Information Overload!

Maybe I was just trying too hard to retain as much information as possible from Amanda Hill's presentation at Tuesday's Social Media class, but by the end of it I was more confused than ever! Don't get me wrong, Amanda was a font of knowledge and obviously knows her stuff inside out and back to front. The problem is that so early in this course there are huge chunks of knowledge and information missing from my personal database (my little grey cells). Sadly, so much of Amanda's very valuable information was lost on me.

Thank goodness she is coming back in year two as I am sure I will pick up more things when I have a sounder knowledge base.

However, my social media mates came to the rescue this morning in the form of their blogs. I found both Barry's and Jeff's blogs really helpful in unraveling some of the things Amanda had been talking about. Barry's was especially helpful with a number of useful links to platforms with brief descriptions of what they are.

Chrissie Designs Jewellery web site is almost ready to be launched www.chrissiedesignsjewellery.co.uk. So I am now able to sift through the information overload and use some of Amanda's precious gems. Getting high in the Google rankings is a top priority, so making sure the web site title and the first 40 words (as well as focussed meta dates) are good ones is my first job. After Amanda told us that the 3 most used words in searches are cats, chololate and sex, I noticed that she had put two of them, (cats & chocolate) in her description on Facebook. Wonder if anyone else noticed that? Note to self - follow her example!

Sorting out my lists on Facebook is another priority. With two target markets for my jewellery - women over 50yrs and Brides to be, I need to make very separate lists in order to use social media effectively in my target marketing.
 
Developing a small business is time consuming. You have to be a 'Jack of all trades'. Social media is just one tool to be used along side traditional marketing and so it has to be very time effective. That's why my next action will be to set up Hootsuite so that I can consolidate my message posting to FaceBook, Twitter and Linked In.

My web developer and I are also looking at ISSUU for developing a newsletter/brochure. With its ability to link and share content it seems the most effective platform for increasing activity and trafic for my web site.

Finally, I am going to put some pin boards together using Pinterest. This will be a very useful platform for driving more trafic and potential customers to my web site. With its online shop, the greater the traffic to my web site, the higher my sales potential. Well that's the theory, now to put it into practice!