Social Media Marketing - Effective Blog Use

Classmate Blogs

• Ian Burleigh's Blog: http://imburleigh.wordpress.com/
  
  I've chosen Ian's post on Social Media Planning for Week 4. This is for the fairly simple reason that he goes into a great amount of depth and gives plenty of reference links to back up his information. He states his points simply, getting into enough depth to make it understandable at the same time and provides great images to illustrate his point.
• Oliver Wlodyka's Blog: http://www.oliverwlodyka.blogspot.com/
  
  I've chosen Oliver's post on Effective Social Media for many of the same reasons as above: the points are illustrated well, giving a sentence to summarize the topic while expounding on it in the following paragraph and giving more than enough information to give somebody an excellent idea on what guidelines to follow when you're doing your planning.

Blogs about Social Media Marketing

• Hubze: http://blog.hubze.com/
  
  I've chosen Hubze because it was one of the top-ten social media blogs in a list that was on top of my google search, and many of the articles seemed interesting, going over many things I hadn't really thought about before.
  
  On Hubze, the first article I've chosen to feature is 4 Ways That Instagram Can Improve Your Business.  This article talks about Instagram exclusively, and while I knew about the service, I had all but dismissed it as a platform for business use, thinking it more like an image upload service.  However, now that I've read this article, I'm a believer.  So long as you have a story to tell in photos, you can make great use of it, especially with location recording of the pictures in the service.
  
  The second article I've picked out is The Renewed Importance of Facebook Check-Ins. With the additional features built into Facebook's search, getting people to Check In at your business is even more important.  Fortunately, Facebook allows you to do many things to give people incentives for doing so.  The benefit to you is that your business is more likely to show up when people search for where their friends go for certain things, the simplest example being a restaurant.  Facebook offers a framework for offering a variety of types of coupons, or donating to a charity for instance.

Blogs used to Market

Criteria: Spelling/Grammar, Frequency of Posts, Interaction with Customers, Variety of Posts

South Park: C.  While they post often, more often than not, its just a clip of the show with a quote.  They rarely have customer created content featured.  When new episodes are airing, they do link to the site that allows you to stream their episodes for free, but its not very interactive with the customers save for some 'Where is this quote from?' posts.

Sonic the Hedgehog: A.  Maintained by Sega, Sonic's page is a mass of content of all different types.  They not only post updates on the latest Sonic-related products, but also share a mass of fan-made pictures and videos, as well as posting links to their giveaways on Twitter.

Halfbrick: A. They pass all the same criteria in the same fashion that Sega did: By posting relevant news about their products in combination of fan-made productions and various giveaways.