My Experience with Social Media & Lessons Learned

Twitter – is easy to use and most of my news comes from here.  My followers have grown from 28 to 495 in 3 months.

• Lesson 1: Start a new account dedicated to your art/business instead of changing your personal account.
• Lesson 2: Crowdfire is a good way to be able to manage new followers and unfollow people who follow, then unfollow you.
• Lesson 3: *Watch for # (hashtags) pertinent to your interests. Found #artisthour sent two tweets and got many retweets; the next day had the highest number of visitors to my site. 
• Lesson 4: Don’t just tweet about yourself, retweeting and favouriting is a good way to make friends.

Twitter is my favourite social media site; though I’m not convinced it’s the best way to get blog followers. Even though I had the second highest number of visits to my blog from Twitter, Google + was no 1 with only 1/5th the followers.

Google + - changed an old account, which was very difficult to do… not even sure it's done right. Can’t stress this enough, from Lesson 1, have a separate personal account. Google + has all the bells and whistles and even though half of the functions are over my head...I’m managing. With google+….you get results on the Google search engine. Only 118 followers and the largest number of visitors to my blog come from Google.

Pinterest - didn’t change my personal account, just added my blog details and after three months with only 29 followers, had 1 visitor in 3 months. It could be because I’m not that active... probably need to re-think that.

Facebook – can’t get on with it. It’s hard to use my AMS-OnArt page from my personal page. A lot of people use Facebook and I know I should be more active.  Only 17 followers, mostly friends... did manage to get 2 visits to my blog.

Tumblr – is a new addition to my social media network; this time I have a separate AMS-OnArt account. In 1 ½ months managed to get 3 visits to my blog, which is good since there were only 5 followers… this may be a worthwhile social media account!

Instagram – is also new and so far no blog visitors. I have only been able to use this site from my iPad, which is not ideal.  Not sure it's worth the trouble but will keep trying…for now.

You Tube - added two very novice videos on Youtube and found other members to be very positive and friendly. The problem is, I’m camera shy and it’s a lot of work making a video. I think this might be the best platform; if you are willing to spend time with videos… but for now I’ll give it a miss.

My social media ranking to attract blog site visitors are: Google +, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, & Instagram. My top user friendly sites are Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest(although a little slow at times). YouTube(linked with Google) is probably the best social media site…if you can make videos. 

The most important advice and final lesson is; if you’re not active you won’t get results.