Social media and DMS and you

It has been mentioned that if we expand, we will need to improve our PR outreach

Among the ways we can do is with a heavier use of social media Several of our committees already
have a presence on FB but some of those mostly seem to reach members and some students

Many artists and artist groups use social media effectively to reach out and build interests and such

Facebook is one platform, I know folks use Twitter and Instagram a lot, I hear a lot of good things
about using Instagram like posting pictures of folks shopping at an art show or a happy customer,
with their permission will draw in folks

I feel that we could do a lot of outreach with even our personal accounts if we thought about and
were willing of course and knew how

Personally I do use Facebook, I would love to use Twitter and Instagram.

I am thinking about things like teachers posting a picture of a class making things, posting photos
of what students made, Students doing the same How often have you stopped after a class
and shown your new box or pen or 3D printed widget with your friends at the space
We may have folks already doing that I dont know

How many folks are willing to help in this way? I know that not everyone is on
social media I m not talking to y all just to those of us that do use it

Would you be willing to share things to your personal account? Do you already do that?
Is there a way to encourage it>

We also have a rarely read blog That is another good way to reach out How can we
get it followed more?

I can it being used to show our expansion

A little personal comment on this, Several years ago I reserved a store name on Etsy Lots of my
friends did the same, most had few sales and limited views, the ones that were successful, used
blogs and the the way they listed items to drive interest, I was working on the ground work for mine
when life got in the way It is still waiting to open (not being able to take in focus pictures is a problem)

Comments please
(I think if anything was official, we would have to be careful about faces Maybe another
thing to ask a lawyer about)

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As would lots of other people.

My media is not social…

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When spell checker fails, when you misspell a work so it is a word

Still not as bad as an auto spell check programs that altered Pennsic Wars to
an obscence sounding variation of it

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What you want is a grammar checker. But “sue” and “use” are both valid in that context. I know of no software which can read minds…

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This is near and dear to my heart, because I love reading it.
So, my question on this is: what’s a “successful” blog see in traffic?
Ours sees ~700-1000 views a day, per the in-wp analytics


This SEEMS like a lot of views, but only <3 mins time on page seems low. How would YOU fix this?
What would YOU like to see here? I have some ideas (that I probably don’t have time nor talent to make happen), but I’d like to hear yours.
i know the #1 answer is “I’d like to see it on Facebook because that’s what everyone uses for everything”, so please try to think beyond that; I’m not opposed to using Facebook to promote things like this, but i would like some OTHER suggestions…
FWIW, promotions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et.al. in my experience, rarely reach “new” audiences, either. They just get passed among the same old circles of friends. How do we score that break-out moment? And what is the vehicle?
:+1:

EDIT: PS do we have any OTHER analytics available to us for our various web presences? Would like to know what search terms brought someone here, where did they go next, if on our site or not, etc. I’m sure some of you are familiar with SEO; I am not. Would love to hear from you what you’d do next to drive newcomers to look at our postings, wherever they are.

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A big problem with Facebook is that those who use it heavily tend to think everybody else does, so they do not bother to do promotion anywhere else.

While I despise social media for how it works and the effect it has on society, I am open-minded enough to acknowledge it has a real ability to expose users to things they are not actively seeking. Promotion by accident, if you will.

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Let me do some asking around, I mean I dont think I have ever promoted it on
my profile on FB
I m on FB a lot and I need to improve what I am doing, I have my personal account, my business account and I manage, the business abbount of a friend and another member Now those are not all local, my friend list includes folks on 6 continents I dont think any of the scientist I know are in Antarctica right now

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In 2015, nearly 75% of American adults on the internet used Facebook. Since that was 81% of all adults, that’s 61% of Americans (or 58% per the headline since the actual online audience looks to be ~72%). That’s an amazingly centralized audience - especially if you can craft your messages on Facebook to reach more than just whoever likes your page. And even if you only reach out as far as friends of_ your page’s “friends”, that presumed familiarity makes them better customers.

I agree that exclusively marketing on Facebook isn’t a great plan, but like it or not that’s where a lot of eyeballs live. Maintaining your own presence on your own platform is important since Facebook is a surprisingly sparse medium for anything beyond photos with endless comment threads that you can’t reasonably navigate.

Twitter is likely also be worthwhile, but I don’t use the platform so can’t speak to it.

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I hear a lot of good things from posting in Instagram

I have a Twitter account I have never used but it would not be good for
[promoting us Its focus would be science related not art or makerly

I would want to use my Howling Artist name for that I think

The nice things about social media is that it is free and that it lets a lot of 'folks help out easily

Twitter seems to be mostly bots these days. I only get on there if I need to flame a business into finally resolving an issue. That said, you can probably find something that posts to both Facebook and Twitter at the same time. I think I must be too old for Instagram, I don’t understand why I would post an image on there instead of posting it to my Facebook page. But it seems that a lot of people are on Instagram. I already try to talk about DMS as much as I can on Facebook without spamming people. I think it would be helpful to have a maker event where non-members can purchase a table because then I can post the event to some vendor Facebook groups and possibly generate some interest. I don’t know if that will increase members but worst case we could have another fun craft show/sale.

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If it can post to Facebook, it can surely post to Instagram as well since the separation between those two platforms is quite thin.

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A friend just mentioned that we could use FB events to help promote
things I wouldnt want to do it too often on my personal page
But folks could post their classes for one thing

What does “successful” mean? :smiling_imp: (I assume “successful” means “frequently added a new member”. Does it?)

The problem with “sessions”, “users”, and “page views” is that bots and spiders are included. They’re helpful when compared to other points in time (after a site has been online a few weeks) but not particularly useful as absolute numbers.

High referral count. Those are visits from something that (probably) followed a link which, in my experience, are mostly humans (as apposed to bots / spiders).

Lots of referrals results in a higher Google search rank.

I found it useful to occasionally visit referring sites. It can be enlightening to see what others are saying about us. It can also be a source of keywords to add to our own site.

High organic search count is good. Those are followed links from a Google search. Sifting through the keywords is very useful. I suspect those keywords will sometimes give us an idea of what tools / classes should be added. For example, if 387 people searched for “3d print aluminum” then visited our site we may want to consider acquiring a really expensive 3D printer. Any keywords included in a search but not included on our home page / blog need to be added.

Referral from a very high volume site. I think it was a Hackaday mention that increased traffic by multiple orders of magnitude on one of my sites. The single mention permanently increased traffic. I assume that mention was also included in Google search results basically more than doubling the chance of someone making it to my site.

In other words, we need other makerspaces to link to ours. We need sites of interest to makers to link to our site (e.g. ask Dakota Premium Hardwoods to link to us). (With reciprocity.) Mouser seems like a great candidate. They sponsored equipment. They should have a link to us (“Want to play with some cool Mouser equipment? Try it out at DMS!”) We should have a link to them (“Those great folks at Mouser donated some really awesome equipment! Join DMS to try it out!”)

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You understand it a lot better than I do
I know that is important in Etsy, I was working o those

Are you willing to advise us or help us out on this aspect of outreach

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I am willing to try. It has been … uh … let’s call it “more than a year” since I last dug through Google Analytics. It is within the realm of possibility that everything still in my brain just got dumped into that post above. But, it is also possible that more will come back to me.

Who has access to the analytics? Just @jast?

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What you see posted above is all I have as far as I know, and as far as I know, everyone has access to that by logging in to the blog (anyone with an active directory account on DMS.LOCAL can so do). I am hopeful someone somewhere has better data, and for more of our pages, than what I see there.

I don’t disagree with you here, except I think the bigger target is people who don’t know they’re interested in “maker”. This goes back to how social media, in my opinion, is limited in that people tend to enclose their circles, rather than expand their horizons in those venues. As much as it pains me to say it, YouTube is probably the leading technology from my experience to lead you to things you didn’t know you were interested in, but check out anyway (hence, “YouTube Hell”). I think that’s where I would focus of I were hired for this, but isn’t where I possess any talent usable in this situation.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, and Mouser is a great example of neither party getting as much from the relationship as it seems we could. I have no idea if we were mentioned at any of their outlets. They got a nice writeup in our blog, but I don’t know if it went anywhere else…
I would like to hear from some old-timers, like @Robert_Davidson, who says (paraphrasing) “we can turn the advertising spikot back on anytime and we’ll be overrun with new members again” what data are used to back this idea. I’m thinking we have better than the analytics summary on WordPress. @StanSimmons is another person I expect might have access and insight. And I can think of one more specific person I would like to hear thoughts about SEO from, and that’s @HankCowdog, of he’s willing. I always enjoy his perspective on this place and how it fits into the world.

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Hootsuite, anyone?
@Diplomat
I should think, if the expansion happens, and we want to fire up a PR machine, something like this would be a fine idea.
Plans are tiered, and aren’t overly expensive for this organization

and it appears to handle many of the most-discussed outlets…


On a slightly different note:
The one site which seems to dominate Google searches for images is Pinterest. Nobody’s mentioned it, but I’ve begun appending “-Pinterest” to searches where I don’t want to deal with its crap (frequently)… What’re other’s opinions of it, and how it might be suitable for driving traffic to DMS?

(Thank you, Discourse. I am aware that I’ve posted several times in a row, and expect to shut up in the very near future and let others get a word in edge-wise. Thank you.)
I was ready to decry using the Internet to ask people how often people use the Internet, but I’ll be damned! They used phones to do this survey.

This negates my primary concern with it, but I have to confess I put little faith in surveys these days. I vaguely understand the “reliability of surveys” ideas and maths, but I have never felt like they were sound. As life has progressed, I’ve put even less faith in surveys being representative for a variety of reasons (survey biases, venue biases, people are liars and like to be part of the popular kid’s table, etc.) and question these results on that basis. However, I’ll acquiesce since this is largely “feeling” opinions more so than factual bases. So Facebook it is. Nobody gets information about the world beyond their couch anywhere else. Even bassackward land-line hangers-on. Or soon will so be… Sigh.

Personally, I would suggest staying away from twitter. As @Julie-Harris states it is mostly bot and negative interaction. In my experience using platforms like this just opens you up to a lot of negative and with volunteers negative tends to lead to loss of interest.

That said, when promoting a group, Facebook has proven to be very positive. Most people don’t post out right negative comments when their real name and friends can see it. Of course their are the outliers, but you have to deal with far fewer on the facebook platform. Another large plus to the Facebook platforms is the ability to leverage our community to increase our outreach. Facebook is constantly changing their delivery algorithms, they recently have been increasing the reach of community supported posts over paid posts. So this again supports our use of the platform.

In Facebook I’ve found that Videos, even very short videos less 6 seconds long tend to do the best for natural viral spreading. The key is that you have to upload the video directly to facebook, you can’t upload it to another platform and expect the same response when cross posting. This is because only videos directly uploaded to facebook auto play when people scroll by, linked video has to be clicked to play. In my posts, I’ve noticed that even boring videos can get much higher reactions than pretty spectacular photos.

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Dallas Makerspace Creative Arts:

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