Sunday, June 28, 2015

The Face of a Dead Bird

According to this website and others, it is worth thinking about how long things last that we put up on social media.


Tweets last 18 minutes.
Facebook posts last 3 hours.
Pinterest pins last months or even years.
The jury is still out on the life cycle of Google+ posts.

There are lots of suggestions out there about when to post, how often to post, and why you might want to "auto-schedule" posts. This means that you write and publish your content, but set it to go "live" or "public" at the time of your choosing. Some advise that you schedule for the wee hours of the morning, others around the time that your audience would be most likely to see your work.

Quality Content? Quality Attention?
This conversation is just about statistically getting "attention", whatever that means. The conversation is about marketing, attention, high Google Analytics, and such.

These statistics, although important and insightful, might not indicate the actual value of the content and the relationships that are represented in our PLN's.

Twitter is valuable. If you include Twitter as a central tool of your PLN, you can surround yourself with people that offer great thoughts and resources. You may not be out to reach the entire planet with a post that goes ridiculously viral. You want to connect with people who will truly value what you have to say. If you have built a relationship with them, then the pure statistics may not matter as much.

Facebook just has a different personality. The quality of the academic, professional conversations there is somewhat questionable. It focuses more on personal, light, hobby-type stuff. Not bad, just not what you as a professional educator might want to spend your valuable time and attention on if you're out to build a PLN.

Pinterest and Google+ can function in either way, in my opinion.

The takeaway for me
It is valuable to include an image on your blog posts. That way, when people see your fabulous content, they actually have an image to "Pin" on Pinterest, rather than the only image on the page being your profile picture. That's why I spent the extra few minutes finding the picture of a dead bird for this article. I need to get better at that.

Just something to think about.
Has this sparked your interest? Do you agree? Disagree? Leave a comment!





By the way...
Here is how to schedule blog posts in Blogger. (No, I was not up at 3:00 AM writing this post!)

Here is how to schedule tweets, from Twitter. Other Twitter clients (applications on your mobile device or computer that help you interact with your Twitter account) have other ways to allow you to do this.


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