Week 17; Wrapping it up

This semester has been a great learning experience.  I always knew that social media platforms are used to grow business, to advertise and to engage customers and audiences, but this class gave me a much better understanding of how this is done.  Data analysis is very important because without it you wouldn’t know if what you are doing is accomplishing the goal. You can try different strategies and judge based on the analytics decide what works best.  

I started out the semester not knowing anything about using facebook for business.  I enjoyed going through the process of creating a business page, and realizing it isn’t that difficult!  I liked exploring the different functions that facebook offers for scheduling posts. The scheduling feature makes posting on a schedule very convenient by allowing you to create several posts at one time and schedule automatic publish times.  

My husband’s baseball card business is best suited for Instagram and Facebook.  The fact that so much of the allure of collecting cards centers around the art of the card makes visual platforms the best option.  Instagram has been a great means to display some of the best cards of our collection. Facebook would be a good option to use if we wanted to grow the business, as Facebook is a great tool for reaching your target audience.  If you put in the effort to grow your facebook presence, you will most definitely see returns.

I do have a better understanding of what it takes to grow a business utilizing social media.  My opinion of social media has changed slightly in that I didn’t quite realize the extent to which social media is used for business.  Learning the call to action and creating a sense of urgency tactics somewhat soured me. I always knew that businesses do that, but for some reason knowing that these are actual tactics that are taught and used to try to get consumers to purchase things bothers me a little bit.  Its almost like I just got validation that retailers are actually trying to suck me in. It makes me second guess every urge I have to purchase something! Do I actually want to buy that item or was the idea planted?

In conclusion, social media is a very valuable tool that can be used in numerous ways to grow a business, engage customers, network, identify and target specific audiences, as well as exercise creativity in branding your business.  I enrolled in this course to learn social media advertising techniques as they relate to business. While I do think that much of this course was geared toward small business and entrepreneurs, the analytics and concepts remain the same and can translate to big business and the corporate world as well.   

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