Director of Social Media

In January I took over social media for Paragon Software. Some of the profiles were already created by someone in marketing on platforms I was familiar with like Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. They were never updated and basically collecting dust.

I started with Twitter since I seem to live in it. I did some tweaking on the @paragonamerica profile, it had about 6 followers at the time and started feeding in some updates and links to news about the company. Basic stuff but I had to start somewhere.  300 tweets later I am at 325 followers and growing a little every day. Now I would be happier if I had 3000 but I wont complain about some modest growth. There are some contributing factors like the company already maintaining the corporate @paragonsoftware profile. There is a strategy to having multiple profiles for the company, I’ll explain that in another post.

In the @paragonamerica profile I focus on updates for our corporate line of software and industry news that applies to the storage market. Since it feels like I have 4 other jobs with the company, social media is not a full focus of mine, I am glad to see that the little bits of interaction I am giving are beginning to gain some awareness. I’ve found some of our partners profiles and connected with them and many others that have some connection to our company or the industry.

Facebook

The second platform I started working on was the Paragon Software Facebook page. Again, there was already a corporate page but was fairly dormant and I started slowly building a group within the new profile. The numbers between Facebook and Twitter are very close, I should make an effort to see how big the overlap is. That would be interesting to know. I was given a bit of a boost when Jackson Chung of Make Use Of –@makeuseof helped promote a giveaway we were running to his enormous following. Now we have regular giveaways and promotion with them and it has turned out to be a great relationship between the companies. Still the following on Facebook could be better. If there was a magic bullet to this, I think I would have found it. So with the time I can spend on it, slow and steady it will have to be.

WordPress Blog

I believe that any companies social media presence hinges on a blog of some kind. Even ifs it’s just a section of the company website that has updated news. On a more complex level having a full blog platform like WordPress helps with SEO and a hundred other things. I started a company blog on WordPress.com. since the company did not have a blog set up, this was the quickest way to be up and running with hardly any resources.I started off with just a few hundred hits a day. Mostly from pushing the blog content out on the other social media platforms. The blog was sorta under the radar of the company since the last thing I wanted to do was call any attention to a blog that was never going to generate any awareness or garner any results. It was a steady climb, then in March we got a post linked to from several other blogs and the numbers jumped. Well, so much for being under the radar. The decision was made to host a WordPress blog on our company network and now we have blog.paragon-software.com.

wordpress.com hosted blog

Self hosted blog.paragon-software

There was some break in the stats while the site was moved but it’s clear that the blog is getting a lot more exposure than our other social media profiles. There are many explanations for this. You can read more about how this works on the posts Corporate Social Media List and 50 Social Media Links. Ive been working with the other regions especially in Europe on how to pull even more traffic into the blog. The site is very functional, I could make it a little ‘prettier’ but it’s nice. I’m comfortable with WordPress as a platform (That’s what this blog is too) but I don’t know all the backend stuff that could really make it shine. Once someone starts talking .htaccess
I’m lost. But I don’t need that to get the blog becoming the central hub for the community, which is the plan.

so that’s my quick update. If you have any tips, tricks or links I should see that can help the process, let me know in the comments.