Thomas' CSIT 155 - Fall 2020 Class Blog

 This has been quit a journey for me, delving behind the scenes of Social Media. Finding out how much a Social Media company knows about me and what I search for and how long I stay on a page or a post, and how important that can be to a business to know. Not just my information of course, but any potential client or customer. This has been an eye opening adventure to say the least. Personally my use of Social Media has become radically more self aware. In the beginning I would’t even question why I was seeing certain adds show up in my feeds. I would just “guess” that it was because I looked for certain things on the internet or that I had clicked on a similar add before sometime in the past. Even as I started The Painting Dummy, I wasn’t quit sure as to the extent the changes of how I view Social Media would change. Now as I have planned out next month’s Social Media Marketing Strategy, I find myself looking at Social Media as more of a Tool than anything else. Learning how that ...

 A very rough draft of where I want this to go in the next month. Time constraints willing, I should be spending about six to seven hours a week on just developing and executing the content for each of these posts. The posts themselves should only take some minutes to upload and post. I believe if I can stick to this (or a very similar) schedule, The Painting Dummy should be well on its way to gaining some organic traction in the social media sphere and take off. June     Week1:             FaceBook: Tutorial on Priming             Instagram: Priming Steps             FaceBook: How to apply Washes and Inks             Instagram: Unboxing new models     Week2:             Facebook: Painting Blue (base, mid-tone, highlight)  ...

 Planning a social media marketing strategy for The Painting Dummy hasn’t been easy.  “Learning as I do”, was always meant lightheartedly, until I have found myself actually “doing” it. This journey has been eye opening and encouraging. With The Painting Dummy barely a forming concept right now, I think the best way to grow will be repeated little steps building on the last. The best platform I see spending the most time on right now will be FaceBook. This platform integrates many of the features for marketing and promoting The Painting Dummy at an affordable cost.  The analytics that FaceBook offers to investigate new strategies of posting and promoting the business though not as in-depth or far reaching as Google Analytics, is tailored to the platform. This offers deeper insight to my followers if not a wider one. Along with the FaceBook Platform, I will still be using Instagram and cross posting to FaceBook between scheduled FaceBook posts. The visual media of both pla...

 The information provided by the FaceBook data, though not as detailed as the Google Analytics, is still very useful. I can see which type of posts get the most interactions and can infer from this information why they are getting the most interactions. Visual story telling along with concise copy and informative details seem to be the best path to interactions along with the time of the posts. This is definitely information I can use to design future posts to interact with my followers and gain new followers.    

 I think for my followers the most important features for me to check on regularly would be engagement, page views, and what time of day my followers are on the most. This would make it easier for me to know what posts people are interacting with the most, what times of day would be best to publish, and what information viewers are interacting with.

Right now my objective for these adds would be to grow page or Brand awareness. Introducing people to what I am doing and how my unique take on the hobby would be entertaining and informative enough to keep an audience checking back for new updates and tutorials.     

 I have to say, that most of the “sponsored” posts I see on Facebook almost all fade into the background of my scrolling. I can almost subconsciously ignore them as I scroll. They are all designed almost exactly alike, to the point they just fade into the background. Most use standard “photo stock” looking images with a tagline or a few sentences of copy to “grab” your interest. It may be based on what I have been looking for recently? Maybe the search algorithms stored for my sign on that keep showing me the simplistic boring “adds” over and over again? In any case almost all of the “sponsored” posts I click on lead me to a “Sales Funnel”, where the call to action is sign up for an e-mail list or download a free sample of information with the opportunity to buy a book or cheep chotskies from China (with a month or so shipping time). I can say for me, most of these adds are annoying, so looking for them as examples was a bit of a chore. At the least, it gives me ideas on what not t...

 I believe one of the triggers that started me on this journey was watching live streaming interactive painting tutorials on Twitch. I know most people think of Twitch as a video game streaming site, but there are many many more channels available that cross many hobbies. I’ve personally used Twitch as a viewer for a few years now, trying to think of actually streaming is exciting and a little scary at the same time (trepidatious). If I go forward broadcasting on a streaming service like Twitch, I could get instant feed back from an audience I could ask and answer questions to in real time. This kind of instant feed back could change the direction of projects and techniques that the audience would want to see demonstrated.