Tuesday, October 7, 2014

6-2 Blog: Social Media Tools





Choose three of the Social Media Tools presented on this website to try. Post links to your attempts. Share your thoughts about which new social media tools will reach audiences most effectively. Explain your rationale.


          
 In order for a writer to be successful within social media outlets, it is beneficial to follow the “Dragonfly Method”(SNHU, 2014).  This method allows for a writer to target a message to a certain audience.  There are four principles that are involved with this method: focus, grab attention, engage, and act (SNHU, 2014). 
Since I am writing this assignment in a blog, I found it fitting to make my first tool, well, a blog.  Blogs are typically written in an informal tone and updated on a daily or weekly basis (Aids, 2013).  I like blogs because of the conversations that can arise from them and a lot of information can be passed back and forth.   Blogs can be written by just about anyone.  One type of blog I love to read is from people’s travels.  They provide a firsthand account of different places and can offer good advice on where to stay, eat, and explore.   Here is a link to a blog that has a lot of worldwide travel information: http://www.hotelswelove.com/blog/ .  They break that blog up into three sections, Think, Play, and Sleep making it easy for readers to follow.  This tool has great potential to reach sizable audiences.  By using some common sites such as Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress, posts can be tagged, liked, followed, and searched (Aids, 2013).  The amount of blogs worldwide has risen by 145 million from 2006 to 2011 (Aids, 2013).  The one downside I can see in blogs is that it is very user specific.  People will typically only view them if they are interested in the topic, so it is important for the reader to have a good relationship with the writer to keep them engaged. 
          Another great tool to reach a wide audience base is Twitter.  Twitter is great to follow the news, sports, celebrities, and products.  By having consumers retweeting products or stories, agencies basically have low cost advertisement, while reaching a large amount of people.  Users of Twitter can connect to people by posting a maximum of a 140 character posts, which is unique in the world of social media and in a way I think it makes messages a lot quicker and easier to read.  With 177 million tweets sent daily worldwide (Aids, 2013), messages are sure to spread quickly.  https://twitter.com/AIDSinfo is a link to a twitter account that provides a lot of great information on Aids treatment, prevention, knowledge, and research. 
          Photo sharing sites are a great way to connect with each other by tagging, sharing, uploading, storing, and editing pictures (Aids, 2013).  People can leave comments and by using hash tags, it can link your photos to others using the same tag.  This is a different way to enhance information delivery because it is mostly done through imagery, rather than text.  Sometimes pictures speak louder than words.  Some of the most popular sites include Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and Flickr (Aids, 2013).  Out of all of the sites on any social network, Pinterest showed the most growth from 2011 to 2012 (Aids, 2013).  http://instagram.com/egpaf is a link to an amazing Instagram account for egpaf, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation (Aids, 2014).  This site has 1, 615 followers and has 513 posts, a great way to spread awareness.
          I cannot say that one tool is more effective than the other because in the end it depends on what type of information writers are looking to share and it also depends on what audiences are looking for.  If someone is looking to share a specific topic then writing blogs might work best for that audience base.  If one is looking to spread quick information to a large audience then Twitter might work best for that.  If someone feels that imagery will enhance their message then photo sharing will work best for them.  Overall, it all depends on the audience base and what type of message the writer or photographer wants to share.

References:

Aids.Gov (2013). New media tools. Retrieved from: www.aids.gov: http://aids.gov/using-new-media/tools/index.html#tool-bookmarkingNew

Aids.Gov (2013).  Photo sharing sites. Retrieved from: http://aids.gov/using-new-media/tools/photo-sharing-sites/  http://instagram.com/egpaf



SNHU (2014) Module 6 - Overview. COM 510-X1509

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