Week 15 B: Wrapping Things Up & Looking Ahead

Change is Inevitable 

This class has significantly changed my outlook on social media both for my personal and business use. I can no longer look at my own personal posts without wondering "how many people saw this"? "why didn't more people comment on it"? It's also incredibly frustrating when I post something to the weddings Facebook and no one says anything, and I'm sitting there like "Hey! I put a lot of work into that, somebody like me!"

I think what's really difficult is finding the right "voice" to write in. As a company we don't really have a formal voice to follow so I'm trying to play around with finding one.  But finding one that really sticks out to brides to be is hard. I used to think figuring out what to say would be easy, I was wrong.


There has been significant growth on our social media likes and followers. On August 1st the weddings Facebook had 714 followers. As of today we have 960, that averages out to approximately 2-3 new likes a day. I'm pretty happy with that considering it's my first time working with business social media. As far as wedding bookings because of Facebook and Instagram go we won't know the results until people start booking and we find out how they found us about us. It was really cool though when my marketing director was talking to the company that runs our SEO and they said who ever is running the weddings social and website is doing a really good job, keep it up!

Facebook and Instagram Insights are really good for a basic idea of what is going on but I really like using google analytics and being able see how many times people click on our actual website and seeing where they came from. Pinterest Insights are a bit harder to understand, i feel like they are more-so all over the place.

Overall we have gained more likes and followers. I've been able to take what I have learned in this class and apply it to WeddingWire and TheKnot. This has lead to increased traffic to our cyber storefront. I have seen more leads come through on Google than I had when I first started.

Week 15 A: Wrapping Things Up & Looking Ahead

The social medias that integrate best with my business are Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. I prefer these because they are easy to use, show off our photos and have large followings. Facebook scheduler is easy to use. I'm still not a huge fan of Twitter and it's not something i want to focus on. I am able to post to twitter easily because I have linked a hashtag to my twitter account so whenever I write #weddingsattwinoaks it sends it to Twitter like an original post. But I am interested in following the wedding conversation on Twitter and what's trending.I like the idea of a blog but I'm also not a very good story teller so blogging is not my strong point. Besides that, I'm not passionate about weddings so it's hard to put passion into my righting.

In the next couple of months I'm going to make it a point to add more content to all of our Google+ pages so that it helps our placement and it seems like the content is always fresh. I don't think Google+ is time sensitive like the other platforms.

For weddings I think I need to spend about 4 hours a week figuring out what photos I am going to post that week. That can be anywhere from 7-14 photos on Instagram. But I need to find better things to post on Facebook besides photos. I will post my Monday-Friday posts between 8-9 p.m. and Saturday Sunday posts before 10 a.m. We are having our open house in a couple of months so that should give us plenty to write about.

Week 14 B: Optimizing Yourself and the Company

Insights

Actions on Page: 1 - Up 100%
Page Views: 45 Up 32%
Page Likes: 14 Down 30%
Reach: 9448 up 10%
Post Engagements: 887 Up 40%
Video Views: 4 down 43%

After looking at the past weeks analytics the best time for me to post is right around 8 p.m. On average the videos I post average a reach of 241 and have an post click of 52. Photos reach 204, but only have an engagement of 52. I need to post more videos, they seem to get the most traction.

Week 14 A: Optimizing Yourself and the Company

Some area's that I want to pay attention to on my analytic page is Behavior - New vs. Returning and Engagement. Most of our visitors are only with us for 0-10 seconds but we do have an average duration of 00:02:01 on our web page so that's good. I need to find a way to better engage them so they look around more on Facebook or just go straight to our website.  

Interests need to be constantly looked at and refreshed so i have an idea of what they like and how that could be trending. For example, a lot of our viewers are info apparel and accessories so think i should have "wedding ring" as one of my Facebook interests to reach those that are looking at engagement rings. Might be a good way to reach out to more men. 

I have gone through and liked all my classmates Facebook pages. 

WEEK 12 B: Analyzing Online Marketing

Driving traffic and Leads 

For facebook we use Driving traffic and Leads and currently spend $10 a day, which is around 10 clicks a day. I think this is fine right now because no one is really looking for venues in december. But I think we should look to spend more money maybe $15-$20 a day in February and March when people are starting to look for venues. Another good time to boost our posts is when there is a large deployment going out, when that happens we usually get a lot of last minute military weddings weddings. 

After further research and listening to WeddingWires podcasts I would want to turn most of our attention to instagram ads and spend about $15 dollars a day. I haven't really seen a lot of wedding venues do instagram ads, so if we could get there before the others do that would be great. But before I can suggest doing that to my company I need to gain more followers on Instagram in order for marketing to give me the go ahead. When looking at Instagram insights I Have noticed that we do have a higher reach and engagements. But, the total impressions are still not the same high numbers that facebook has. Facebook also has a longer post life than Instagram. 

Google Analytics - Extra credit

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I added google analytics to my blog

Week 13: Advertising & Marketing

 The reason I chose the book now photo is because it was for a larger wedding and WeddingWire said that brides to be want to see full pictures of people at a wedding not just the bride and groom. This helps them envision their wedding a little better. 

 I created another ad for instagram because people in my age group turn to instagram a lot. The instagram photo is also more updated than the "book now" photo. This is also one of my favorite photos because its intimate, romantic and rustic. All of which are styles our brides like about our venue.  

My company is still throwing a lot of money towards facebook for advertising. This is our old ad. I like this photo, the course is in great shape, it is a warm spring photo with a light breeze. It's an overall great picture. But in my opinion its a bit dated because not many of our current brides wear long veils. This ad has been a success and that is why we keep it the way it is. I personally think it needs a little more detail.   

I feel like I'm not very creative when it comes to advertising verbiage and that's why I kept our headline the same in all of our ads minus the Instagram ad. The demographic for these ads are for Southern California, have two requirements. I placed these in campaign looking for the website clicks