Sparking thought

Over the past few classes we have been talking a lot about online participation. Unfortunately, our group has been having a pretty tough time getting participation out of others on our two social media sites. This is mostly due in fact to the fact that our twitter account only has 6 followers and our Facebook page as well only has 6 likes. We are hoping that by inviting friends of our via Facebook to like our page we can hopefully obtain a few more likes. However, that obviously isn’t enough so we have also taken into consideration the idea of changing the name of our page to something catchier and shorter than “Forum on Educational Reform”, because simply enough, with that name we aren’t getting any attention.

This past week our group has also spent a lot of time discussing how we can get more participation out of the few followers we have (and hopefully out of future followers). First and foremost we came to the realization that the lengthy articles after lengthy articles are not the way to persuade participation. Most people on the internet like stuff that is quick, short, in your face, humorous, and/or controversial. Therefore, we hope that if we start changing our approach we can attract more attention. We plan on doing this by mixing up our media with memes, short videos, parody articles, with lengthy informative articles still in the mix, but not dominating the feed. By keeping things either short, comical, or controversial we hope that rather than just spitting information at people we can provoke people to think further on their own and thus feel the need to participate. With this new approach we are hoping that we will start to see a change in our two pages popularity.