Jarrett Kinson
Known as Jazz, I am the founder of Tamworth Informed, I truly have Tamworth in my blood and really want this fantastic town to blossom. I want Tamworth to be somewhere we can be proud to live and happy to bring our children up in, this is why Tamworth Informed was formed.
In May 2013 I began a local Facebook ‘micro news’ site. The idea of this page was to build an audience through the use of social media and to then use this audience base to promote local businesses and charity events to, it was just to help promote the fantastic things about this town.
I am not a journalist and have never had any formal media or marketing training, I just go with what I believe people want to see and seem to have got it right in most cases!
Originally, we just posted the odd bit of local news and promoted discussion about the town to build the audience base. The audience grew much quicker than I could ever have expected and today has around 9,000 Facebook ‘likes’ with a regular post reach of over 40,000 people a week, making it the most interacted with news page in Tamworth.
Due to the growth I was approached by a local web design company, Tier One Design who offered to create and jointly run a website for Tamworth Informed. This was launched at the beginning of the 2014 and more recently mobile applications have been launched on iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms.
Tamworth Informed is now recognised locally as a credible news source and is in regular receipt of press releases from local government, the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner and PR agencies on behalf of local businesses.
The page continues to support local businesses and bring ‘the news that matters to you’.
Due to family and work commitments I have unfortunately had to take a back seat where Tamworth Informed is concerned but the page is still run by a Tammie, for Tammies.
John Bryan
As the owner of Tier One Design, I was the guy who approached Jazz at the back end of 2013 and offer to build him a website for Tamworth Informed. I really enjoy supporting local businesses and ventures.
Living in Tamworth, I liked to keep up to date with that was going on in the Town and began to look more and more at the Facebo0k page after finding other local news sites either didn’t give me the information I needed, was unreliable or filled my screen with pop up adverts!
I was really passionate to help build Tamworth Informed and it went from my company sorting the website to us getting really involved. With my employees being Tammies to we all got behind Tamworth Informed. We did not want to just ‘deliver’ a site to Jazz and that be our only involvement, we wanted to remain involved and co-run it.
Today we have seen the website grow in popularity and I am so pleased to have made contact with Jazz in the early days. We have become more and more involved in recent months as Jazz has begun his family. It keeps us very busy but we love it, we are so happy to help promote Tamworth.
