Social Networking

Reach Your Audiences with Social Networking

With millions of users actively using Social networks, why shouldn’t music educators try to get their audience’s attention with these great tools?

Social Networking Sites:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Foursquare

Ways Social Media is Changing Our Daily Lives

• The way we get our news
• How we start and do business
• How we meet and stay in touch
• What things we reveal
• We things we can influence

Facebook

• Over 1 billion users
• Status updates – tell people what you are up to or how you are feeling
• Your timeline — a list of events, posts, etc.
• Post photos, videos, links

Facebook Pages

• A post is authored “from the page” and not from an individual user
• Your “place” online — can provide your group an identity
• Post videos, photos, links
• Great communication tool for students, parents, and other followers

Facebook Groups

• Online forum; collaborate and communicate more effectively
• Permissions:
  1. Closed — available for others to see that the group is there, but must have permission to join;
  2. Open — publicly available for all to join, read, and contribute; or
  3. Secret – not visible to anyone but group members
• School Orchestra and String Teachers, v.2  – a group with over 2500 members.  Dr. Gail Barnes founded this group and it has grown exponentially!

Twitter

Essentially asks the question “What are you doing?”

• 500+ million registered users
• Micro-blogging site
• 140 character limit per “tweet”
• Tweet – message sent to someone or posted
• Retweet – when you resend or repost someone else’s message
• Mentions (@)  – designated to mention someone in a tweet  (@charleslaux)
• Hashtag (#) – designated as a keyword for searches, etc. (#musedchat)

Creating Short URLS for Twitter or print media

• A URL shortener will convert long URLs into shorter, easy to read, and type
• Bitly – http://bitly.com/
• Google – http://goo.gl

Regular URL: http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/03/famed-fiddler-pulls-strings-for-music-education/?iref=storysearch

Shortened URL:  http://goo.gl/FX2wg

Linking Facebook & Twitter

You can link Facebook to Twitter so that what you post on Facebook automatically goes to Twitter

• Many different apps available on Facebook to do this
• RSS Feed from Blog to Facebook
  • RSS Graffiti
• Facebook to Twitter
  • App: Selective Twitter
• Automate Twitter
  • http://hootsuite.com/
  • http://twitterfeed.com/

Considerations for using social media as a public figure

Professionalism

• Many employers are starting to search the web before hiring
• Post only what you would post on a public bulletin board or on a post-it note stuck to your forehead!

Protect Yourself

• Familiarize yourself with Facebook’s privacy settings (always changing!)
• Don’t friend people you don’t know
• Don’t friend students
• Make sure you know exactly who can see your photos
• Keep your friends from sharing your info
• Limit the use of applications
• Protect your location, don’t ever give away the location of your home (home, friends)
• Don’t overshare

The Future of Social Media

• Where will all of this go?
• How much is too much?
• Privacy issues

Download Presentation Slides (PDF, 4+ MB)