, out of their interest the COME to you, you don't need to find them.   I personally think this is brilliant and turned on a light bulb in my mind. I'm really not a sales type of person, but if someone is interested and can benefit from what you have, then your are really just sharing what you have.

So, my thing is trying to get the word out about our online church service. If I could come up with some awesome prayer cards by using photos and verses and make them available through Pinterest, then maybe someone who wants something like that would find my page and be able to benefit from that work. If we have some original songs that we write (wouldn't want to infringe on copyrights), then I could create some You Tube videos that would allow someone to watch our worship. If I want to do an online Bible Study, then Facebook would be a good choice. If I wanted to just sent a quick blip that our Online Service is starting, then maybe a Twitter shout out would be in order.

Now not every business would want to send a Twitter feed, and not every business will have a video, but I think that's what's so cool about this. There's no boundaries or limits.  You need to use your creativity to think of ways to help people so that they can then decide if they want to know more about what you're doing.

Week 1 - Why I chose this template

Well, this is my first attempt at a blog. I was looking for some template that represented me and what I'm trying to do with this blog. Since my main purpose for exploring social media is to promote New Song Online Church, this seemed to be a fitting background.  Every time I'm in the mountains it always highlights the vast, incredibly beautiful creation that we live in. The mountain is a place where God met Moses and where Jesus went to pray and get revived.   Well, I need some of that today... and every day, so why not look at this every time I come here. Hope it puts you in the same place that it's putting me.