Week 9 Part A

    I think a personal personal touch to a blog post makes sense with businesses that have a fun aspect to them. For example, if I owned a pet store I might be using memes, emojis and humor to spice my blog posts up, because owning pets is mostly an enjoyable experience that brigs positive emotions. When it comes to more high stakes sort of businesses, I would want a more serious type of blog post. I might not enjoy the fact that a law firm uses humor on a blog post or a business that sells potentially life saving medical technology uses emojis. 

   Adding a personal touch, like friendliness and humor could work well with my fictional business. Since I am a bookseller, and books are often entertaining, I think most people would not be put off if my blog was a little less formal than some other types of businesses. My type of blog for my bookstore would probably mostly be recommendations and news about books. It would be almost like a more detailed version of my social media feed. 

    I could reach people on google just by writing reviews of popular books. A lot of perspective buyers look at book reviews online and I could get potential customers by posting recomendations about recent releases. I could also put up top 10 lists for books as well, which lots of readers look at. Another type of post I could write could be bi weekly updates about the store and what special events are coming up. I'd probably follow up these events by writing posts about how they went. 

Week 8 Part B

     My first post was a picture of Stephen King asking, “In honor of Halloween this weekend, what are your favorite Stephen King books?” I posted it at 11am on a Thursday on Instagram. The hashtags I used were: Stephenking, spooktober, Halloween, bookrec, booksellers, buylocal, horror, scary, novels, mustread, autumnreads, classiscs, bestseller.

I had found these hashtags by looking at other booksellers instagram accounts. Stephen King posts tended to get a lot of engagement compared to other authors, and Halloween was coming up, so I essentially tried to combine a crowd favorite with a somewhat trending topic. I also found some other hashtags by typing in hashtags in the search bar. For example, I typed #Halloween into the search bar and I found the “spooktober” hashtag next to similar posts. This post unfortunately did not get a single like. 

    My second post was of a humorous meme that I created. I tried to tap into a relatable aspect of being a reader, which is reading too many books at once. I posted it at 5 pm on a Thursday. The hashtags I used were: Memes, bookmemes, relateable, whoelsehasthisproblem, books, novels, fun, humor, funny, reading, uhd4kmemes.

This post got more engagement than the Stephen King post, with 4 likes. I don’t know why exactly; I only have theories at this point. One reason might be that I posted it a 5pm, the time of day a lot of people get off work. The other reason is that it was humorous, so people were more inclined to like it. I put some generic hashtags that I had seen used on other bookstore accounts for it to get some traction, and I think some of them worked. Some of them were jokes for the audience to read. 

My third post was a picture of William Faulkner with a quote about writing. I probably should have done a quote about reading instead, but it’s too late the post is already up. The hashtags I used were: quotes, authorquotes, books, writing, Faulkner, fbf, books, wisdom, writing, novels, inspirational, inspirationalquotes, soundandthefury, bookrecs, reading, literature, classics, mustread, bookstagram.

            This post has the most hashtags out of all my posts so far. I think that helped it get a lot of reach. Like my other posts, I typed in hashtags to get other hashtags, and got information from other bookstore accounts. I posted this at 7am, a time when a lot of people are first getting up and checking their phones. 

 

 

LESSONS LEARNED

            

I think one of the lessons I learned was to post at times when people have leisure time. My post during the mid-day didn’t take off the way my posts in the evening or morning did. I think another one is to have a lot of hashtags. My post about Stephen King didn’t get any engagement and I think it is because I didn’t use a lot of hashtags. I regret not making any hashtags not specific to my business. I did use the hashtags “booksellers” and “buy local,” but not any that established my brand. I think that might be a goal for my next post.