Week Nine Blogging for Business

Blogging can be such a great outlet for someone to express themselves, but how much personal information is it necessary to write about for it to be interesting. I have read blogs where people go on and on about their love lives, living situations, work life and etc. and it's so entertaining to read it and feel like you are best friends with the blogger. I think it's up to the blogger to figure out how much they want to be a public figure, blogger in themselves are a new kind of celebrity. Privacy is something someone should think about when they are considering what they are going to expose about themselves on their blog.

Week 8 Visual Social Media

I know of one community college that is using Pinterest as one of it's social media platforms. Irvine Valley College http://www.pinterest.com/MyIrvineValley/ has a great site full of boards and pins which have to do with their college. They have 128 followers and over 1200 pins, their boards have to do with college life to a campus tour through pictures. The pictures are great shots and it captures the beauty of the campus.
http://ucsdhealthsciences.tumblr.com/ UC San Diego has a blog roll on Tumblr with articles and pictures of relevant health posts.

Week 8 Get Visual

"Lets get Visual"
Here at work I have been using Facebook for about 4 years and about a year ago after going to a conference I found out that going visual is the best way to get engagement on your page. Lots of the posts I do are of workshops, events and or announcements for the campus and having continuous copy is just going to bore our audience. When began asking for flyers and pictures from the various departments on campus to promote the event they were having and saw a big increase in the posts engagements. I have been following Tumblr and find it fascinating how people use a visual to express themselves and been using this as a personal journal and have been thinking of asking if we should develop a Tumblr for the younger demographic but find that if I want to post pictures of the campus and such Instagram is a better platform for our business type. Youtube could be a great avenue to make how-to-videos for our most asked questions, Like how to register for classes? and other school related questions. I think it would be a great way to reach out to students with students doing the videos they would be able to relate and use a platform that is being used relied on heavily for peoples opinions.

Week Six Pages Liked on Facebook and Scheduled posts

Working with the official Palomar College's Facebook I liked pages that were relevant to education.
I liked all the Community Colleges in San Diego County, departments in our college who also have Facebook pages to keep update with departments activities and events. I also liked local news channels to stay informed with current events regarding Palomar College.
Scheduling post is a great feature that Facebook has and it saves me time on weekends when I know I won't have access to my computer. I feel successful page requires constant activity and with this feature you are able to remind students of activities that will be going on Monday or even a Football game on Saturday night by scheduling a post for Saturday morning.
On Thursday, Oct. 9 I scheduled a post for a Volleyball game happening on Friday, Oct. 10 since I knew I wasn't going to be by desk due to an event on campus. I had it post at 7 a.m. and had two likes by 1:30 p.m. when I logged in to post a photo of the event we were having.

Week #5 Facebook Page Components

 The difference between post reach and post engagement is that engagement is the total likes, comments and shares your post get and post reach is the number of unique people who have seen content associated with your page. Reach measures your brand's effective audience where in engagement can provide what you audience is interested in. In the page I manage I see very high engagement when I post funny pictures of cats or dogs, I get the most likes and shares. I think students like to see a bit a humor in the midst of traditional post. We haven't paid for any of our posts all of our reach is organic, people are following our page on their own.  I tend to see on certain posts people are sharing our post and are generating an viral reach for people who are not getting our feed organically. Facebook insights come in very handy, I have taken into consideration the times when I have the most visits on the page and tend to post at that time. I also can see the competition and their engagement percentages and scramble to come up with more creative post if we are down in likes and engagement.  

Week #4 Defining a Target Market for My Business

Week #4 Defining a Target Market for My Business
The business that I will be using for Facebook is the official Palomar College Facebook page.

My target market is anyone who is interested and or is a already affiliated with the college. Our target age-range is 18-24.

We are competing with Mira Costa College to the west and Mira Mar College to the East, we need to capture the attention of perspective students in our district area. Palomar College has over 200 degrees and certificates which we are promote  and events within the campus.

We would like to get more people to like our page and have more engagement on post that are related to the campus. I would like to learn how to bring in more likes with out having to pay for posts.