Quick W.I.T.S.

So yesterday, while Facebook and Instagram were both experiencing outages and many people were having trouble accessing the sites or seeing their feeds, it got me thinking again about social media as a whole, and how much we've come to rely on it. See, I think Blanche DuBois got it wrong. We can't  rely on the kindness of strangers - not when it comes to business. More and more small businesses are choosing to forego having a website of their own in favor of putting all their eggs in the social media basket. The problem with this idea, of course, is that you don't have any control over what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the others choose to do. If they change their platform, it messes up your business in the search results. If they decide to start showing their own ads on your page, or redirecting traffic to competing companies, or jack up the price of making your own ads, or even hold your business page hostage unless you pay them fees for the right to be displayed,

Those of you who have followed me on social media for awhile now may recognize the name Denise Alison. She's the owner of Stratigro Business Consulting, and just like me she helps small and medium sized businesses improve their online presence to increase their success. Over the past year, I've shared a few of her articles on my own page, and we've traded comments back and forth on each others' content quite a bit. Denise recently reached out to me about a new online course she's offering, on using live video content to grow your business. This is a subject I'm very interested in - I've been thinking a lot about different ways to expand a company's social media presence. Video content is proven to get a lot more traction than written articles alone, due to its ease of access, and the personal rapport you can develop with your audience by appearing on camera. I've always been a little reticent to pull the trigger on video content myself (I'

Hello, friends and followers. It's been a long couple of months, I know. Mea culpa! This is just a quick update to let you all know that I am starting up my social media activities again as of today, including more helpful and interesting business articles. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to resume posting 5 days a week yet, or what my exact schedule is going to be, but I'll figure that out over the next week or so. In the meantime, I hope everyone had an excellent holiday and new year, and please stay tuned for more content very soon.