Utilizing Social Media to Create Awareness and Drive Traffic: My Storify

The purpose of this storify is to recap my experience in COMI610: Social Media Strategies and Tactics. I will describe how I utilized Twitter, Pinterest and Blogger to drive traffic to my class blog and effectively engage by audience. This report will also summarize key activities and analyze pert

Background

Social Media has transformed the way
consumers as well as businesses effectively manage their day to day activities.
During this explosion, communications between individuals and companies have
become two way rather than one way interruption that used to exist. Long gone
are the days of one way interruption and big billboard advertisements. Social
media has introduced to us how to effectively communicate messages that are two
way and cost effective across multiple platforms. Our course Comi610 required
us to integrate all our social media platforms and utilize them to drive
traffic to our blogger account. This storify will describe my social media
trends, strategies utilized and provide statistical analysis over the semester.

Introduction

My name is Saurav Ghosh and I will
be graduating from Marist College in the summer of 2014. I previously have
completed my Bachelors and Master’s degree in Accounting in 2009. I then proceeded
to attend Pace University and finish a DUAL MBA in Finance and Information
Systems in 2012. I choose to pursue the IMC degree at Marist College as I
wanted to have a holistic view from all business disciplines. I wanted to have
this view in order to ultimately open my own firm. Social Media has been a big
part of my life, as I am constantly on facebook, youtube and other social media
platforms. However, before this course I did not know about the tactics used to
engage audiences and drive traffic to certain sites. While taking this course,
I was able to learn a lot of different skillsets that enabled me to keep
individuals engaged by utilizing certain fonts, spacing, and videos while also utilizing
certain pins from pinterest, tweets from twitter and posts via facebook to
drive traffic to blogger.

Plans
& Policies

When implementing
plans and policies one must consider how social media fits into the overall
communication strategy. This point was a key point in the article we read
titled “The Social Media Handbook for U.S. Navy PAOs” (n.d.). To
see my site policy, please click here.
My communication strategy included
utilizing tweets, pins and facebook posts to drive traffic to my blogger. I
tried to use tweets that linked to my blogger account so audiences knew where
to visit. I pinned different infographics to my Pinterest account in order to
facilitate conversation between classmates while also directing them to my
site. I used my personal facebook page as well as the Marist Group page to facilitate
conversation as well as drive traffic to my blog. By posting updates and
teasers I was able to gain traffic to my blog.

Below is an example of a facebook teaser:
Saurav Ghosh Blog
Hey All, It was a fun week actively participating as Team 6 leader. In our individual blogs we all touched on many aspects of security and privacy. With a plethora of social media sites ( facebook,twitter,pinterest, youtube to name a few, keeping our guard up and being careful of what we post, where we post, what we click and where we click is key.
Saurav Ghosh
In order to drive traffic and activity to my blog, I wanted to create an
environment that is engaging and collaborative. I utilized twitter, pinterest,
facebook and other creative elements in my blog such as pictures,videos, line spacing
to keep users engaged. To maximize views, I posted teasers on twitter as well as links to my blogger. I posted throughout the week on twitter targeting my direct team as well as within the group. I utilized pinterest and pinned relevant info-graphics that built on the topic that was being discussed and directed the conversation over to my blog. I posted info-graphics as well as other relevant material on our facebook homepage that drove traffic to my blog and encouraged active collaborative discussion. In order to make the blog engaging I posted links in my blog as well as videos from youtube that further enhanced the discussion for the week.

First Blog Post via Twitter
Below was my first tweet, which targeted all my followers and guided them to my blog. This tweet linked my blog specifically and allowed my target audience to simply click the link and visit my blog. A weakness in this tweet was that it did not include creative hashtags nor did it include a specific target audience such as Mar610 class group of my teammates but rather a more broader audience, which were my followers
Saurav Ghosh @Sauravghosh1984
WEEK 2 BLOG : COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY http://sauravghosh1984.blogspot.com/2014/02/week-2-blog-communications-strategy.html …
Wed, Feb 05 2014 20:40:55
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Second Blog Post via Twitter
After gauging the traffic that was being driven to my blog based on twitter, I decided to target the Marist twitter group directly. Below is a tweet encouraging the class to visit my blog and comment. I again linked the blogger to make it easy for the user to visit my site.
Saurav Ghosh @Sauravghosh1984
@MaristCOM610 come check out my exciting response to our discussion and comment. http://sauravghosh1984.blogspot.com/
Sat, Feb 08 2014 10:44:07
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My final blog post via Twitter
This tweet was very successful as I integrated my twitter audience with pinterest. I originally created a pin on my pinterest and then shared it with twitter. This enabled not only my pinterest followers to engage in my blog but also my twitter followers. By integrating multiple social media platforms I was able to effectively drive traffic to my blog.
Saurav Ghosh @Sauravghosh1984
END OF LEADERSHIP POST ON BLOGGER WEEK 6 http://pinterest.com/pin/79657487133469671/ …
Sun, Mar 02 2014 10:38:58
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Analysis

Measuring success of a blog is based on the amount of views your page is getting and the amount of collaboration that is occurring on the blogger. I tracked both of these activities using blogger stats and have come up with the following diagram below:
Googleapis
·
Wed, Mar 05 2014 17:24:07
Entry Pageviews

United States 436

France 27

Germany 3

Spain 2

Russia 2
Googleapis
·
Wed, Mar 05 2014 19:24:44
Conclusion

To conclude, I feel my goals for this course were met for the most part. Being a Finance major I did not know what to expect when entering this course. Even though I had been a social media user, I did not really know how to employ social media tactics in order to drive an audience to a destination. However as I progressed in the course and started integrating multiple social media channels such as twitter, pinterest and facebook, I started to realize integrating across multiple different outlets optimizes the amount of collaboration. I do feel however that I could have had more engagement in my blog but utilizing better tweets, hashtags and posting earlier in the week as it seemed the amount of comments had a downward slope towards mid to end of the week.

References:
Scott, D.(2013). The New Rules of Marketing and PR.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated.