Final Project Blog

Over the last 16 weeks I have been exposed to a lot of different social media sites. This blog well show you how these different social media sites have gone for me.

Blogger: Blogger is a free site that allows users to post onto a forum where other users can connect and read along with you. Throughout these weeks, I've had my ups and downs with blogger but overall have built a quality connection with it. I struggled with posting/positioning pictures on each of my blog posts. By posting once a week to Blogger has helped me create a foundation to build off for my business and give a consistent image to all of my readers. I thought it was pretty cool that you were able to add your different social media sites right onto the sidebar so readers can have easy access right to all your other sites. I feel that I would not use this in a real life situation for my business because it takes up a lot of time to think of what your topic is going to be and is quite time consuming. Here's a link to my blog, go check it out!

Twitter: Twitter is a free social media site that lets users post short stories which can only be up to only 140 characters max. I found it challenging to get my messages out their without going over the character limit. I learned very quickly that putting spaces in your tweets count as a character. Twitter was definitely easier to use because you could have quick and short tweets. I found this to be like more of a "on the go" social media site. Joining Twitter I didn't think that it would be at time consuming as it was. Half the challenge was just trying to come up with what you were going to tweet about. I did a cross collaboration to help promote another business (@BankOnFitness) while they helped me out and mentioned me in one of their posts. Since you need to be consistent with tweeting, I found it best for my business to tweet right away in the morning at about 8:30am, then at 12:30 to try and catch people on lunch breaks, and then again at 6:00 so people would be home from work and online around supper time. In a real life situation I would not use it because it's just too time consuming to tweet 3 times a day and try to come up with things to tweet about. I would use it in a real life situation if I could just tweet about my events that I have as long as it wasn't every single day. Head over to my Twitter account!

Facebook: Facebook is a free site where users can connect, add friends, and have a profile. I used this social media site to post articles about different types of recipes and tips. This was very easy to stay caught up with since you only needed 3 posts a week, not a day. According to the buddy media report, the best days to post for my business is Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. The weekend is the best time for me to post because people are home and looking for something to make. I could improve my posts by using more pictures in my posts. Yes, I believe that I would use this platform on a regular basis to help keep getting new information to my customers and keep them involved with my company. Go check out my Facebook page!

Hootsuite: I found Hootsuite to be a very useful tool. Instead of doing all my tweets every day and Facebook posts all week, I would just sit down and schedule them all at one time for the whole entire week. This way, it was less stress having to worry about doing the posts everyday and I wouldn't forget to do them. I really found this to be a very easy life saving site that I loved right from the beginning. I would definitely use this social media aggregator in a real life scenario to take the stress out of doing social media.

Pinterest: Pinterest was a neat site to use and I really enjoyed it. I found that I couldn't be on Pinterest for only 5 minutes at a time, it was more like 45 minutes at a time. I loose a sense of time on it and got distracted easily. Pinterest works well for my business because since I'm a catering company, it works out to pin foods to different categories (Main dish, desserts, etc) so it's like an online menu. I had created boards for different types of meals from kids meals all the way to holiday meals. This way customers can go to my page and look to see what they want to eat and if they don't find anything they like, they can just pin something to me. I would definitely use this site on a regular basis. This would be a great beneficial website for me to use so I can find new recipes to try and make for my customers. Check out my Pinterest page!

Niche Sites: A Niche Site that would be great for my business is Group Recipes. Group Recipes is a great niche site for me to use because it's a site that lets you look up recipes by meal, or by certain food type (Chicken, steak, etc) and then pulls up thousands of meals/recipes for you to use. Since I have an account set up on this site, it's handy because once you open a recipe, you can add it to your grocery list and it compiles it all together so you don't have to do anything. This would be a great tool to have for my business so when I'm putting together an event and all the food, I can just put it all together on the grocery list so all my ingredients are in one place. I would use this niche site on a regular basis for my company, mostly when planning for an event and discovering new recipes to try. Go try out Group Recipes, it's awesome and FREE!

Podcasts: Podcasts was an interesting experience which I've never dealt with before. I created a podcast to create a commercial for my business to help promote a current special. Using audacity to record was simple to do since it was easy to navigate. I struggled to fit my commercial within the time limit that was given and wish we were given more time. By the time I said what I wanted to say, my time was past and I had to re-record. I thought that these podcasts were a pain to do though because all you do is talk to a microphone, it's basically like a radio commercial but online. I still struggle with the idea that people would listen to these, to me I wouldn't listen. I would not use these if my company were real. I don't see my target audience listening to Podcasts since I'm a food related company, they wouldn't spend their time listening to that. Check out my podcast now!

Vines & Videos: I found Vines to be pretty fun and spent a lot of time on it. I used Vine to create short 6 second clips to help promote my business and help introduce it to people so they could get to know it. I really liked the over all concept of this but 6 seconds doesn't seem like enough time when your advertising a business. I would use this for my business to help advertise new looks and recipes to help get my word out there. I also created a video and uploaded it to Youtube. This was quite the process as I've never done something like that before. I wish I would have had more time to make my Youtube video more professional looking which mine clearly didn't look anything close to that at all. I would like to learn editing software more so I could use this to help my business out. It would be a great way to help my business and its free so it costs my business nothing. By doing this it could actually save me money so I don't have to hire someone else to create a video for me. I see this being very beneficial for me.

Summary: Over all this was a very hands on great learning experience. I've learned so much about all these social network sites from building a foundation for my business with blogger to making my thoughts come alive with videos on Youtube. I loved every minute of these platforms even if they were stressful from time to time. I loved learning all the social media analytics to figure out all the numbers behind your sites. I would recomend to use Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite, Pinterest, Niche Sites, and Vines and Videos for your business to help grow it. I wouldn't recommend using Blogger, or Podcasts at all but they could work for you depending on your business. Some of these social media sites are time consuming but do pay off if you stay dedicated enough to help build your company image and to promote it. It's really cool to watch your company grow from the first week we started to see where we are now with all of our "Likes" and tweets. It goes to show that hard work does pay off!