Back To School on Social Media: 5 Accounts To Follow To Learn Something New
Did buying the kids’ school supplies and liking everyone’s back-to-school pictures on Facebook get you in the mood to learn something new yourself?
Picking up new knowledge and skills doesn’t take a trip to campus anymore, thanks to websites like Lynda, Coursera, and Skillshare.
You can also find ways to learn that don’t even require you to leave your social media feeds. Follow the five social media accounts in this story and you’ll discover some new ways to enrich your mind even when you have only a few minutes between meetings or while waiting in line.
And you’ll also gaining some ideas and inspiration that could help your business. After all, educating your prospective customers or clients about your products or service is one of the cornerstones of content marketing. Take a look at how these accounts wow followers by helping them learn.
1. What Was There
What Was There is an app that adds historical photos to Google Maps so that you can see what a location used to look like. What Was There uses Pinterest in a really smart way with its Today in History board. The captions give the historical context of the picture, and they lead you to the What Was There website in a way that doesn’t feel too sales-y.
2. Mental Floss
Mental Floss magazine is all about feeding your brain delectable facts, and you can get a free sampling of its informational tidbits on the Mental Floss Twitter account. While Tweets link back to the magazine, you can usually learn something even when you don’t feel like leaving Twitter. Extra kudos to Mental Floss for remembering the power of visuals on Twitter. Adding a photo or other visual element makes a Tweet more likely to get retweeted.
3. Daily Infographic
Here’s another resource for building up your stockpile of general knowledge. The folks at Daily Infographic deliver just what their name says. When you follow Daily Infographic on Pinterest, you’ll get a steady supply of graphics that teach you about everything from juicing to curling. And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that you can also hire Daily Infographic to create your own informative masterpieces.
4. The Corseted Beauty
Fashion photos are all over Instagram. But The Corseted Beauty doesn’t just give you pretty pictures of vintage finery. The Instagrammer behind this account takes the time to provide details about each piece in the caption and often shares extended information from sources like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the Corseted Beauty seems to be purely a labor of love, its approach is easily adaptable for a business, whether you sell vintage clothes, website designs, or hotel rooms by the beach. Curate (and credit!) images of products like yours and write informative captions to help educate your potential customers.
5. Living Language
At the website Living Language, you can take courses to learn languages from Arabic to Tagalog. Living Language’s Facebook page helps you test the waters of learning a new language with lots of fun information and inspiration. One cool feature: Every day, you can find out how to say a different word or phrase in several languages. I’d love to see Living Language add an image to its word-of-the-day posts so that they’d be even more appealing on social media.
Did you learn something new thanks to social media? Tell us about it in comments.