Social Networking and Blogging

Though we've been loyal bloggers for about a year now, in the past few months we have really seen an gigantic increase in our clients who are interested using blogs and social networking sites in their marketing programs. So we felt it was time for a little review of what we offer in terms of social networking and share some tips with you.

BLOGS:
This week we launched our first internally hosted blog site - which is http://rinckerlaw.com/blog/. We did this site this week for our fellow Aggie friend Cari Rincker who is agriculture and environmental attorney licensed in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and District of Columbia.

The neat thing about Cari's blog is that it if you notice, her blog is hosted on her own web site. Ours is hosted at blogger -- so our address is ranchhousedesigns.blogspot.com. Cari's is hosted at her own web site which just gives more promotion and credibility to rinckerlaw.com. With this project we set up her blog and also designed the matching supporting graphics and icons to have a seamless integration with her web site.

If this is something you are interested in for your site, just let us know and we can help you get set up to start blogging away! The main thing about a blog is keeping the information fresh and current. You have to commit to blogging regularly, otherwise the blog loses it's appeal.

FACEBOOK:
In April we did a test experiment using our family's ranch as a guinea pig and we created a ranch page for V8 Ranch on facebook. At this time this was the first U.S. cattle ranch page on facebook to the best of our knowledge. So we created it and within a matter of weeks we had over 400 "fans" on our facebook page. If you are a member of facebook, you can easily create your own fan page yourself and then invite friends to join your group. This is a great way to socially network with others online and share news, success, and stories.

We've also found that there are many other ranchers on facebook and it is really fun to interact with them. For example, a couple of weeks ago my mom posted that during our first rain storm of the summer, unfortunately we had 4 baby calves that died in a lightning storm. This post resulted in 13 comments from other ranchers all over the world. So it's definitely fun and easily something you can get addicted to!

TWITTER:
When we made the V8 Ranch facebook fan page, we also gave them a Twitter page. We have to give the credit for this to Luann Williams who was the person who suggested the facebook and twitter accounts for the ranch. Currently we have 45 followers on our twitter page, so you can see it's roughly 10% of what we have on facebook. Personally, I can't quite get into twitter as much as I like facebook....but there are definitely those who prefer it and so we try to update our twitter page just as much as the facebook page.

On all of these 3 services, you can easily set them up yourself or we are happy to help you set them up if you aren't quite as computer savvy. Once they are set up, we can also gladly design custom graphics for these pages for you to use as your icons and backgrounds.