by Trevor Sanders
American sustainability is an organization that can help individual authors publish their content about sustainable living, healthy behaviors for our environment, or anything that falls under the umbrella of eco-friendly living. Being able to publish information is a wonderful start to making changes within a community, but to actually make change, people need to be able to access the information that is made available. This is where the gap can sometimes be created between authors and the general public. Author’s will become discouraged quickly because there is not enough traffic from people reading the information that has been developed, published, and made available to read and learn from. The impact that authors are attempting to have on their local communities will not be present until the information is presented in places and times that reach the most people possible. This can be a challenging process. Finding locations that are reaching the right people is one of the most important parts of spreading knowledge.
After becoming a blogger for American-Sustainability, I began to realize that the blogs that were being published are not truly making a difference in the local community based on the number of readers of the individual blogs. This began my thought process on productive ways to increase traffic for all the wonderful information that American-Sustainability has to offer.
Social Media is such a large aspect of today’s communication. Through social media, information spreads like wildfire. Factual and not factual information is spread around social media swiftly and reaches, sometimes, millions of people every day. I believe developing a strong social media presence, that is backed with factual information, will help the knowledge spread in ways that make sense to the readers and knowledge seekers of today. The first way that I found to create exciting and attention-grabbing social media posts was to make sure the post is short and sweet. When people are scrolling on social media, the majority of people do not want to read lengthy posts or watch 10-minute videos. What seems to work the best for people who are already pros at using social media to market their information are attention grabbing, short and sweet posts. Linking an inviting photo, or a short 2 minute or less video, will catch the attention of people who are using social media. If short and sweet posts do not allow for enough space or time to provide all the information that you want to get out there, provide a link to a longer article or video with the post.
After practicing creating short and sweet, attention grabbing, social media posts, we also need to take a look at when and where we are posting them. Joining groups on Facebook that already have a following of like-minded individuals is a good start on finding places to post relevant content. Since American-Sustainability is an organization that looks to provide awareness on ways to live more sustainably, joining other sustainability groups on Facebook would provide a great place to post knowledge. This can get murky at times, due to some groups thinking a little differently than how the author does, but this does not mean that there are not groups out there that could provide a little more traffic for the created information. While researching the most active social media times, I found that it is best to post during the week between the times of 11am and 1pm. This is when there are the most people online using social media. By posting when the most people are active, it is more likely that people will see and interact with your posted information. The more interaction that there is on your posts, the more people it will reach. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media applications prioritize posts that are getting the most interactions. This is why we are all seeing similar posts, memes, and articles on all of our pages. As bloggers who want to help the environment, we can use this information to our advantage by posting information regularly, multiple times a week, during the times where the most people are active on social media. 
I understand that these ideas are not going to solve the issue of getting information to the general public over night, but they definitely are great places to start creating more traffic on the blogs, articles, informative videos, and any other form of media that you have worked so hard to create!
