Week 3 Part 2

 For this assignment I chose the following businesses or individuals because they either are doing what I am also doing, only on a bigger and better scale, or they are doing what I hope to do in the future, or are somewhat related to what I do.

 The first one is Relevant Magazine. It's a magazine I have subscribed to off and on for years, and I listen to their podcast pretty regularly. On their podcast they are constantly referencing their social media platforms, so I thought they would be a good one to start with. Their website is www.relevantmagazine.com and they use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Their most recent posts are as follows: Twitter, 8 minutes ago; Facebook, 9 minutes ago; Instagram, 4 hours ago and YouTube, 1 week ago. The links to these on their website all work well.

 They seem to be using social media well. Each of their platforms has a lot of followers: Tw, 252.7k, FB, 285k, IG, 65.9k and YT, 289,701. On IG they seem to mostly post videos. On YouTube, their videos have anywhere from a few hundred millions of views. They seem to post to Twitter and Facebook all the time. One thing I noticed is that they don't seem to conversate all that much with followers, but in listening to their podcast it is clear that they do pay attention to people's comments.

 Keeping with the printed publication category, the next business I chose is the Seattle Times. I chose them actually because of the photographer who is my next choice, Erika Schultz, because I heard her speak at a conference and was really impressed with her work. She is a staff photographer at ST. They have Facebook and Twitter linked to their website, and both links work fine. The have 618.3k Twitter followers and 86.7k Instagram follows. They also have a Facebook page with over 365k followers, but it's not linked to their website. They are constantly Tweeting and seem to post to FB every hour. Their last Tweet was 1 minute ago, their last IG post was 2 days ago, and their last FB post was 7 minutes ago.

  I chose Erika Schultz because after hearing her speak at a photojournalism conference earlier this year, I became an admirer of she and her work. She and I are the same age and have a lot of other things in common, but she is doing her thing more successfully than I am doing mine! She works for a major daily newspaper and I work part-time for a small, family owned weekly community paper. Clearly she is someone I can learn from.

  Erika also has Instagram and Twitter linked to her website (working links) and Facebook as well. Her last Tweet was yesterday, her last IG post was August 21, and her last FB post was yesterday. Most of her social media seems to heavily reflect her professional life, although her FB does seem to have some personal posts mixed in. Her FB profile is a personal one, not a professional one. She has over 22k IG followers, 4,426 Twitter follows and almost 2500 FB friends. Her social media use seems to be sort of middle-of-the-road; more far-reaching than I could dream of being right now, but nothing too shocking. 

  When it comes to photographers who are really living out my dream, though, Jeremy Cowart has it locked down. He is a very well known celebrity photographer, but that is not the part of his career that I wish for. What I admire is how he has been able to use his talent and artwork to make a huge difference in the world. He and I share the same Christian faith, and what inspires me the most is his project that is unrelated to his photography but is going to help change the world. It has enraptured me because for years I have had a very similar idea for a "one day" project...but he is making his vision a reality! That project is my next choice on this list. But for now, I must focus on Jeremy.

  He seems to be constantly updating his social media platforms. He has Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Spotify all linked to his website with working links. He has over 245k Twitter followers (his last post was 3 hours ago), 140k IG followers (last post: 2 hours ago), 56k monthly viewers on Pinterest (last posted a month ago), over 100k FB follows (posted 2 hours ago) and 5.3k YT subscribers, although he apparently hasn't posted anything on YT for 2 years. 

  His world-changing project (my prediction) is called The Purpose Hotel, and it began with a Kickstarter campaign but as far as I can tell, is not officially happening yet. He has social media platforms for it, though: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The IG account has almost 5k follows but hasn't been posted to for almost 2 years. The FB account has 12,000 likes but no posts in the past year, and its Twitter account has almost 4300 follows and the last Tweet was in May. So although the hotel is not realized yet, it already has a social media foundation ready and waiting for it.

   A few things I discovered about all of these choices is that none of them really used social media to have ongoing conversations with consumers. In our textbook the author talked about the importance of interacting with your consumers when they interact with you, but none of the above did much of that in my observation.

   I was also amazed that none of them used very many hashtags on Instagram. I was under the impression that you should use as many hashtags as possible with each Instagram post so that more people would be exposed to what you're posting. I hope to learn more about this in the weeks to come. 

   The most obvious consclusion after looking at each of these case studies seems to be that the more often you post content, the more followers you will have. The Seattle Times had the most followers and the most recent posts, and Relevant came next, and had the next most recent, and so on and so forth. That's just looking at the surface, but we will see how that conclusion holds up. 

   For Week 3 Part 1, I commented on Vicki's, Mario's, and Andrea's posts.