Sarasota Sister Cities has an aggressive program of social networking. We use the internet to get out the word and to try to improve communication among our members and other interested citizens. Our addresses below:
Pinterest sarasotasistercities.us
Facebook facebook.com/SarasotaSisterCities
Twitter twitter.com/#!/SarasotaSisterC
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/sarasotasistercities
Google+
Photos Twitter twitter.com/#!/SarasotaSisterC
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/sarasotasistercities
Google+
The first three systems primarily get the word out. We first write what is happening on the blog. The Web site automatically picks up the latest 5 posts from the blog.
Pinterest provides a great pictoral history of the organization. Tom Halbert and Gayle Maxey have posted a great deal of information and photos on the site.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ are all designed to get people to interact. We post a short message on each system with a link back to the blog. You have to sign up for these programs - this is free and simple. You will want go to our pages and like or friend or link to them. Then you will see what we post and everyone will see what you post. Over time we hope to get a number of people interacting on these systems.
You can also use direct email to your contacts. I usually just send a link to our blog to our contacts with a short message so if they are interested they can go to the blog, or if not, they can just delete the email. You should send the email to "An Undisclosedlist of Your Town Sister City Members" sarasotasistercities@gmail.com with the actual addresses to a bcc address - that way spammers won't pick up the addresses and harass your email contacts.
It is your choice whether you use a simple email format or one with an attractive photo or letterhead - the attractive letter head looks nice but takes longer to open and will not work on everyone's computer.
Social marketing is evolving rapidly, but you can get underway quickly with no cost and a little effort. It takes a reasonably computer savvy person a couple of hours to get all this up and running, and then some time to develop a little skill.
The buttons at the bottom of each blog post make it easy for people to send your blog address to their friends on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. You need to be logged into all of your systems for these to work.
You can create lots of different blogs with different looks. A couple of examples below:
sarasotaphotos.blogspot.com