CSIT155-F18-TBantle

I posted on the following students in my Group#1: Christian Dahmann Alexa Floren Kalyn McMackin stopped posting Vicky Mowery Mario Panousos Shana Thompson Floyd Williams stopped posting

Learning the various social media platforms has been a real eye opener. I thought Facebook, Instagram, You Tube and Twitter were all good for our business and creating newsletters are an invaluable tool to create and increase sales, but learning to blog was also a very useful tool I am planning to expand on. In researching all of our competitors, I got to see what they are or aren't doing. There were a few companies that are very active in posting regularly and I learned from them and will grow from that. I liked some of their visuals on their websites and I will incorporate similar offerings. Offering seasonal ads as well as sales is a good idea especially in the gift giving season going on now. Farming is such a day to day business and things change rapidly so I'm going to start blogging more in addition to Facebook and Instagram about what we do to try and convey honesty, hard work, quality and value in what we produce.  I will plan on  spending  3-4 hours a day for 2 da

It appears that I am able to view more categories in Facebook Insights then I recall seeing before on our Facebook page: Bantle Avocado Ranch. We have 145 likes/followers now too.  I don't remember "People" being an option before. This is really cool because I can now see whether they are male, female, their ages, where they are and languages spoken. I can see my fans, followers and people I reached. Women are our major customer ages 18-64, but we do have some men too. The activity on the page has increased as well. This inspires me to become more involved in posting more creative ads and content.

The features of GA I think would be best for our business is found under Reports and Acquisition.   Here I can see Real Time/Traffic Sources, ie: where people came from, what they are looking at and content performance. I can see what people are looking at right now. With this report, I can learn how to focus my marketing efforts on which social media platform customers are using most. I can also use the Audience Report to see where my customers are based. Since I can't sell out of the country privately, I can determine if I am being watched by other countries, perhaps spied on for growing secrets or hacked by Russian Spies. :-) One last area I would look at is the Bounce Rate to see if people are only clicking once and leaving the page. I installed Google Analytics to our website, here's a screen shot for extra credit.

I created a few ads that I thought would be effective. I had some fun with this assignment as I got to get a little creative. The first one shows the sun shining on our fruit as it hangs in the trees and it encourages the viewer to buy some as a gift. This is a stock picture that was offered on Facebook. They had many to choose from which was helpful. It shows that we get our hands dirty to grow the best avocados we can and the viewer can get to know us better by liking our page. This is just a simple Instagram ad with a Shop Now button. There was an article that came out today about a shortage of Mexican avocados, so I thought I'd include this in an ad to urge a call to action and show some of our perfect fruit hanging in one of our trees. Hope you liked my first ads. I can't wait for our season to actually open so we can start running some real ads. Maybe next month!

This week I researched the many Facebook advertising options. Using the principles of good design with eye catching images and urging calls to action, I know I could implement a few good ideas into our ads. The different types of current Facebook ads I found listed on their website are: Video, Collection, Carousel, Slideshow and Single Image. Using Boost Posts is essential due to the algorithm they have now and I often receive discounted offers from them to do this so that is helpful in lowering the cost. I just need to set up our target market which won't won't be difficult as just about everyone loves a good California avocado. Some of the ads are only available to mobile users, not desktop, so I probably won't be using Canvas and Collection Ads. Another simple way to engage new customers is by using Messenger. We are already using this option. We get contacted by people around the world asking a variety of questions from how to grow avocado trees from a seed, to can th