Week 17: Wrapping it up!!!

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Ok! So, lets wrap this up. I can say that my overall understanding of how Social Media (SM) for business works. Not to mention my own personal profiles. Honestly, I am still not a big fan of using SM other than for my own personal entertainment.

Knowing the analytics and the information that is gathered can really assist with reaching your target audience and delivery of a specified point to said target. This also showed me just how much info is being tracked about my online and App surfing. That is really scary! Makes me want to pull the plug and go off the grid.

Given the information provided from Facebook and Google analytics, well once I have enough hits to create some, I can better engage my customers. I will know age groups, location platform and other info which will assist me with the type of content and how best to deliver it. In the meantime, I will continue to play the guessing game and fire out everything I can within reason. Not to mention security restrictions.

Honestly, at this point there has been no sign of growth or increased interaction with the SM platforms. Of course, it would help if I advertised it more. I am still getting used to having the business platforms. I need to advertise them more. Maybe add the icons to my business cards, email signature line and verbally put it out there. I could also start following people I have interacted with. I guess the idea there is that others may end up receiving my page in the suggested friends and businesses you may know section of the SM platform.

I’m not sure how far I am going to take this. The other two guys on the team are a little resistant to the whole SM thing. Darn Boomers! I can say that cause I am one, apparently. I am not involved with it enough yet to even think about using a service to manage the SM platforms. Working full time, being a full-time student and life in general has me quite busy lately. I may step back and revisit this in a couple weeks. Ya know, once I have had time to take a breather from the semester and a week of work for some R&R. Until then, what out there can marinate in the savory juice of my creation.

This has been a great learning experience. Its good to know that I can get things out there to the customer fast and wide-spread.

Week 16: Social Media Management Tools

 The webpage discussed 8 SM management tools of 2021. It was nice that they broke them down to best by categories. It makes it easy to find one that would be the best fit. An All-in-One tool or one suited for a small team would most likely be best for my current situation. There are only three of us on my team. There is great deal of geographical area between us.

Zoho was ranked best All-in-one tool to use. They have a free plan, which is good. However, going beyond that you have an individual plan for ten dollars a month. This could work. The agency plan is a little steep, starting at $200 a month. I like that you can manage email, projects, and accounting while linking with your SM platforms.

SocialPilot was ranked best for small teams. Like I said before, there are only three of us. There most affordable plan is good for up to three years. Draw back there, to get the lowest price, you have to pay for a year in advance. Kinda makes me shy away. Just incase things don’t work out. They do offer a 14-day free trail so you can dip the toe in without having to jump in. And, it works with 25 SM platforms. I only need two at this point. This just leaves room for expansion. I don’t post much or often. So, their limit to posts published per day really isn’t a factor for me at this time. I wonder if they treat it like rollover minutes on your cell phone contract. If I only post once a week, can I use all my posts for the week in one day? Food for thought.

Week 15 Part B Building Your Own Strategy

 I think at this point in the game I will need to set a daily, weekly and monthly strategy for checking and updating the SM platforms. Thankfully, a post to one can also be posted to the other just by checking a box.

 

The daily strategy: I will check the platforms in the morning and evening. I will check them for likes, comments, and general comments. If a person DMs me, I will do my best to respond in a timely manner.

 

The weekly strategy: I will do my best to provide detailed content. Well, as detailed as I can get for some of the items I support. Hush, Hush, secret, secret and all that jazz. Weekly relevant posts will help to keep my viewers engaged.

 

The Monthly strategy: I will need to review the analytics to be sure I am hitting my target audience. This will be critical in getting the information out to those who use the equipment. If I’m not reaching them, then I will need to adjust fire.

Week 15 Part A: Developing Your Marketing Strategy

 At this point, I feel as though Facebook and Instagram have met the mark. Admittedly, I have not ventured into other SM platforms. Life has been busy as of late. We did one newsletter during the course of this semester. I think that I would like to attempt a quarterly newsletter for general information and updates. I can use the SM platforms for interim flash information.

 

In general, Facebook is the platform I have enjoyed using the most. Its been around longer and I am more familiar with it. I will most likely need to become more familiar with Instagram as time goes on. More of my clientele are in their late teens to mid-twenties. They all seem to prefer Instagram over Facebook.

 

Time on SM platforms is eating into a large part of my day. It feels like I should be on it daily. I’m barely on it for personal reasons, let alone business. However, if I wish to remain relevant, I should probably step up my game. I just need to find the time.

Week 14 Part B: What we Learn from FaceBook Analytics

 Well….. I don’t have enough info for FaceBook Analytics to give me a report 😔. So, I guess I will use the ABC dataSp21.pdf.

The Summary gives you a nice overview of Page Views and Page Likes. Combine that with the Post Reach and Engagements, and you have a pretty good picture of how things are going.

Scrolling down we find the Page Followers section. I found the graph which shows Unfollows, Organic Followers and Paid Followers to be interesting. I am sure you could tie a specific event and time period to each category to see why the numbers increased or decreased at a particular time. One could use that data to take corrective action. Possibly get those that unfollowed to follow again as well as gain new followers.

Your 5 Most Recent Posts- now this is interesting. The columns here will help you determine how interesting or uninteresting your follows find your most recent content. A nice snapshot of Organic reach, Post clicks and reactions. Just below this is the Pages to Watch box. A good suggestive comparison tool. Go check out your competition and see what they are doing.

The next few sections give you graphs and charts. They allow you to see over specific time periods how much interaction your posts have had. I like that you can break it down into so many subcategories such as Age, gender device, city and so on. If you are not reaching your target demographic, this is the place which will tell you that.

In general, this whole analytics section is very useful, even for a very small business. Targeting your demographic in a particular geographical area can be very challenging.

Week 14 Part A: What We Learn from Google Analytics

There is a lot of good information to be gathered from the analytics page. After viewing the different features, I found a few that would be particularly helpful.

Acquisition: The information here gives me Users, New Users, Time spent and Medium. This will be good to see what platform they are using to commonly access the page. Also giving me details about the amount of time they spent on the page. I really like that it breaks down New and current users. This allows me to see how many people have reached the page and how large my audience is growing.

Engagement: I like to see the engagement stats. See the average time the user spent engaged and the number of times can help me analyze how relevant the content is to the user.

Retention: We all like to know that we have followers. How many of them are staying? That’s the real question. We need to keep our followers. This also allows us to see new users. Users and New Users seems to repeat throughout the analytics.

Demographics: The is very useful. Seeing the age and location of the users is important to me. This will allow me to adjust my content to age of the clients and direct clients to the appropriate FSE for their geographical area.

Tech: Knowing what platform is being used to access my page(s) is interesting. I would image that most users would be on some sort of mobile platform. Whether that is an Apple or Android device is helpful in determining graphical content and resolution. Their platform firmware version, App version and other variables should be considered as well.

Out of all the analytics features, the four above I found to be the most useful. They provide the most useful information to me. Currently, there isn’t a great deal of data there, perhaps in time there will be more.

Week 13 Part A: Online Advertising - Analysis of the Marketplace

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Adds on SM (Social Media) can be annoying to say the least. The other day I did a web search for an item. Later, I was on Facebook and saw several adds for the item from different sources. One search on Google was all it took to be bombarded on SM. Not to mention clicking on the SM add. What does that do? Darn it!!! I wish I hadn’t done that. Now all my SM is plagued with adds. Every time I see an add I have to tell the SM platform that I don’t want to see the add anymore.

The website the add linked to was good and contained more information about the item as well as other items the company is selling. The add itself made use of creative design. Catchy pics and a short video of the product were enticing to say the least. The offer of 20% to first time buyers acting in the next 24 hours was a good hook. However, I’m still not buying. More research is needed.

I don’t know about you, but I find the gimmicky weight loss adds to be the most annoying. If you have seen one, then you know what I’m talking about. Enough about that.

Online advertising, I think, has become a very effective tool over traditional advertising. I don’t read the newspaper. In fact, I don’t know many people who actually get a print anymore. TV adds are still very effective. I don’t watch much in the way of regular programming. I often stream content. If you are like me and do it on the cheap, then you will likely have some adds at points during the stream. Like TV, I stream most of the music I listen to rather than listening to traditional radio. Thanks to IP address locating and GPS, the apps like Pandora and Spotify know my approximate location and feed adds based on that.

I am online way more than watching TV and receiving adds via more traditional means. So, I would say that adds on websites, SM, and streaming services are a much more effective way in these modern times to reach the target audience.