For my blog, as I stated in class, I went through a couple of ideas before I decided on dedicating my blog to pictures of my dog. It’s a blog that no one else will have, because I am the only owner of my dog, and I know that people on the internet love pictures of animals, who became my target audience. I initially had a few different means of promotion but after some had little to no success, I focused my energy on what was successful. I started by setting up a tumblr account, which includes a link to the twitter account, worked on the theme, color scheme, and placement, and then began adding pictures. A day after I had a good amount of content on my page, I created a twitter account for Roscoe and tried to promote through my personal facebook.
My least successful mean was through my personal facebook. I posted a status trying to get people to go to my blog, but only 9 people responded to it- 6 likes and 7 comments- and only a small percentage of people who typed in the web address visited. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be very successful through facebook so I decided to focus more on twitter and through tumblr itself.
I had more success on twitter than I did on facebook. However, I was pessimistic about twitter at first. After I created my account, or Roscoe’s account to be exact, I customized a theme that had the same color scheme as my blog, and included a link to my blog. I then made a tweet, sat for a couple of minutes, and thought “oh yeah I have to have people follow me in order to make any progress”. I began following 1 other dog who had facebook and decided to call it a night and find people to follow the next day. However, the next day I was being followed by 9 dogs, including the dog I was following. It was pretty easy to get people to follow me because all I really did was follow dogs who would in return follow me along with some other people who followed them. At the end, I have 39 followers (29 are dogs, 4 people, and 6 that consist of either dog related products or dog tips), 2 direct messages, 1 dog tweeted to me, and 1 tweet of mine was favorited. I tweeted about 30 times.
Tumblr was very easy to gain an audience and is my most successful tool of promotion. About 87% of the page’s visitors were all directed through tumblr. The rest were either directed from twitter, a google search, and typing in the web address.
It’s really easy to promote yourself and successfully lead people to your page within tumblr. Thanks to tags, people are able to search for certain pictures they want to see which can then lead them to a tumblr page. I chose to do a combination of obvious tags like “dog, puppy, cute” to attract people that are looking for the kinds of pictures I have and tags, like “fall, stairs, goofymovie, snow, socks” that could drive people who weren’t looking for the kind of pictures I posted to my page. I tagged “roscoe” in every picture and I guess that could fall into either category. The more tags I made, no matter what they were, the more different opportunities I had to reach people. Whether someone was interested in pictures involving dogs, seasons, etc., whenever people do a search they will be able to look at my pictures in that tag and go to my page to look at all of the pictures. Each picture had at least 3 tags and the whole page had 57 different tags in total. Every picture used “dog, roscoe, cute” as tags.
It is also easy to post pictures on other people’s pages. One page that Roscoe was very successful on was loyal-2 me. His most successful picture that I submitted was “roscoe caught red handed playing with the yarn”. While that picture only got 2 notes on my tumblr page, the picture got 19 notes- 11 likes and 8 reblogs- on loyal-2 me’s page, which then led people to check out what other pictures I had on my page. I think promoting on tumblr itself was easy because many of the people who have tumblr pages are on there to either share or look at pictures and maybe the occasional video. It isn’t very heavy with text, which is exactly what my page is like. I also sent a few direct messages to loyal-2 me.
My blog had a total of 47 posts, which include 2 reflags, 1 video, and 57 photos (1 post could contain up numerous pictures- 1 of my posts contained 5 pictures). I followed 17 blogs, which all had something to do with cute animals. I gained 5 followers and acquired 14 likes and 1 reblog. Even though I only had 5 followers, I had more people who would go to the site everyday. While the most noted post on my page was “dreaming of a white christmas”, the video I posted of Roscoe howling/singing got the most views.
blog- roscoeworld.tumblr.com
twitter- https://twitter.com/RoscoesWorld