I put this together for college for an online journalism class with limited funding,thought it would be good to share here. It just highlights some of the simple things you can do for free to optimize your businesses social media to push more traffic to your main business website.

Why Facebook is important for your social media presence
One key selling point as to why Facebook is important for our social media strategy for thecity.ie is Facebook’s large-scale reach with over with 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. As a “business”, it’s important to set up and maintain a Facebook Page as a means to connect with our audience and deliver our business objectives ← Get more user engagement on our social media platforms and traffic to our website. Facebook Page posts are a way to generate engagement with target audiences by sharing news, announcements, tips, contests, events, stories, etc. Published Page Posts can be strategically targeted both organically through the free post composer and via Facebook ads to gain greater distribution.

How to Optimize Facebook posts to move our audience to our website:

Highly engaged Facebook posts typically are succinct.

Attention spans are shorter than ever, so it’s important to make your point and make it quickly — This is a good story GO TO OUR WEBSITE.

Additionally, being topical and relevant is key to engaging your audience in the most impactful way. Make it clear what you want them to do with the information you’re sharing, so be sure to include an explicit call-to-action (CTA) to get the most out of your post. We want their eyes on our website, we want our audience to engage with our posts that means Likes, Shares and Comments. More engagement means eyes which means more optimization which moves traffic to our website.

Lastly, including rich media in your post is imperative in order to be seen in user’s cluttered News Feed environment. Posts lacking photo or video can easily get lost in a scroll, and Facebook’s algorithm is also optimized to showcase posts that include native photo and video content ( Stock images found on Google means posts won’t be optimized).

How to make your page more optimizable:

Facebook is all about proper engagement from people, such as comments and shares on Messenger.

Comments and likes on a person’s status of photo
Engagement with publisher content posted by friends
Shares on Messenger
Replies to comments on a video
Who posted the content
When was it posted
What time is it now
Technology (what type of phone, how strong the internet connection is)
Content type
Average time spent on content
How informative the post is
Completeness of a profile

Click here for source from information from above

Best Page posts to move traffic towards your website:

These are the types of link posts available through Facebook:

Source:https://www.qwaya.com/facebook-ads/guide-to-facebook-ads

The city.ie three best type of posts to implement from those eight:

Link Posts:

Link Posts are simply posts that link to a website off of the Facebook platform.

The issue with this link is that it moves the user off of our platform onto Youtube rather than to our website. The main goal is to get as many eyes as possible to the main website https://thecity.ie/.

Photo Posts:

Capture your audience’s attention and tell a story with photos. Photo Posts can be with or without text and include an image, of course.

Photography makes a difference to engagement because Facebook wants meaningful social interaction.

Video Posts:

Video Posts include a native video uploaded directly to Facebook rather than posting a link to a video from a third party site. A video link offsite would be considered a link post. (Refer to link post above).

Key take-aways:

Have call to actions on all our posts i.e read this story here, go here to read more etc…
Social media acts as a way to imbue professionalism as it acts as the first port of call before users move towards our website
Optimize our Facebook to reach a larger audience — is our facebook profile completed, quality photos over stock images etc…

Optimizing Youtube:
Youtube would be the social media that shouldn’t be focused on too much. While videos will be posted there it is one of the weaker social media presence. To best optimize the Youtube account it is important to recognize that it hasn’t been updated in terms of the profile image (see below).

Videos don’t link back to the main website thecity.ie which is the most important CTA (see below). I understand that this has nothing to do with the students from the class, hence why it should be recognised that the Youtube page would get the least amount of strategy. The Youtube profile can be improved by simple things such as hashtags, CTA’s such as LIKE,SHARE,SUBSCRIBE for the Youtube channel.

Best metadata practices:

1. Video title – provide a title that will encourage users to click or watch the video.

2. Video description – accurately describe the content of the video that a user is about to watch.

3. Tags – add keywords to your video that can be found in YouTube search.

Key Take-away:
Metadata enhances the discover-ability of your videos and tells the system about your content. It is also the same metadata you will later rely on to effectively target your advertising, so it is best practice among all content creators to complete this step.

Reflections of a mature student: How to read beyond your level

The bored journalist

Posted on September 18, 2019

First class back and we are given a pile of reading to do, for me is not a problem I enjoy this side of academia, it can get overwhelming when given a long list of articles and books to read. DON’T STRESS, I know it is patronizing and easy to say (write?). Your first class always has to go like that in college. You are told this is what we the lecturer expect from you the student, be it an essay, an exam, or whatever hoops they want their students to jump through. And it can be intimidating. A little hint: if it is an essay your lecturer want from you, then you don’t have to read everything they give, just what you need for your essay. Of course what is provided helps to shape your thoughts and ideas about the subject.

Have the right mindset:

This isn’t school anymore it is expected that you are interested in what you are doing, and I know that isn’t the case for everyone, if you are stuck doing something you really are not interested in changing your mindset and approach is more important for you. Unfortunately, what you are going to read is going to be tested on in some form or another and that in itself can ruin the enriching experience of reading to learn rather than reading to pass a test, you should be reading for yourself and not for the teacher.

Have the right mind set.

When reading articles:

Read the intro/abstract while this might sound like a pain to do, it is important to do. The intros have loads of interesting stuff about who the work ended up influencing, and other bits that often stick with you, they also give an understanding of the book as well. On reading the abstract with academic journals is simple: the purpose of an abstract is to provide prospective readers the opportunity to judge the relevance of the longer work to their projects. Abstracts also include the key terms, which is important to understand the “technical” crux of the information found in the longer work and the purpose and methods of the research. Both the intros and abstracts develop a foundation for the readers to work.

Read the intros and abstracts they are helpful for developing the foundation to what you are about to read.

Ruin it for yourself:

Get a feel for what you are reading before you read it, you can read reviews, summary’s or I like to read what people critiqued about the reader and the work. Having an understanding of what you are about to read allows you to ask yourself questions while you read it, this allows for active reading rather than passive reading. You want to be actively reading because simply reading and re-reading the material isn’t an effective way to understand and learn. You shouldn’t be wasting your time figuring out what the author is trying to say. Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he’s right and how you can benefit from it.

There are no spoilers in learning, actively engage in the readings

These are three easy things you can do to level up your reading. I’ll have more tips on reading and leveling up soon.

Categories: Rob's notes

Tagged: #activereading, #college, #habits, #selfhelp, #selfimprovment, #writer

Objectivity in journalism

The bored journalist

Posted on September 17, 2019

College notes:

Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of reporting only the facts and not a personal attitude toward the facts. That means that when covering hard news, reporters don’t convey their own feelings, biases or prejudices in their stories. This article questions if objectivity has chilled journalists. Objectivity was not always a core foundation of journalism and while it is considered needed in journalism perhaps it is this illusion of fairness. This article looks at objectivity mostly from the American press perspective and briefly touches on the development of the British press as well.

Journalism wasn’t always considered a profession in fact before professionalism became an integral part of journalism newspapers were not neutral, non-partisan outlets, but the products of particular political parties. Britain’s press can trace its history back more than 300 years. William Caxton had introduced the first English printing press in 1476 and, by the 16th century, the first ‘newspapers’ were seen in Britain. Newspapers were slow to evolve, with an illiterate population relying on town criers for news. Around 1640 around 30,000 ‘newsletters’ and ‘newspapers’ were printed. News, commissioned by the wealthy and by aristocrats and senior clerics, had been transmitted orally by messengers and in manuscript form before the arrival of printing in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. As the world of the Early Modern period began to quite literally expand, with the so-called voyages of discovery and the subsequent increase in commercial traffic, people were keen to keep in contact vicariously with a more dynamic world. In 1794 America, newspapers made up 70% of post office traffic and the big debate in Congress was not over whether the government should pay for their delivery, but how much of it to pay for. James Madison attacked the idea that newspaper publishers should have to pay even a token fee to get the government to deliver their publications, calling it “an insidious forerunner of something worse.”

Objectivity wasn’t even invented until the 1900s. Robert McChesney comments in The Problem of the Media, “Such notions for the press would have been nonsensical, even unthinkable.” The beginnings of journalism at Columbia with Joseph Pulitzer, the founding gift to Columbia in l908, the formation of an undergraduate school and its opening in 1912, Pulitzer’s insistence that the separation between the news and advertising departments achieved in the world and other modern newspapers are reproduced in the school. By the turn of the century, we had entered the age of the reporter. The reporter became the archetypal figure of journalism simply because the “glut of occurrences” forced him or her to the center of the enterprise and made the newspaper an instrument of news gathering and writing rather than an excuse for editorials or printing official documents.

It was this “glut of occurrences that in 1919, Walter Lippmann and others began to look for ways for the individual journalist “to remain clear and free of his irrational, his un-examined, and his unacknowledged prejudgments in observing, understanding and presenting the news.” Journalism, Lippmann declared, was being practiced by “untrained accidental witnesses.” Good intentions, or what some might call “honest efforts” by journalists, were not enough. Faith in the reporter, what Lippmann called the “cynicism of the trade,” was also not enough. Nor were some of the new innovations of the times, like by-lines, or columnists.

In an article by the American press institute described how Lippmann argued, for journalists to acquire more of “the scientific approach”. What Lippmann meant by this that journalism should aspire to “a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact”. Lippmann thought the early field of journalism education should be transformed from “trade schools designed to fit men for higher salaries in the existing structure.” Instead, the field should make the study of evidence and verification more prominent. The first courses in journalism, in short, were designed to transform irresponsible writers into responsible journalists, to teach not only a craft but politics and ethics congenial to the needs of college presidents seeking, like all administrators, more order and docility. The entire foundation of press criticism was rebuilt.

Now, instead of criticizing papers for the bias of their owners, press critics had to focus on the professional obligations of their writers. Bias wasn’t about the slant of a paper’s focus, but about any slanting put in by a reporter.

Categories: Thoughts on journalism

Tagged: #jornalism, #news, #writing, collegenotes

Reflections of a mature student:Changing routine

The bored journalist

Posted on September 16, 2019

One of the hardest things about going back to college with a full time job is juggling the two, for me working full time didn’t make sense and had to take a back seat. The transition from working full time to studying full time was hard at the beginning, it is a different type of working day, but that is how I wanted it to be.

To better understand how to change my routine I got a book called The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg discusses how old habits never disappear; they are simply replaced with new habits. To understand how to change your habits, Duhigg outlines the importance of identifying your Keystone Habit—the habit you identify as the most important thing you can change about your life. The keystone habit is different for everyone, and it may take a few sessions of deep thinking to pinpoint exactly what that habit is. For me I am just looking to develop good habits to better prepare myself from moving from a working environment to an academic one.

Next Duhigg write about what he describes as the habit loop which is a neurological loop that governs any habit. The habit loop consists of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward. The habit loop is always started with a cue, a trigger that transfers the brain into a mode that determines which habit to use. The crux of the habit is a mental, emotional, or physical routine. Finally there is a reward, which helps the brain determine if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. One of the things I want to do is get a gym session done in the morning and I am are that in the beginning this will be hard as I am changing my whole routine at the same time.

The Power of Habit states that if you keep the initial cue , replace the routine, and keep the reward, change will eventually occur, although individuals who do not believe in what they are doing will likely fall short of the expectations and give up. Belief is a critical element of such a change, though it can be structured in a number of ways including group settings. I have read books on Nero-linguistic Programming (NLP) the study of how we think, communicate and behave. NLP is used by people from all walks of life for both Personal and Professional growth and development to better recognise how changing my belief system will help me develop the best habits before going into college.

Categories: Self Help, Uncategorized

Tagged: #college, #habits, #hardwork, #selfhelp

Rob’s reads:Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays

The bored journalist

Posted on September 16, 2019

While this book is quite informative, I am interested to find someone who writes the modern equivalent to this insightful book.

The important point of this book to take home, is that the only thing that helps propaganda ( in Bernays sense of propaganda) is public opinion.

The best examples of good propaganda in action today is a redeemed celebrity ( insert your own) and from the past, any particular social or political movements, these are constructed a la Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and so on.

Propaganda by Bernays shows that with a proliferation of Ism’s (ideas) that it becomes easier to control narrative, becomes easier to sow ideas that pushes narrative away from policy the thing’s that actually makes a difference, not some ideological identities which in fact divide.

I would as a recommendation to someone,read this book as a foundation before reading a book to understand something like power or politics.

Another interesting book mentioned by Bernays in this book is The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, by Gustav Le Bon.

Categories: Rob reads

Tagged: #books, #reading, #robsreads

Reflection of a mature student: On asking questions

The bored journalist

Posted on September 15, 2019

Is there such thing as asking too many questions in college?

Short answer yes! Nothing worse than the mature student who asks too many questions, am I right? Always asking questions that just don’t make any sense, “Okay Susan we get it you’re out of your depth and don’t know how Google works”, I’m not saying I know what’s going on either, it’s my first time with epistemological philosophy, but you don’t see me asking how to spell it cause the lecturer doesn’t believe in waiting on the same slide long enough for you to actually read what’s on it. There are memes about those annoying mature students

(I love this one)

What annoys me more is when the class is asked a question and the response is so quiet you hear a pin drop and you see tumbleweed roll by. Shit! Sometimes I find myself being that annoying mature student due the lack of life from my class. There are moments that I agree I wish someone wouldn’t ask a question and that is in the last 30 seconds of the class, ask after the class, ask by email. There seems to be a lack of confidence in asking questions in class, something that stems from secondary school.

The world is full of endless opportunities and it may seem like those opportunities just pass you by unless you develop the confidence to not be afraid to ask for clarity when something confuses you. Becoming more confident is simply a matter of shifting your perspective and finding the positivity in each of your limitations. When you find that positivity you will see opportunities in front of you that you never saw before.

Go forth young students and fear not what others think, just don’t ask stupid questions,okay?

Categories: Rob's notes

Tagged: #college, #study, #work, #writing, blogging

Reflections of a mature student: Dissertation supervisor part 2

The bored journalist

Posted on September 14, 2019

This blog post is going to look at what the supervisors expect from the student.

Some supervisors may ask to meet with you or for you to submit your ideas to them for consideration. Each supervisor will fill half of their supervision spaces in this way. Most contact with a supervisor will occur in regular meetings and or through email communication. It is the student’s responsibility to organize these meetings in conjunction with the supervisor, and it is important that you contact your supervisor to agree regular meetings.

To receive feedback on written work you need to have submitted it in advance of the meeting, you should ask you supervisor how long in advance this needs to be. It is important that as a student you take charge and responsibility for these meetings. You should have a list of issues that you want to discuss and always be sure to take notes of decisions that you have made so that you can get the greatest benefit from the time spent with the supervisor.

It is very important that you start writing for your dissertation early in the process and the proposal provides you with the first opportunity to do this. It requires you to clarify your thoughts by succinctly outlining the key area of focus of the dissertation, an early attempt at what your research aim might be and your initial thoughts about what methodology you might employ. This must be submitted to your supervisor and research methodology lecturer on the specified date and will form the basis of your discussions at your next meeting with your supervisor.

Your dissertation supervisor is there to supervise your work in progress. The official allocation of time for this work will vary from institution to institution. Do check what the arrangements are for your own department. However, it is important to make a clear agreement with your supervisor about how the supervision will occur. Meetings in the absence of any written work being completed are not generally an effective use of time, as you are wasting your allocated hours. If you have a question to ask or a point to check, then an email will usually suffice. On the other hand, writing a good chunk of material and submitting it before your meeting means that the supervisor will have had the opportunity to read and comment upon it. It is often a useful idea to arrange to have some time as soon as possible after a supervision session so that you can follow up on the comments. Successful students have also found that it is helpful at the end of each supervision session to plan out clearly the next stage of work and the target dates.

Key takeaways:

1.Checking whether your tutors have drop-in times or whether you need to make an appointment to see your supervisor.

2. Making yourself known to your course administrators, who can help you to get in touch with your supervisor if she doesn’t get back to you after a long wait.

3.Finding out about what support systems are available for students with dyslexia and other disabilities.

4. Getting in touch with your supervisor – find out from your course administrator whether your supervisor prefers phone or email contact.

Further Reading

BELL, J. (2005). Doing your research project: A guide for first time researchers in education, health and social sciences. 4th ed., Maidenhead, Open University Press, chapter 2

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: #college, #habits, #notes, #study, #work

Robert Geoghegan.

Social commentry.

How to optimize your social medias: Facebook and YouTube

The bored journalist

Posted on October 1, 2019

Reflections of a mature student: How to read beyond your level

The bored journalist

Posted on September 18, 2019

Objectivity in journalism

The bored journalist

Posted on September 17, 2019

Reflections of a mature student:Changing routine

The bored journalist

Posted on September 16, 2019

Rob’s reads:Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays

The bored journalist

Posted on September 16, 2019

Reflection of a mature student: On asking questions

The bored journalist

Posted on September 15, 2019

Reflections of a mature student: Dissertation supervisor part 2

The bored journalist

Posted on September 14, 2019