New Year Resolution for Grandparents: Getting Social Media-ized

The world has brought on a huge hype about Social Media and how we communication with one another as a result of this phenomenon.

New Year resolutions come in all shapes and sizes, but this year I hope you take into consideration utilizing Social Media as a grandparent. There is much literature about why you shouldn’t use Social Media, but you know what, here are some strong reasons why you should use and embrace it.

Communicating with Grandchildren
Young people with their technology are a lost cause these days. Just kidding.
But seriously, Social Networking has opened up many doors for families to keep in touch. In what other age could you keep up with what your grandchildren are doing 24/7, with instant updates?
People think they need to make a Facebook profile, and that they’ll need to spend a lot of time to maintain it which means they’ll need to go on there every single day and write something every 12 hours. Firstly, you can sign on there once a month for all Facebook cares – they are about numbers anyway. Secondly, when you set up any sort of profile, be completely clear as to why you’re on there. If your primary goal is to see what your children or grandchildren are up to so you can stay in the loop and make conversation later, or comment on it through Facebook, don’t worry about updating your page every time you log on. All you’ll need for your profile is to upload a photo (if you like), set your profile to private so weird people on Facebook won’t stalk you, and write one or two sentences about what you’re up to once in a while if you feel like updating your family members about it at this platform.
It doesn’t have to be hard or take a lot of time. Facebook is one of the only platforms where you may find out about your daughter/grand-daughter’s engagement before they announce it, you can keep tabs on who is visiting what city, what someone’s latest favourite food is, and get invited to and learn about events the whole family are attending (this can be family reunions, concerts, and others).

Blogging your passion
The world marvelled when a girl called Julie started blogging out of all the meals she cooked from Julia Child’s recipe book. Blogging can start you off on a ride to stardom, but even if stardom isn’t in your cards (or in your hopes), if you enjoy a particular hobby that you enjoy writing about, you can create a small following of an audience online by blogging about your hobby.
Go onto Blogger or Wordpress, create a simple account and start posting! What does this ‘posting’ mean? It’s a simple way of saying you are writing into your blog – like an online diary. Hate to write? Why not show off your photography skills? Instead of writing, post your photos online.
Tell all your friends and family about your blog – people may start following it, and at the very least, you’ll know your work is floating out there in cyber space that people will be stumbling upon from time to time.

Make a community
You probably have a whole group of friends who either hate or are confused by social media just like you. Why not get a group of you, and visit SeniorNet who can help you become computer-savvy. Or, if you already are on social networks, apart from keeping tabs on your family, you can socialize with them through the internet. The internet will make it so much more faster for you all to..
Share links to interesting stories, recipes, events
Update each other instantly, instead of phoning around only to come across answer phone half the time
You can use it at any time of day. How awkward would it be to get a phone call at 4am from a friend who’s calling to ‘just remind you about this week’s event’? On social networks, if they really must get in touch with you, they can leave you a comment or message at any time of day, and be rest assured that you will check it when most convenient for you.

Are you already excited to get onto Social Networks?
Or aren’t you?

Get your Business Social-Mediazed!

Although I’m a huge advocate for Social Media, but at the end of the day, it’s merely a marketing platform, and just like you, as a business, don’t visit every business networking event, your business also doesn’t need to be on every social networking site, so here’s a few tips to help you be as productive as possible in your online ventures:

- Have a reason. Sit down and ask yourself: what do I hope to achieve through social media? Is it to drive traffic to my site? Or will I get more business by sharing articles and links that will be useful to my potential clients and become a trustworthy brand by being an information hub?

- Do your research. Numbers are available everywhere – as a business, take a look at the social media sites that attract your demographic, and use those. If you’re a business selling office chairs to large corporates, your primary audience won’t be found on Bebo, which is made up of the Gen Y & Z audience with a passion for socializing with their age group.

- Find time. Social Media can become daunting if you get stuck on checking your profile every time a new alert comes into your inbox. Set aside, say, half an hour every Monday morning to reply to messages and update your personal/business page and stick to it.

- Automate it. A couple of useful tools our clients love are ping.fm and futuretweets.com. Ping lets you update all your social networks at once with the same message. Say you’ve done your half an hour of updating on Monday but come Tuesday and an important press release just appeared in a local paper about your company. You can log onto Ping and send a link to update all your profiles without logging onto each one individually. FutureTweets is a great partner for businesses on Twitter - you can schedule a series of tweets to go out to your Twitter audience at different days and times. Free, quick and easy!

And if you need any extra consulting, or a full-time person to do everything to get your business social-mediazed for success, let us know – our team of Social-Media savvy youth are ready to add success to your business exposure and profits.

Catch you soon,
Eva-Maria
eva@socialnetworkingnz.co.nz
www.socialnetworkingnz.co.nz

....WOW technology's gone far! For the video version of this blog post, watch it here: