Where everyone should be: Twitter.

This week, my social media class received a Twitter assignment that involved following two people and two organizations on Twitter, and then we had to compare and contrast how they utilize the social media site. I followed and paid close attention to Geoff Livingston, Brian Solis, Lima News and the Cincinnati Enquirer on Twitter for one week.



I chose Lima News and the Cincinnati Enquirer because I thought comparing and contrasting two newspapers in different areas of the same state would be interesting. The Lima News description stated they are a daily newspaper covering nine counties in northwest Ohio and included the Lima News’s website. The Cincinnati Enquirer had a more simple statement, “auto news feed from Cincinnati.Com. Therefore, I thought the two Twitter profiles were going to be different from each other. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s picture was a cartoon boy holding a newspaper, while Lima News’s profile picture was more professional – a symbol of a blue and white torch. The Lima News has 14,701 tweets and has 600 followers. The Cincinnati Enquirer has twice as many tweets at 29,645 and has 4,367 followers.


The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Twitter is very simple to follow. All they do is put the title of the most recent news article as the status with the web address to access the full article following. The Cincinnati Enquirer has a new tweet basically every hour. Here are a couple examples of what the enquirer’s tweets look like: "Bengals Draft Class 2011 http://bit.ly/kGYqWq". "April rain falls a few drops short of record http://bit.ly/jRnj3K." This is a very easy method for the newspaper and doesn’t take up much of the employee’s time. The Cincinnati Enquirer never used a hash tag, at least not this past week. Most of their headlines on Twitter were about car crashes, the Bengals, the Reds, shootings and other violence, robberies, the Flying Pig Marathon and several pictures from high school proms. The Lima News Twitter operated in the same format; recent headlines with the website to the story. However, these stories were greatly different than the Cincinnati Enquirer stories. Also, the Lima News updated their Twitter posts far less than the Enquirer. Sometimes the Lima News went 7 hours without a new story. Like Cincinnati, Lima had tweets about automobile accidents, prom photos and weather updates. But Lima News had way more tweets about specific events, different high school sports games, kids winning contests and citizens being honored for various things. I was interested to see that ONU was mentioned on April 26th about police making arrests in dorm thefts. ONU was mentioned this past week several times. Lima News did not use hash tags. I think they both should rethink their ways of utilizing Twitter because people can go to their newspaper home page and see the exact same stories. However, it is an easy way for people to pick and choose what stories they would like to read.


Geoff Livingston goes by @geoffliving on his Twitter. He has 11,862 followers and 38,845 tweets. Geoff is the co-founder of Zoetica and the author of two books. Brian Solis only has 10,133 tweets, but has 90,274 followers. He is the author of Engage! Solis sometimes tweets up to 6 times in one hour of the day, and is constantly on Twitter. I believe the only time Solis is not on Twitter is when he is asleep. Livingston is the same way, however a couple times he tweeted 10 or more times in the same hour.


Geoff Livingston sparingly uses hash tags, however in almost every post, he uses the shout out (@person’s name). This is an example of what many of his tweets look like: "@kanter @katyaN4G yes, @kamichat and i were honored to put in extra time over that weekend on the Gaga project." Livingston used his has tags numerous times for #SOBcon, which must have been a conference that recently took place in Chicago. He also uses many bit addresses that take users to articles on e-mail marketing, blog posts and online business techniques. Livingston seems very personable and keeping up with him was a difficult task. Brian Solis sparingly used hash tags either, but he did use them for generic terms, such as #love, #graphic and #Engage. Most of tweets were also about social media marketing and he included links to different articles. Solis is also a fan of the shout outs. Here is an example of his tweet: "RT @WOMMA: Free chapters of @briansolis and @duncanjwatts' books to download. Win signed copies! http://ht.ly/4Gwfh." Both Solis and Livingston were always telling people how it was nice to meet them and thanking people for various things, like reading their books. More recently, Solis was discussing paid celebrity tweets, which I found very interesting.


In conclusion, the two organizations and two people I followed were very similar to one another. I wish one of my selected four would have used hash tags more because I need to learn how to correctly use hash tags. However, I enjoyed this assignment and I’m glad I got my Twitter back!

Three Important Social Media Sites

Many people my age are too wrapped up in Facebook and Twitter they forget to join and create profiles on other social media sites. Geoff Livingston wrote an informational article today called, “Are you ignoring these 3 important social media sites?”

As my peers and I are entering into the workforce and the ‘real’ world, I think everyone should create a LinkedIn profile. I know you all have heard of LinkedIn and most likely know what LinkedIn is all about, but what you may not know is over 100 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities. This is an awesome way to network and find a job. This is also a way to control your professional identity online (which sometimes Facebook does not help with this). LinkedIn is a simple, yet professional way to keep in touch with former and present employees and classmates. Most young people don’t understand that we can truly power our career from a LinkedIn profile. Livingston states LinkedIn is in intense competition with Facebook and Twitter, but somehow LinkedIn “keeps it coming.”  

The second social media site Livingston discusses is YouTube. Although YouTube has been around for about six years, more than 1.2 billion videos are watched by 89 million Americans every day. We can expect to see more video demand and less text-heavy media on the Internet. Livingston claims that YouTube is more powerful for social media communications than Twitter, in some cases. Also, there is no better place to practice marketing than the largest video social network. At my past two internships, I have created a YouTube channel for the businesses and produced, edited and shared my informational videos with the entire YouTube network.

The last social media site everyone should join in StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon takes you to web pages, photos and videos handpicked by your friends and like-minded people. This is the one site that I have not joined yet, but I do plan to sign up. My friends are always 'stumbling' and constantly share funny videos with me. StumbleUpon recently gained a few million new users, with more than 15 million accounts total. Livingston claims that this site is the ultimate in surfing, which means if you can foster a strong community, and then you will see dramatic increases in traffic. Also, StumbleUpon could be a more productive effort then retweets.  

All of these sites are free and allow you to build your own community on the Internet.