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.