Module 6: Social Media Tools

1. Come up with a group/company or non-profit you wish to represent.

I work with a couple close friends, and a couple far-away connections on a "combo-blog" as we call it. Raddish Beats is a place where each of the authors has a focus, but the blog allows them all to post together. While I write about the health and lifestyle, my friend Jesse write about sports, our friend Matt write about Rap music, and others write about TV, music and city life. This is a rare experiment for a blog, where usually a person searching for their interests must find one blog for each of the above listed categories. Raddish Beats attempts to put as many topics of interest in front of as many viewers as possible. If they like what they read--they might stick around and read something they didn't plan on reading. 

If readers find themselves liking one author or another, they can sort the posts by author and by topic-- creating a hub of searchable content in one page-- as opposed to the entire internet.

2. Come up with an target audience for that organization.

Our target audience is not only the general public, but the general public who gets most of their information from blogs. I think it is fair to say that we are reaching out to a demographic interested in entertainment-- be it in their personal lives (lifestyle activities, diets, health, consumerism) or outside (music, movies, concerts, sports) they can engage at any level they wish-- but most of it is entertainment based. 

3. Come up with a message for that audience. 

Our message is at the baseline, come to our blog and read some interesting things about entertainment and engage directly with the bloggers. We want readership to be aware of our blog as it is just starting up-- and encourage its use outside of our friend group.

4&5) Pick three Social Media Tools and explain their effectiveness.

Raddish Beats utilizes Twitter primarily right now, as a place to post our blog links to the Twittersphere-- it is a good way to get word out quickly about a new post. Right now they are auto linked and every time we post, a tweet is sent out to our followers. This is an effective way to increase readership, link to those our stories are about, and create a more cohesive package for our readership.

I think that as we continue to grow we should use Instagram--particularly for the folks blogging about city life, diets, lifestyle activities etc. Those genres within the blog would get the most use out of snap shot photos to supplement their posts. Instagram is great at showing what we do and images will boost readership and interest for readers.

I am not sure if there is another social media platform we would use, because our whole blog is hosted on a social media platform, WordPress. I would consider that the third social media tool we use.

Facebook-- as a group we have talked about Facebook as an option to expand on our posts etc-- and we have come to this conclusion-- Facebook would take away viewership. Meaning that if we linked everything on Facebook readers could get thumbnails and summaries without even visiting our blog. We lose in that situation, almost Facebook likes to spam folks who join groups or like them. We decided against it.