social networking

New social media courses and dates announced

Posted Wed, 24/02/2010 - 15:27 by Graeme

Reach Further are pleased to announce a raft of new course dates coming up in the next few months. As well as the hugely popular LinkedIn and Twitter courses, there are courses to help with blogging and all aspects of social media.

So whether you’re a complete newbie to social media or are familiar with it but could do with a boost to help in maximising the potential of your social media activity and gaining as much as you can from it, then attend one of our courses or workshops and let Liz or Helen guide you through the process and begin using social media to have a realistic impact on your business.

Our upcoming courses include:

Contradictions in research into the experiences of learners online

Posted Mon, 01/02/2010 - 16:06 by Helen

I was intrigued to see that in Canada they are reporting that the use of social networking and other web tools such as Twitter and Facebook is damaging the quality of students' English skills. Apparently academics at Waterloo University, Ontario and Simon Fraser University, British Columbia are finding that many students (a third and a tenth, respectively) are failing at English, i.e. not up to the standard required for academic writing. And they are blaming young people's use of these social networking tools for this problem.

"Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser."

At Coventry University in the UK, however, researchers have found the exact opposite, as reported by the BBC a few days ago. In their study of 8-12 year olds they found that children who regularly use the abbreviated language of text messages are actually improving their ability to spell correctly.

Following the Leader

Posted Tue, 26/01/2010 - 13:25 by Liz

A quick guide to jumpstarting your followers on Twitter.

Unless you already have a strong reputation, offline following, or brand name that will mean people look for you specifically on Twitter, you need to find another way to get people's attention. 

You could tweet usefully with lots of niche keywords to help people find you when they search and you can put all the right keywords in your bio on your homepage, for the same reason.  But this is very passive and gives you no control over speed of following.  (you should niche tweet in the long-term still)

You could @reply people in the hope of starting a conversation, but this is very time-consuming.  (you should engage tweeps in the long-term still)

For most of us unknowns, the only way to get people to follow you, quickly, is to follow them, and then be so irresistible they follow you back. 

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