Clark Creative Goes Social
Everyone who is tired of hearing about social media raise their hand… I can’t see you but I’m sure there are lots of hands up. It seems the topic is promoted, written about and webinared virtually every day. All sorts of experts are out there giving advice on the what and how of it all. Take it from one entrepreneur who has tried the various forms of social media it can be overwhelming, and it takes a little experimenting to know which one will work best for you and what you want to accomplish.
I jumped in to the Twitter thing late last year but after four months of tweeting my heart out I wasn’t sure anyone was really listening. I feel Twitter is a bit impersonal, sort of like those people who talk at you and not to you. It reminded me of the old adage “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it…” So if you post a tweet and there’s no one there to read it… you get the idea. And boy do people like to hear themselves talk, or in this case tweet. I grew tired of people who felt it necessary to tweet 23 times day – sorry all you faithful Twitterers but that’s just annoying. If you’re following 136 people, multiply that by 23 and you get 3128 tweets, a day! Who has time to read all those? In my opinion as a business using Twitter, three to six well meaning tweets a day is more than enough to extol the virtues of your wisdom on your followers. I will admit my Twitter experience has enlightened me to some valuable information, especially in my field, and it also opened my eyes to the idea of blogging.
I think blogging is more personable form of social media –a chance to reveal more of yourself. As an artist, it’s a shift in creativity because I get to write the words instead of draw the pictures. I started blogging more for personal reasons but I also wanted to talk design so the line has been a bit blurred between the personal and business uses of this media. But blogging takes time and it’s touch to stay current, as you can probably tell by the absence of posts in the last few months. I want every article to be well-written and hopefully interesting to at least a few people. It also takes more of a commitment from your audience than a tweet. It used to be you only wrote as much as what people can read in the bathroom. In this digital age I think you can only write as much as what people can read at a glance.
Enter Facebook: originally just a social site to keep in touch with friends, it’s quickly becoming an important business networking tool. You can keep your audience up to date on more personal aspects of your work and life and still give those snippets of information people can read quickly. And I think Facebook lends itself to more of a dialogue than just spewing information. It might be the happy medium between the abbreviated tweet method of communication and the more labor-intensive blogging. I have no intention of giving up blogging, I feel it has value as a place to expand on topics and ideas, and gain credibility. And although Twitter is all the rage I’m not convinced it’s the right method for me. After all, one can only do so many of these social media things effectively and consistently.
So Clark Creative is on Facebook now and we’ll see how it goes. Stop by from time to time and let me hear from you too.
