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Choosing social media networks: Marketing the #PhillyMakerFaire

Laura — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 18:46:07 +0000

Choosing social media networks: Marketing the #PhillyMakerFaire

Marketing the Faire

In late March I took on a volunteer position as Head of Marketing for the first ever Philadelphia Mini Maker Faire "a volunteer-organized, family-friendly celebration featuring local do-it-yourself science, art, robots, crafts, tech, music, hands-on-activities, and more. It’s an event where people show what they are making and share what they are learning" says the official site. My first goal was to extend our reach through social networking.

When I first took on this role, we had a Twitter account and a Facebook page.

Seems good enough, why do more? My answer always is that your online presence should be where your customers are, and we want to reach everyone! Well not really, but since the event is brand new, building a community and a brand is a huge part of the task.

Of course, not all platforms are appropriate for everyone, but I do encourage you to use any that are appropriate for your business. For #PhillyMakerFaire I have set up a comprehensive, cohesive social network presence.

Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/PhillyMakerFaire/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/phillymakerfaire/
Twitter https://twitter.com/phlmake
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/phillymakerfaire/
G+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/116631378467518106973/116631378467518106973
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_DDs59K8d3vVXLZGK1UiLg/
Tumblr https://tumblr.com/blog/phillymakerfaire

Inserting a shameless plug for the Faire on June 24th at Pennovation Works! Buy tickets. Follow us. Share it. Like it. Pin it. Re-tweet. Love it.

Just. Do. It!

How do you pick which social networks are best for you?

Facebook: Facebook is still the king of the social networks, in spite of recent controversies. If you only make one social network, Facebook would be a good option.
If there can be only one. Choose Facebook.

Instagram: If you make anything physical, you should definitely get on Instagram and share beautiful photos of your work. Every photo tells a story, and Instagram is perfect to tell yours.
Best for visual creators: artists, photographers, builders, crafters, makers, architects, designers

Pinterest: Another visual social network, but with an emphasis on collections. If you craft or DIY, consider a Pinterest account.
Best for gathering and sharing visual information: DIY, crafters, makers, builders

Twitter: It's a great all around network for visual and written content, but if writing's your thing, you should be on Twitter.
Best for wordsmiths: writers, bloggers, comedians, poets

G+: Google plus hasn't lived up to it's potential, but if you have a physical location, you should claim your Business and set up the corresponding brand page on Google. Help your customers find you and make sure your contact information and hours are always up-to-date.
Best for business: brick-and-mortar, eCommerce, B2B, service providers

YouTube: Video is an engaging way to reach your audience and YouTube is the more social video hosting platform. Choose YouTube for video unless you're a filmmaker or animator, Vimeo would be the better choice.
Best for: DIY, vloggers, social video

Yelp: Yelp is the modern day BBB, you should definitely take the steps to claim your Yelp page and interact with the reviews -- both positive and negative. Another place to keep your hours and contact information up-to-date.
Best for business: brick-and-mortar, service providers, B2B, hospitality

NextDoor: After G+ and Yelp, I would claim your NextDoor business page so that neighbors can recommend you, and tag you in network.
Best for business: brick-and-mortar, service providers - especially home improvement, B2B

LinkedIn: B2B and other service providers should be on LinkedIn. It's an excellent network for connecting with other business as well as for finding great candidates for your team.
Best for business: B2B, freelance, professional services

All the social networks could fill a small book, so I'll stop here. Vimeo is great for filmmakers, Flickr for photographers, Houzz for architects, GitHub for programmers, and there are a huge range of industry specific social networks.

Next Steps

Building a cohesive brand; look your best online.

Follow this blog over the next few weeks and I'll share what I'm learning about reaching out to the press, social media automation, managing a project with dozens of volunteers, and working with an amazing design team, two passionate founders, and marketing partners who have provided excellent guidance and structure.

Expand your social presence today!

Laura Fri, 06/01/2018 - 11:46

Marketing

Facebook

Twitter

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

Laura — Wed, 07 May 2014 15:29:21 +0000

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

For my art site, I believe in having a social media presence on multiple platforms. I also prefer to focus my time creating content for my own site and then share it from there. And of course, I want my content to look good. Currently I have fan pages set up on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and I also push my new content to my LinkedIn profile. Below are the tools I'm currently using.

All of this is done using the RSS feed. CMS driven platforms such as WordPress, Bloggr, or Tumblr should create a raw RSS feed automatically, although it probably won't look very nice. Feedburner can clean it up for you.

Feedburner can easily theme your RSS (Rich Site Summary) driven content and offers integration to popular readers. Feedburner also supports publishing your feed to Twitter. Here's what my Drupal RSS looks like before Feedburner…

…and after.

Definitely an improvement! To see what your raw RSS feed looks like navigate to YourSiteName.com/rss.xml.

HootSuite allows you to view and interact with multiple social networks. Their free plan includes integrating up to 5 networks allowing you to publish content to all of them at once. There is also the capacity for scheduled posts, location tagging, and integrated privacy settings.

I primarily use HootSuite to push my content to my Google+ page. I've tried a few different combinations of services and feeds and have found that using the Feedburner RSS feed with HootSuite looks best on Google+. This is controlled in the RSS/Atom section of HootSuite's settings. Here is a comparison of the IFTTT recipe vs. the HootSuite post.

Since my site is primarily images, I definitely prefer HootSuite on the left.

GPlus allows you to have a slightly nicer Google+ name. Basically a URL shortener, the name defaults to the long numerical Google generated name once it loads. Google+ is inviting page owners and individuals to change this, making this service obsolete.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a powerful service that allows you to automate almost anything. Helpful lifestyle updates such as receiving a text when you need to pack an umbrella or an email when tomorrow's forecast calls for snow are handy recipes that you can use. There are powerful back up tools that allow automatic back ups of photos posted to Flickr or Instagram to your preferred cloud service. For social network integration, I'm using these straight forward recipes designed by others to publish my RSS driven content. You can create triggers based on keywords in your content and more. These are the recipes I'm using now.

RSS to LinkedIn profile
RSS to Tumblr
RSS to Twitter (currently I'm using the Drupal module)
RSS to Facebook Fan Page
As I mentioned above, RSS to Google+ was not very pretty, so I'm using HootSuite for this push.

Log in to all of your social networks before signing up for HootSuite and IFTTT to make the integrations a little easier, and make sure you copy your RSS feed into each recipe. Also when you change passwords, it's a good practice to double check that your networks are still linked.

Drupal is king for content management, but the social network integration is better suited to pulling, sharing, and commenting. Twitter is the exception and is one of the easiest to integrate and gives specific control over individual posts. I followed these instructions.

Drupal Modules

Twitter
Oauth
Create your custom Twitter App

I find this to be the best and most direct social integration and I look forward to when other social networks are as smooth. The Twitter publishing shows up as one of the bottom vertical tabs when creating content and the content published can be customized globally through the content type edit page. Authors with the proper permissions can add custom hashtags and intros for any content.

If you don't have this level of access to your site or lack the expertise, Feedburner and IFTTT are excellent options for simple Twitter integration.

Next week's post will cover what content goes best with different social platforms, how long the ideal post should be, and what the best frequency is to reach out to your networks. Stay tuned.

This post edited by the Revise It! Team

Laura Wed, 05/07/2014 - 08:29