Blog Background: Rebekah Radice

Rebekah Radice is a renaissance woman of sorts — a social media writer, public speaker and strategist among many other roles. I find her appeal in that she offers sincere, carefully thought out advice for those in the social media realm — and covers how to incorporate the proper protocol into a variety of platforms. Rebekah has been actively blogging about social media topics since 2004, and is invested in teaching others how to maintain a strong presence online. Her blog can be found at http://rebekahradice.com/blog/, and she posts quite often on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube. Rebekah writes a new blog post once a week and keeps the topics varied, posting mostly about her own take on trends she has noticed in social media. She offers her opinion on what makes certain actions effective, and what may hurt you in terms of the content you post. Rebekah’s blog is where she posts her primary content, and advertises her posts through the other platforms she is active on, distributing her advice as widely as possible. Her advice is renowned and well respected — which is reflected in the number of her followers: 79.7 K on twitter, 26.5 K followers on pinterest, 6000 page likes on facebook and 615 Youtube followers.

Blog Reflection: A Visual Guide to Social Media Etiquette

Posted Sept. 22nd, 2014 by Rebekah Randice

Although this post was written almost two years ago — It remains as one of Rebekah Radice’s most read and relevant blog posts. Rebekah makes a point of saying that when used correctly, social media can be a highly effective venue for increasing brand awareness and communication with your customers. However, conducting yourself appropriately is key to guaranteeing your success in this venture. If you make yourself or your company accessible on social media, it is important to respect relatively specific guidelines on how to communicate with your followers. The post is broken down by platform, and outlines how to conduct yourself to get the best results.

As an example — the key points for Facebook were very helpful, and Rebekah is sure to follow up with a specific company/persona that exemplifies the points she outlines:

• Don’t ignore the posts made to your page — Make your followers feel important.
• Too many hashtags can be overwhelming and unnecessary to your readers.
• Post according to what your analytics indicate — Pay attention to peak times to increase viewership.
• Post relevant information.

She points to skittles as a company that has done this well, noting their creativity and ability to engage their followers with their posts.

In addition to her list of rules — It was suggested also that we must not delete negative comments to make the feedback seem more positive. This would reflect on your persona or your brand poorly, and shows you are shying away from answering to difficult questions or comments.

This is a very helpful blog post in terms of helping you to figure out what content is useful for your brand or can take away from your message. When you are first trying to decide what to post in an attempt to promote your brand, you could use as much guidance as possible.

In total — This post has 17.8 K shares over various platforms.

This Social Media Success Pinterest Board is a reflection of the examples Rebekah names in this post — who have demonstrated the right etiquette on their respective social media platform.

Blog Reflection: 6 Habits of Highly Successful Social Media Marketers

Posted July 20th, 2015 by Rebekah Radice

Those who are looking into creating social media profiles tend to look to the experts to see how they’ve come into such a large following. How social media marketers go about this is a popular topic, and Rebekah takes an interest approach to laying out their top habits. She does not only outline the habits, but also explains specifically how one can go about developing the habit themselves. This post generated a large response, with 37 comments with back and forth discussion.

In summary, Rebekah outlines the following as the most important behaviours to demonstrate in order to guarantee success:

• Dedicate time to connecting to your contacts to create a significant relationship with them.
• Combine a cause you are passionate about with your social media campaign to give your message meaning.
• Research what appeals to your audience and use this information to increase the popularity of your posts.
• Communicate with other influencers to share experiences and keep each other learning continually.
• Focus on creating profitable content rather than putting out a large quality of information that won’t earn you anything.
• Track your campaign carefully so you can accurately measure its effectiveness.

Many commenters agreed with the idea that incorporating your passion for any particular cause into promotion is a real driving force in getting followers to pay attention to your campaign. Rebekah highlighted TOMS as a specific example of this, noting that a lot of their success is drawn from their commitment to the cause behind the brand.

This post has been shared 6.6 thousand times across varying social media platforms.

Blog Reflection: How to Create Your Social Media Strategy

Posted Dec. 28th, 2015 by Rebekah Radice

This post stood out to me specifically because we will be making a social media strategy of our own, and having never done this before a step by step explanation is very useful to me.

Rebekah breaks it down into a 7 part strategy, taking a fairly complicated process and narrowing it down to the most important checklist items:

1. Determine what your key objectives are, and what you want social media to do for your business. The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to track your success later on.
2. Examine what your current social media habits are, and plot out how you would like them to change to benefit you best
3. Try to figure out more about your audience — What their current problems and wants are. A helpful clue is going through their collective interests, through analytics.
4. Choose the topics you wish to address, by thinking about where your personal passions lie, what your audience wants to read, and an area in which you excel.
5. Do research around your chosen topic, and post interesting items from other sources which relate to it
6. Look into the possibility of automating more posts to expand your reach, and engage with more followers
7. Ensure there is a plan in place so you can track your success, and measure how effective your campaign is.

I found this post to be very helpful and straightforward, providing a list that clarifies the process of putting a strategy together. This how-to asks you to examine what you want social media to do for your company, and in doing so the plan of how to get there more or less builds itself. It is very important to determine what your purpose is, as it will create the direction for your entire plan. The emphasis on tracking at the end is also important. Followers of Rebekah’s blog commented that if you don’t measure the response to your posts, you are just continually putting out content but not knowing if it’s having any influence on your brand/company, either positive or negative.

I chose my other favourite How-to’s and interviews with Rebekah, which can be seen on this You-Tube Playlist.

This post has had 4.1 thousand shares, and not much commentary (15 in total), however it appealed to me directly because of the future projects I will be looking to complete.

Blog Review: Conclusion

I found Rebekah Radice’s blog to be very insightful, and helpful. The way her posts are constructed more or less follow the same formula each time — Break down a process into a simplified how-to list, provide examples of brands/companies who execute this well, and add in useful infographics that further emphasize the points made. I found that by reading her posts, it helped me to understand methodologies that I originally thought would be very complicated. You can tell through her posts that she is genuinely invested in the success of others, and is passionate about giving out advice that will really help people get started and do well in social media. I would recommend her blog to anyone that is looking to break into social media and would like to improve their understanding of how to execute their plans at a high standard.