Week1A: My Template

 So, Blogger doesn't have a ton of great themes. I'm currently using Soho Red - I could have picked Soho Light (White and too clean looking), Soho Dark (A little moody), Soho Neon (Cool, too cool), or Soho Pink (Cute but why the black margins?). Longing for a more neutral experience I decided to go with the red theme. To Blogger I present the question: What about it is red? No disrespect. I'm content with it and, with the exception of link color, the lack of red.

Neutral blog themes are what someone would go for when they want to appear sophisticated; come to think of it, I'm definitely not sophisticated enough for cream/beige/"red". I would have liked to use the Neon theme but I'm absolutely not cool enough for the font or the commitment to pure black. Maybe I should switch to white? It's a nice, non-demanding color. 

The thing that stuck out to me about Soho was the big, beautiful picture of a fig tart on a wooden plate surrounded by rosemary and walnuts. It looks sophisticated! The preview for the light variation of this theme has a photo of a cat in a very relaxed setting leading me to believe that, yes, it's possible maybe I should have gone with this variation. It's friendlier and more casual than the intensity of the cream and fig tart of Soho Red, almost like I'm missing a vlog of my farmer's market outings to supplement my blog's content. Clearly I have a little more soul searching to do before I really commit to a semester of looking at the same theme. 

Moving on - I've picked my theme, now what? It hurts to admit but the last time I used my blogger account was in 2013 when I wanted to be an older and less knowledgeable Tavi Gevinson, stalking pop ups and taking shy photos of things I considered future content. Times have changed since the early 2010s with blogs going through their tumultuous time at Tumblr, graduating to Twitter, becoming spoken dissertations on YouTube, and finally becoming hidden under a "read more" button on Instagram. I love all of these platforms.

While I do love these platforms I would say that they each have their place. For example, I would absolutely use all of these for personal content but would opt out of Tumblr and Twitter for business use. Tumblr is fabulous for personal use; with the breadth of options for customization for blogs by both official and third parties it makes for a very personalized and intimate form of social media, if you want it to be. I've seen it used for business use by mostly artists and small businesses usually advertising their Etsy shop but find that while not totally ineffective it's not as useful as it could be. Twitter for business is also not useless but is a platform that makes no sense to me to use primarily for business. Absolutely fabulous for ranting and venting and joking around. For interacting with future and current customers, not so fabulous. Twitter is best suited for personalities. If one were to have a business with a very personable, relatable social media person, maybe it would be better. But from my experience on the site I've learned that most people dislike when businesses attempt to be friendly with the public in a "Twitter" way. 

In my mind the platform most suited for business right now would be Instagram. Everyone and their mother is on Instagram. People who don't want to be on Instagram are on it because they want to keep up with their friends. It's an easy platform to use: Post good pictures, use hashtags, navigate the algorithm, and link your business in your bio. It's impossibly competitive but if you know how to flow with the changes in trends every single day it's doable. Instagram is all about looking good  - good looking people, good looking clothes, good looking scenery, good looking food - and if you can make your product look good then it's all about outreach and the algorithm. 

Above all else the most important thing for business is keeping your eyes open at all times for new trends, platforms, and audiences. Any social media platform can be utilized to promote a business, it just so happens that some of them are infinitely more effective than others. 

Edited on 8/28 to say holy smokes, that fig tart image really eats up the entire page. I'll edit the size someday but I would love to know whose call it was to make a header image that large.