RSS Feeds, Tags, & Hashtags

It’s expensive to monitor social media, really expensive. So how do businesses save time when gathering information from other sites, from clients, and from competitors? The answer is with the use of rich site summary, also known as RSS feeds. What this does is brings all the news to you. Instead of having to go search for all the information you’re looking for, all the news you want comes straight to you. By using a site like google reader, you can subscribe to other sites like blogs and posts and what not you can get all the information you want in one spot. From there, by using XML the information can be organized by things like most popular or most recent. This is how Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and Pinterest are set up. Facebook has moved to a most popular set up where are of your most popular news will be shown on your timeline first. Most of the other social media sites are set up to be most recent. With these RSS feeds it can save businesses, especially small ones a lot of time and therefore money. You are able to keep in touch with what your customers, clients, and competitors are doing with one click of a button. It makes everything so easy and right where you can get everything at once. It brings the news to you and you don’t have to do a thing past just subscribing.

The other subject we talked about in class was tags. A tag is a keyword that you use to help people find your content more easily and they make sure it is relevant to them. We talked about the ethical side of using tags if it’s ok to use tags that might stretch a little past the boundaries of your actual business or content. There are no real rules prohibiting the use of tags though, so whenever you do type in Honda in search of a Honda car, but a Ford ad pops up, it’s because they paid to have their ad come up when the word Honda is typed into a search engine. Is it ethical or not, that’s the popular question.

The last topic we really talked about was the extension of tags, and that’s hashtags. People go way overboard when using hashtags sometimes. I know I have some “friends” that hashtag about 100 different things in one post and all I can say is, “are you kidding me?” I find it ridiculous and usually just keep scrolling through and don’t even bother. As a matter of fact, I’ve got the TV on in the background as I write this and I hear a Dairy Queen commercial and the guy says this blizzard is “hashtag deliciousness.” The point being that the use of the hashtag is everywhere! But you can’t go overboard with them. As a business if you start using too many hashtags, customers will just keep going without even thinking twice about it. Keep it simple, keep it short, if that can be done, there will be more success.