30 Days of Dance Photo Challenge

I'm kicking off the year with this #30DaysofDance photo challenge started by Faizeh! It ties in nicely with my goal of branching out into more social networks. You can now follow me on Instagram for these pictures and more! Don't mind all of the Cthulhu pictures, I used to only use Instagram to document the adventures of my beaded Cthulhu plush. I'll still post him from time to time but it's going to mostly be dance stuff.

So far my year of dance is off to a good start. I didn't end up having time to dance yesterday (other than some hip work while I was cleaning), but my family had our gift exchange and I received two types of poi which will help me with my goal of mastering my prop collection. These new poi are much softer than the practice set I made for myself, which often resulted in strange bruises. And as for today, I've already put in a few hours working on Open Stage and my social media stuff, I'm about to do a little practice and then it will be time to put on my face and head over to Sky Bar. This will easily be an 8 hour day of dance-related work. Awesome!

Social Media?

If you spend a lot of time on-line, you've probably seen/heard/read a lot about the recent changes to Facebook fan pages which has been resulting in much lower page views as FB apparently is trying to push fan pages to pay for advertising instead of getting it for free.

Normally I ignore the panic around these sorts of announcements because usually people scream "the sky is falling" but nothing really changes. However, I admin several FB pages and I have definitely noticed a steep decrease in views on posts, even when people are liking and commenting on them. It reached the point where it wasn't even worth posting jewelry listings on my jewelry page, because they were getting less than 20 views each.

I can't even entirely blame FB, as there are a lot of businesses using it as a platform for free advertising, taking advantage of the system to run contests where likes, shares and comments give you a chance to win a prize. But on the other hand, not all fan pages are to promote a business. For instance, I'm not dancing professionally yet, so there's no point in paying for an ad for my Sophia Ravenna fan page, but I'd still like my friends and fans to be able to see my blog posts, performance photos and such. And Fire & Gold is an amateur troupe with no advertising budget, but it would be nice for people to know when we're performing or see that we're hosting Open Stage.

So I guess the time has come for me to look into different avenues for promotion next year. I'm just not sure what to do. Instagram? I see a lot of dancers using it so maybe I should too. Tumblr? I have to admit, I don't even understand Tumblr, it makes me feel old. Should I be promoting myself more on Pinterest? Should I give in and join G+? Is there some other untapped market I'm forgetting about?