I find social media ridiculously time consuming and troublingly
unreliable. For example, I carefully
planned and crafted a post for Instagram and scheduled it for release this
AM. The post AGAIN reverted to sharing
to my personal FB timeline rather than my business page as intended. Even worse, within a couple of hours I
noticed that my carefully captioned and researched hashtags had all disappeared
from the post! I went in to edit the
post, rewrote it and received the feedback “Your edits weren’t saved. Please try again.” This has persisted for
hours. I tried editing on the desktop where
it would only allow me to access one of the Instagram account handles I manage
(they are all linked), and not the one I needed. What’s up Instagram? I did report this as a problem through their
support link. This has consumed the
whole of my morning, time that would have been better spent planning classes
and networking.
I have put considerable time and effort into trying to make
social media a more effective tool to grow my business. The number of followers gained on Instagram
over the course of the quarter has been nominal in relation to the effort and
number of posts (22), up to 113 from 85, approximately the number of people in the
social media class. On the plus side,
post engagement is up for some of the posts.
The Instagram account I manage for Zero Waste San Diego on
the other hand has increased from 89 followers to 104 with only 3 new posts
over the course of the quarter, engagement is not noticeably increased with the
exception of the post I paid to promote.
The ZWSD Twitter feed increased from 1,004 to 1,051 with no effort above
and beyond my FB posts to ZWSD relaying to Twitter.
My viewpoint of social media has changed. I am less inclined to believe it is something
that can really boost my business.
Social media is fickle and technology glitches such the Instagram
debacle today are time consuming. I think it is necessary to have a presence but
I know I provide better quality service when I spend the majority of time
thinking about my client’s needs and how best to serve them than contending with
technological issues. I do not feel that
I am a Luddite although I acknowledge that the tone of this post may come
across as such.
I will continue to try and use Instagram, hopefully with
more success next post. I am concerned
that when I searched for help over Instagram I received a message saying my
account had been blocked…
I did increase my use of Instagram for business posts and
use of hashtags over the course of the class.
I also tried directing tweets to a region specific list I put together
for my business Twitter account. My
attempts seemingly went unnoticed.
I think it would be great to include an exploration of blogs
platforms that can be linked to business websites with an over view of any
costs and payment structures included. I
would have liked to add a blog directly to my business website. I also would like to learn more about
podcasting.
I think the idea of comments from classmates is a great idea but did not really get any actionable feedback until the week 16 posts where I was given suggestions that I have been using for over a year such as posting my Cats and Mats events through Eventbrite and as events on FB and posting cat/yoga pics regularly to gain engagement and awareness. It is disheartening to hear that those posts are perhaps not being seen as easily as I thought they were across Instagram, FB, Twitter, and in Eventbrite. I do regularly post my prenatal yoga offerings and retreats in Eventbrite too. It would be great to have had that kind of feedback throughout the class in order to tweak my posting methods more to gain better results.
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