Week 16 Post A

Planning Your Future Strategy

Of the social media platforms explored in depth, Instagram and Facebook seem to work the best for my personal business.  I'm a small business of one with little to no marketing budget and of the platforms explored, only Instagram and FB had any effectiveness at all. 

It was relatively easy to add the twitter, FB and IG icons to my website.  It’s convenient that I can post on IG and it conveys to my FB business page and then to Twitter. 

Of late I have noticed that IG seems to revert of its own accord to linking to my personal timeline so that is something I need to keep an eye on and switch back as needed. 

Despite creating lists, performing searches and creating posts unique to Twitter, Twitter does not seem to be a platform where I am able to gain any traction.  Of my 112 posts there is nary a response and the 17 followers gained on this platform are largely from this class.  Alternatively, the Twitter account I manage for a non profit organically grows followers daily with only re-posts from the FB feed.

The scheduling feature on FB is nice however Instagram seems to be the more effective platform for me to use on a regular basis.  I can still use FB less frequently to share events and to post events to FB groups.  I continue to encounter drawbacks on FB such as being unable to post as my business from my mobile device, this drawback does make posting more time consuming as I often must transfer an image or video from my phone to my computer in order to post as my business rather than from my personal profile.  Often times I check the post and it still comes from my personal feed despite my having selected to send as my business page.  This lack of reliability is definitely a drawback and one that curiously does not occur over the two other business feeds I manage from the same mobile device and computer.

 It is also a little bit of a time consuming drawback that posts within a FB event listing need to be created and shared from within the event and that it only appears within that event discussion only.

I will also continue on a less frequent basis to send out newsletters.  At some point I would like to learn how to integrate blogging into my website and to podcast.

I do use Google Drive very effectively for collaborative projects for sharing documents however Google + was not at all effective for networking or marketing my own business.  It may be that with instruction or guidance from an experienced user I can tap into it's usefulness.