My exploration of social media
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Social Media Example – Farm.TV and LRC open House
Jul 21st
Farm.TV is a Canadian based social media site for the farming industry. It is perhaps not as glamorous as celebrities and stars using social media, or even the big social networks, but it is a great example of just what can be done with the web using social media.
I personally became aware of Farm.TV through my father Brian Freeze, the Director at Agriculture and Agra-Food Canada’s Lethbridge Research Center. Yesterday on Farm.TV they highlighted an upcoming open house at the research center. So check out my Dad, and if you’re in the Lethbridge Alberta area check out the open house – the LRC is quite a cool place, I worked there a few summers as a teen and loved it.
Why Your Business Needs to Twitter
May 27th
Twitter has been around now for a few years – early on the numbers were small. Now twitter is starting to be widely adopted – more and more people are hopping on. Your business needs to be there, and here’s why:
People are looking for you. More and more of the people you are trying to reach with your business are on twitter and looking for people, products and groups in areas they are interested in. If you’re not there, you’ll miss the opportunity.
Bring traffic to your Site. Twitter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. In your tweets you can post links to news, articles, promotions or whatever on your site and automatically drive traffic to that page on your site. This is extremely valuable whether you have just a blog or a large corporate site. The more followers you have the more you will have come, and within seconds of your tweet.
Keep your customers informed. Once you have your targeted following, twitter can help you to keep your customers informed on upcoming events, products, changes or company news. If you have a blog, you can link twitter to your blog to send out a tweet each time there is a new post – once it goes out you immediately get readers, just make sure that title is catchy enough.
Put a face to the company name. More and more value is being seen by having a company with a human face behind it. What better way to humanize your company than to have tweets from the owner available for both employees and customers to follow. Followers can respond to what you are doing and build a connection with you that may not have existed otherwise, thus building brand loyalty and happy customers and employees.
Respond real-time to news. Twitter can also give you the ability to respond quickly to news about your Business – good or bad. If it is good news, you can hop on twitter to spread the joy with everyone. If it is bad or false, you can respond quickly and get your side of the story out, or correct misinformation.
Find new opportunities. Twitter is also a great way to connect with other business and people. Each person or business is sharing ideas and experiences that they are having. It can give you a better idea of where you can provide new services or products that your public are demanding. Watching their tweets can also give you ideas on where you can improve upon current services and products.
As you get out there, and start tweeting, you will surly see some benefits I have not listed, these are just a few.
Some additional things I don’t mention here but will be writing on in the future are: how best to start using Twitter for a business, how to grow your followers the right way, and Twitter best practices.
Social Media is Changing the World
May 23rd
The more and more I am learning about social media, the more I am realizing that now is the perfect time for all of this to come to a head. Every time that there is a recession or depression in the economy there has been a great change in who has the money. With the current recession business are struggling to come out on top of all the job losses, decreases in orders and bankruptcies. At the same time people are becoming more and more informed and the world is becoming more and more connected. More countries are also joining in and the days of national economies are going away and being replaced by a world economy. Now is the time for companies, old and new to embrace social media.
I feel as the social media trend continues with the development of web 2.0 software we will see a decrease in regular TV watching as more and more turn to the web for films, sports, news and sitcoms. Traditional phone lines will disappear and be replaced by live video streaming and cell phones. People will buy more and more on-line and through on-line media sharing. Technology will begin to jump drastically as more and more knowledge sharing of statistics and innovation are opened and collaboration is made across places where there once were boundaries. Social media encourages synergy. Ideas I get are stimulated by others thoughts. It is truly changing the world and I want to be a part of it.
HOW TO: Leverage Social Media for Career Success
May 18th
In this post, you’ll learn how to conduct a situational analysis, figure out exactly what your personal brand is, select the best social media tools to connect with your audience, build your online empire and finally, market your brand for career success.
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