Cattle - Raising Small Animals - page 494

could provide updates on your day-to-day activities; for example, one day you could let
people know you are calving, and another day you could let people know you have new
products available for sale. You also could use a blog as a feature on your own website.
“I think people should start out blogging,” Kjarval said. “It is a great way to build confidence
and understand what your narrative is. I think it is important to tell a story.”
TWITTER
Twitter ( www.twitter.com ) is a free site that lets users broadcast text messages called
“tweets” that are 140 characters or fewer. Twitter might be a good choice for farmers who
are not comfortable with their writing skills or who do not have the time to write whole blogs.
You can set up your Twitter account so you can broadcast tweets from your phone; this
would enable you to let people know when, for example, you were out in the field and about
to move your cows to a fresh pasture. Users can decide if they want everyone to be able to
see their tweets or if they only want certain users to view their tweets. Users who sign up for
your tweets are called followers. Twitter also allows you to share links to websites, news
stories, photos, and videos. The addresses to these sites, called URLs, are often longer than
140 characters, but you can convert them to a smaller number of characters at the site ht-
tp://tiny.cc .
FACEBOOK
Users of this free site ( www.facebook.com ) create their own profile pages that can highlight
their personal information. Once you have a profile, you can become “friends” with other
users and share information with each other by broadcasting updates to a news feed. This
news feed is a list of all your friends' updates, usually shown with the newest updates first. In
their news feed, users only see information posted by their friends. Farmers can use Face-
book by starting pages devoted to their farms and potential customers can link up to them by
either becoming a friend or becoming a fan. One way you could use Facebook is to update
your status to let people know, for example, when you have fresh beef for sale.
“It's like subliminal messaging in a way,” Kjarval said. “It is kind of like having an advertise-
ment in people's lives.”
YOUTUBE
YouTube is a site that lets you upload and view videos. It is now inexpensive to film videos
— handheld Flip video cameras cost less than $150. And the audience is huge — millions of
people watch videos on this site. To upload content, you must register with the site. YouTube
videos must be less than ten minutes, and the file size must be no more than 2 gigabytes.
FLICKR ®
Flickr is a site that lets people upload images and videos so they can be shared with other
people. These images can be viewed on albums on the Flickr site or posted on other Web