In my INTE4665 class, we explored uses of social networking in our professional lives. A few years ago I co-founded a small educational publishing business. We publish workbooks for K-12 students with a focus on 2nd-5th grade at this time. We sell through a third party company, TeachersPayTeachers.com. Although TeachersPayTeachers sells advertising space, we’ve had to get creative on other ways getting our name out there. Surprisingly, one of the most effective ways of advertising was using Pinterest and Instagram. Many teachers love both of these social networking platforms and we found that it was super easy to post our products on them as well as connect with potential customers/current customers.  We also use Twitter and Facebook too, especially to announce sales and the release of any new products.

On Pinterest, we are able to link directly to our page on TeachersPayTeachers.com, so if a potential customers wants more information or to actually purchase the product, they can.
I think the social platform that we use that is the least valuable for our needs is Twitter. It does not seem as popular among teachers it seldom gets as much traffic as our Facebook page does.

One piece of advice that would I can think of when using these tools is to use them with frequency but do not overwhelm the readers by posting constantly. It just depends on the social media platform. On a site like Facebook, posting about once a week or even less would suffice for what we are doing with our business, but on Instagram, we could post daily and our subscribers would likely not complain, as long as it wasn’t always advertising that we are posting.