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...

 I chose to go with Twitter as I am more familiar with it from my own personal account. I set up a fresh account for The Painting Dummy. With only a couple of posts for now, it is still like planting a flag for my venture. I like Twitters ability to use hyperlinks to share information as well as images, short text communications (tweets), and even sharing videos or animated gifs. This does up the complexity compared to Instagram, but I think the freedom to communicate with more variety of media in one place makes up for a slight learning curve. I have never used Twitter for marketing, so this will be a first and look forward to seeing the results. Right now I will be looking to expand my brand awareness , as most of what I am planning on creating will be more tutorial like content for my blog, Instagram, Facebook, and even Youtube channels. Using a Twitter account to drive brand awareness and communicate with news and previewing upcoming content, like a shorter e-newsletter that “a...

 With such a visual business like The Painting Dummy, I would expect to send an e-mail newsletter about once a month. The long interval of time between the sending is allowing for time to create content for the website and social media outlets. A shorter interval would create quit a time crunch for the work involved in modeling and painting steps. A newsletter for this business would be as informative as possible and could include: painting techniques - showing how certain techniques are done construction - wether a hard build or showcasing a special ‘Kit-bash” basing - material ideas and techniques for basing your models kinds of paints - new paints on the market, comparing and contrasting paint manufacturers tools - new tools, new tool techniques, glue - best types of glue for the materials we are working with I think anyone that would sign up to follow this e-mail newsletter would like the information I could provide as another opinion or new way of doing a technique they haven’...

 For this blog, I think I can break this genre down into a few categories to stay better organized. “Building a Miniature” - How I put certain miniatures together. If some miniatures are easier to build than others. What tricks I may have for building some different miniatures. “Prepping for Paint” - How (after finishing a build) I prep the miniatures for paint. Why I use certain primers. Do I fill gaps. “How I Paint “ - first category would be showing and explaining how I am painting a certain model. The techniques and paints I am using. What brushes I use. The techniques I’m using to lay the paint down. “Paints I Use” - showing what paints I use for different techniques. "Finishing a Miniature" - what steps I use to seal and finish the miniatures I'm working on. Each of these categories I could easily split into sub categories for even more organization and to make the blog easier to search. Whatever makes searching and reading a blog or blog post easier to search and...

 Reaching for the human element in a business blog post makes the business (what ever it may be) more personable, more relatable, more welcoming. This may spark more interest in your audience and even allow more people or customers feel better about sharing your content and so reach an even larger audience.  Not every post needs to be a human interest piece, but neither does every post need to be cold and just pushing a sale or for a conversion. To me I think adding a piece of me into a post that can make it more relatable to my audience is almost natural, like meeting a group of new people and finding a common interest with a few of them. I would make some of my diy posts more about how I solved the problems I was facing in the painting or assembly of the models that I am showcasing. The niche genera I’ve chosen lends itself to more of a personable approach as it is more of a personal hobby to many more people than a business.

 For my instagram posts I used the Hashtags that I thought best suited the images and type of posts. #warhammer40k #warhammer #gwpaint #paintcollection #bloodforthebloodgod #proacryl #proacrylpaints #warhammer40k #berzerker #khorneberzerkers etc These Hashtags I found by looking at other hobbyists on Instagram and how they tag their posts. These are specific to the hobby and to the images that are being posted. This I think narrows searches for potential followers / fellow hobbyists. I tried to post in the mornings, which seemed to get to most traffic by noon. I think it’s that first coffee break perusal of instagram people do in the mornings. I think going forward I will be posting or setting up auto posts to hit that part of the morning (between 9 and 10 am pacific time). I learned quit a bit from this exercise. I learned traffic can ebb and flow like tides, so finding the right time of day for posting in your niche or genre will organically raise your views and audience awarenes...

 Lucky for me, The Painting Dummy is very visual. Painting miniature war-games models is a very visual medium. It’s almost difficult to explain through  descriptions without the visual media to accompany it. I found four other similar Instagram pages to look at a little closer. The comparison of followers to likes on the individual posts kind of threw me off. It confused me a little. The largest company I looked at is Warhammer Official with 265 thousand followers but only has a 3% follower to like ratio. The one with the least followers I looked at is Jarek Westermark with 3,653 followers, but their like ratio is way way higher at 33%. I averaged these out to get the percentages, so approximately. I’m not sure where this leaves my analysis, except the smaller pages look like they have more engagement with their audience. All of these pages post at least every other day. This is a goal I will be setting for my own page. I’ll be needing to get a head start on my painting projec...