It’s hard to believe Semester One is all over bar the assessment. In the last week or so, we’ve been busy tweaking the web site design and trying to link in with other book lovers and relevant organisations and companies.
Our starting point was giving our family and friends with the URL and pleas to visit the site and provide feedback. I’ve also emailed the Society of Editors about letting members know about the site and asked the course co-ordinator for Publishing and Editing to email the relevant students and lecturers. There’s a few industry organisations that we could contact as well – Vic Writers Centre, Australian Society of Authors, Wheeler Centre, to name a few.
Social media newtorking sites have been very useful for letting people know the site exists and what it offers. We’ve had a Facebook page for a few weeks and gained about 17 fans. So, I set up a ‘friend’ account and have acquired 98 ‘friends’ in just over 24 hours. Not bad going, if I do say so! The majority of these are people who I have assumed are in our demographic as Melburnians interested in books – from fan pages for the Melb Writers Festival, the Wheeler Centre etc. Need to be very careful not to contravene spamming protocol though – I guess if people don’t want to accept the friend request, they can ignore it. Hmmm…
We also have a Twitter account which has a decent-sized following and it’s really only taken a week to gain 73 followers but it’s harder to find people and organisations on Twitter. Time for further investigation of Tweet Deck I guess.
Pretty good results, all told. Most of our traffic is coming from the social media sites at this point. The URL has been submitted to several search engines but that will take a while to come into effect.
I’m also focussing on improving the presentation of the events posts so they’re easier to read and not just a mass of text on the page.
We’re still a work-in-progress and that’s the beauty of having a website – it’s easy to change and build on the foundations in the early stages.
