LE E Podcasts report for webcon

LearnEnglish Elementary Podcasts: Tracy Swallow Strategy – I decided to use the FB fan-page to reach the LE podcast users and Twitter to reach the ELT professionals because I thought the podcast audience would be more responsive to the social interaction, whereas ELT professionals just want useful information like updates etc. Teachers don’t warm to Tess & Ravi as much as learners, so I didn’t use the personalities of T&R in Twitter, like I do in FB. Face book fan page: 633 fans Methods used to get fans – I invited friends, joined several groups who were learning English and invited members to join the fan page (you have to do this slowly or you will get your FB account suspended) and promoted internally via tech teach. Keys to success: Responding quickly to all fan comments, liking posts – finding the right balance between informing, entertaining and trying to avoid spamming (I noticed I lost a few members when I updated too regularly). The fans like Tess & Ravi and feel gratified to be able to communicate with them directly. Longer more thoughtful posts, emphasis on communication and social bonding. Weakness: I think it will always need moderation; it won’t self-sustain as the fans value the interaction with T&R more than the interaction with each other (although there is quite a lot of fan to fan interaction going on). Twitter: 135 followers Methods used to get followers. Being proactive is much harder on Twitter. I followed the people that ‘cool’ people were following and used ELT blogs as a starting point for taking the temperature of the online ELT community (commenting on blogs, retweeting blog promoters etc). I also tried making connections through Twibes and a few other Twitter spin-off communities. I feel I could have had more success with Twitter as myself than as Tess & Ravi. The identity of podcast presenters is less appealing to ELT professional than a fellow teacher / blogger would be. Keys to success: Effective networking with the ELT community is vital. Short and sweet posting, information not chatter. Appropriate use of retweets and hashtags. Need to make use of each other’s contacts and content. Weakness: Need to be always on, being in a vastly different time zone as many of the tweeters means I miss a lot, and they miss me. You need to be sure of your audience, follow the right people and get followed by the right people. I made the mistake of following the wrong people and get buried under nonsense every time I log into tweetdeck. Tess & Ravi don’t appeal to ELT community as much, I could do with a teacher persona – maybe we should have used Tom the Teacher here ^^. Or have a single Digital ELT guru to promote all of our digital content through Twitter. Generally How do we measure success? Scorecard? Number of fans, weekly interactions, likes (using FB insight), followers, retweets or mentions or simply downloads to podcasts. I think the Fan page interactions are impactful anyway – people still feel connected to the BC even if they don’t always download the podcast. Number of fans is gratifying but less meaningful than fan page interactions. It would be useful to know how many of the fans do actually download repeatedly. We could have a target ratio - Fans: downloads. We need to organize better for twitter, share content and retweet systematically. The danger is all we will be doing is retweeting each other, but it would help with leverage and get the ball rolling a bit faster. Could we have a way of connecting with each other? BC social networkers utd. Could be (rather boringly) a list like mmforum or techteach – or more usefully for those of us who do most of the work from home a Ning network. We can share best practice and contacts, hashtag of the week ;-). Give help and advice more effectively. We could also do with prioritizing content for twitter especially i.e: Primary – our product, LE podcasts in my case Secondary – other products and services from the BC network Thirdary – general ELT news, British news (? Are we still in the business of promoting the uk? :D)