Week #17 Last Post-Wrapping it all up

Social media is simply a collection of free online tools and platforms that people could use to connect with each other. For past few years social media have seen tremendous changes. With already existing platforms such as LunarStrom, Friendster, Last FM, MySpace and LinkedIn, all of which started from 1990 to early 2000. Sometime after 2000, we see Facebook arise and ever since social media has seen many forms such as Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Foursquare to name a few. Now days these platforms are used to leverage business opportunities. These are used as marketing tools by businesses along with traditional advertising.

Previously I caught up with the trend of maintaining Facebook to interact with friends, other than that I really did not know anything about social media platforms and their enormous uses. This class really helped me realize potential that social media has on every aspect of daily life, be it for promoting business, finding reviews and connecting with friends and family or even just keeping yourself busy by browsing interesting topics.

I can say I’ve better understanding of various social media than ever before. As far as using them for business purpose it takes time to learn nuances of reaching right audiences to have a successful business and this is work in progress. In this class we’ve learned to use -mail marketing, advertising on Facebook, blogs to create valuable content to promote business, using metrics to measure audiences is a very valuable experience which I can implement in my business if I were to have one.

While I’m not a big online shopper for many reasons. I can however, say that, should there be a deal or promotion that is offered by business on social media platform, one that is just not worth missing I might investigate that business. I find that many company’s or businesses these days are offering variety of promotions of services and product to bring brand awareness and loyalty. They are using variety of strategies to boost their sales or even introduce new products through social media platforms. Though these promotions are offered in short time period, they are proving to be good tactics for bringing revenue to a company’s or spreading brand awareness.

I want to conclude that this class has been a very valuable resource for me into my future endeavors for any business I would start. Social media is not about connecting with just friends or family any more. It is a process of learning to listen, bring out creativity, build a strategy to boost a business. As technology progress, we should be excited, there will be new platforms and new ways to manage personal lives as well as maintain business through social media. Hope to use them all.