Week 2: Social Media Platforms

A businesses first goal when creating a social media account to market themselves is to connect best via the most optimal platform. How do they know which platform is best? Based off of some target audience research, businesses can estimate which one will allow them to have a wider reach within their audience. The more you can connect with the audience and provide strong yet interesting content will bring success. Wasting valuable time in creating and managing marketing on social media platforms that has little impact is a huge disadvantage.

Facebook and LinkedIn are the more professional options of the platforms and also hold millions of users. Other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are also great alternatives that are more focused on the content production. The three platforms listed above are very concentrated with video advertising making those a possible outlet for marketing. It is important to correlate what type of content you are producing with what the platform is traditionally used for. For example, posting channel updates on YouTube is most likely not going to grab many users attention compared to a produced video. Facebook and LinkedIn use similar strategies but have small differences. Overall, it is necessary to make a marketing plan and record some research on the most optimal ways to connect to your audience.

Week 1: Intro to Social Media Marketing

During the next few months I will be discussing several topics regarding social media marketing. Today, I will be giving a brief overview or introduction. Social media marketing is the strategy of using social media platforms such as Facebook to connect with your audience. Why do this? Here's why:

• Increase traffic
• Boost Sales
• Brand Awareness
• Stronger Connection to audience

There are also tools that businesses can utilize to monitor success or the general impact of using social media marketing. Traditionally, social media in the business world used to be used for promoting content and running advertisements but with technology being so prominent this has changed slightly. Now, social media has many functions. One being a way of monitoring employee behavior. Interestingly, this is a topic that is controversial since some people believe that it is an invasion of privacy. Nonetheless, the use of social media has become a major force in digital marketing and will continue to be for some time!