Of all of my endeavors in social media, our stuff with Disney Parks is the one I am most satisfied with. This year has been great, and I have added a lot of new followers, many of which I have to say comes from those folks who do #FollowFriday on Twitter! I have been able to keep a new, reasonably fresh pic up every day, even during the month I was laid up healing from knee replacement.

This year, I plan to do more of the same, posting one or more pictures every day of the year, keeping up new pictures from my upcoming 2-4 trips to Disney World (and possibly Disneyland, that is still up for discussion after our wonderful trip last year)!

Still, I don’t think everything is perfect, and there are a few areas where I feel I need to change/improve.

• Blogging consistently – We have been terrible about putting out blogs. Some of that is that I don’t post them very quickly, like the fact that I have a post that my wife wrote a few weeks ago that I need to edit. This next year I want to make sure we post at least one blog a month, some with tips about the parks, and maybe a blog or two about my process and tools (like the latest iPhone camera).
• Scheduling less – In the upcoming days, my goal is going to be posting tweets live, to interact more with followers (based on advice from @ivysaysrawr). I won’t abandon scheduling altogether, as posting daily pictures will not happen if I have to stop and do this daily. All this means is that I am going to schedule tweets later in the day, and try to come back and post live if possible.
• Paying more attention to everything Disney! – I missed an opportunity to go to the Midnight Magic party at Animal Kingdom on our next trip because I didn’t see that it was open for registration. I had weeks I could have signed up, but I missed it, only realizing it because I read someone else’s tweet…two weeks later. I missed the one at California Adventure last year the same way.
• Changing Friday tweets – Friday’s from now on will be just #FollowFriday tweets (unless we are doing a countdown, perhaps, or if we are not posting a #FollowFriday post as I have not done during the Christmas month). No matter if I am mentioned or not, there is so much glorious noise on Fridays that the normal tweet on that day rarely sees attention. It is already so hard to figure out what to post, having an easy day on Friday will actually be kind of nice, even though picking out fireworks/explosion pictures is enough work on its own!)
• Expand my Follow Friday list I know there are many great people out there to follow and recommend, and I like to really believe in an account before I suggest to others. I have been so busy this year that I haven’t taken enough time to consciously look for accounts to follow.
• Listen to more podcasts – One of the reasons I have stuck with Twitter for almost 12 years is because of the community and the reasonable time involvement. I can be sitting in a doctor’s appointment, or a boring meeting, etc and read and reply to tweets in just 5 minutes. I work at home, so without a commute podcasts were never something I had time for. When I was recovering, I had a lot of extra time on my hands and really started to like the Dillos, the Monorail family, and the Disney DNA podcasts. Now that I am back to working 12+ hours a day, I haven’t listened as much.

Stretch goal:

• Start a podcast, or at least guest on one – Over the years, I have been on several podcasts for technical topics. That is fun, but not Disney fun. I have contemplated starting a podcast for years, and have ideas, but the time commitment has been a blocker. To be honest, I have other side work that pays me, which leads to more Disney trips which leads to more pictures that have to take precedence.

All in all, I don’t want to change much. I am totally looking forward to meeting a solid number of my #disTwitter colleagues (and dare I say, friends) in early January for Jocelyn @disneygratitud1‘s meetup in late January!

I have met only a few people from my theme park twitter accounts over the years, and I hope it becomes more like my @drsql account. Through that account, I interact with people that I actually get to see occasionaly around the country at conferences and meetups. Of course it will be a lot more fun to meetup with people at Disney World because, you know… you are at Disney World.