Month: February 2023

Social Media Influencers is the new digital marketing

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Social media influencers are all around the world today. They are important because they have changed how companies go about digital marketing and marketing in general. These influencers have massive audiences that trust them and leads to them being able to market products off their following.

Influence today is much different than it was centuries ago. Influence would come in most forms of trying to influence religion on someone or political ideas like Marxism, for example. Nowadays, there is an influence in social media, products through basic e-commerce and many other products or brands that have no real influence on the world itself, just the joy or happiness a person gets when they receive the products. 

The title influencer has become increasingly popular since social media has allowed people to make a living off having an influence alone, whether its impressive or not. If Jesus Christ were alive today, he would be considered an influencer. 

Social media influencers are what has taken a storm recently. An app like TikTok, it has changed the direction of social media influencing. For most of the time social media has been around, there have rarely been people with no real skill that have a major influence. When I say no skill, I mean they are not an athlete, politician, musician, actor, etc. I mean, people like Kim Kardashian, who became famous for looks and dating popular people and ultimately caught her break, when a sex tape got released of her. Now Kim Kardashian is one of the biggest influencers on social media and has amassed hundreds of millions of followers. Tiktok has allowed for people with no real skills besides looking good or being funny to have a massive influence allowing them to profit off their audience.

The creator economy boosts upwards of $100 billion through roughly 50 million creators and influencer marketing content delivers 11% higher ROI than traditional forms of marketing. Still, being an influencer is not necessarily an easy job because in order to actually have an influence on what people will buy, you need to be genuine and authentic. Being an asshole can only get you so far online before engagement drops and people forget who you are.  Also, by being active and engaging with your followers you create a sense of an online friendship, therefore, receiving more trust from your audience when marketing for a brand.

In conclusion, influence has evolved throughout history and in today’s world. It has taken a new form through social media and e-commerce. Social media influencers have become a dominant force in the creator economy, and their impact on marketing and advertising has grown significantly. While some influencers may not possess traditional skills like actors or musicians, their ability to capture attention and create online relationships with their audience has allowed them to profit and become major players in the industry. However, to maintain influence and success, authenticity and genuineness are crucial. Overall, being an influencer may seem easy, but it requires hard work, dedication, and a commitment to building trust and with one’s audience.

Learning from my Social Media scavenger hunt

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On February 14, I set out to complete a social media scavenger hunt. With this scavenger hunt, I created tweets with questions revolving around various seton hall topics. I wanted to see how students would answer these questions but I also wanted to use my journalistic capabilities to utilize twitter to spread and gather information regarding how students feel about certain aspects of Seton Hall.

Results

The scavenger hunt was very interesting as I got a lot of different answers from numerous students. From receiving numerous answers, I noticed how my Twitter page started to look more professional and organized.

The tweets I’m about to list were the seven best answers I got.

Seeing what some of my other classmates tweeted

I also engaged with some of my classmates and what they were tweeting. It was enjoyable to watch everyone put on their journalistic shoes and get to work. Here are some of my favorites.

Engaging with others’ posts

I even engaged with some of my classmate’s posts where I thought my answer could be valuable to their process. Below are some of my answers to my classmate’s questions.

Final Thoughts

After conducting the survey, I found that utilizing Twitter as a reporter is more tedious than it looks but is also a fun task. Throughout my surveying, I found that listening to what others have to say and how they feel is always a good experience, especially if something is new to you. Hope you enjoyed my survey findings, and I look forward to utilizing my Twitter more.

Engagement is KEY

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Twitter is a great social media for numerous reasons. It allows for easy engagement due to easy access to commenting, retweeting, or quote tweeting. It is not an app directly for pictures or videos, so engagement is heavy. Commenting on what someone wrote on Twitter vs commenting on a picture on Instagram is two totally different things and makes Twitter more accessible to actually hearing people’s thoughts rather than what they are going to compliment about a photo.

Twitter for journalists is an amazing thing as it works as a portfolio for them, and is super easy to share articles through Twitter. Any type of topic written by a journalist invites that specific group to engage with their Twitter posts, whether they are posting their article or just talking about a specific topic. For instance sports beat writers invite fans to ask specific questions during the season so the journalist can provide insight. 

Some practices for journalists on Twitter involve responding to comments, sharing other colleagues’ work, sharing parts of personal life, and sharing your own stories but also posting other tweets that don’t just involve links. By doing this, it allows the journalist to grow followers in a way where they can also be considered fans of your writing and insight.

Whether its Twitter or other social media platforms, journalists cannot ignore other social media platforms because that is missing out on important engagement. All different social media sites offer different demographics, especially Facebook, which is not primarily used by people older than 25 and not part of GEN Z. Journalists can’t ignore certain apps because it takes away from the main part of why they are writing which is the number of clicks and engagement their stories can receive.

Engagement is key in a world full of followers, which is why it is the most important thing in social media. Engagement will always beat out followers because, by having constant engagements, social media algorithms push your content to the top of people’s pages where it can be seen. Any amount of followers can’t do the same thing unless their engagement is high as well. I referenced this in my last blog, but let’s say 1 account on Twitter has 5000 followers with a ton of engagement, and another account has 500k followers with little to no engagement. Even though one account may seem like they make a good amount of money because they have followers, in reality, the account with 5000 followers and more engagement would be crushing the other account in terms of getting paid even with 495k fewer followers. Engagement is KEY.

SEO and SEM, what is it, and why is it so important.

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Optimizing your online copy is a massive deal for digital marketing and keeping a brand afloat, especially when it’s making most of its money through online purchases, which many brands do nowadays. SEM and SEO are why brands can market online and allow simple user searches to direct them to their websites.

Now, what are these two terms, SEM and SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization and does just as it sounds. It optimizes your search in google. SEO is accessible for anybody trying to optimize a search that would redirect them to a website. It can take longer to build up and gain traction by not paying, but it would likely be there for the long run if that success were ever to come. SEO also allows for my trust because some users don’t feel that level of trust when seeing an AD sign above a website.

SEM stands for search engine marketing, which is similar to SEO but has slight differences in the long run. SEM is paid for advertising but does offer way faster results than unpaid optimization like SEO. The quick results come from Ads being the top section of google searches. Also, the data for paid marketing is far more advanced than just free optimization, which allows for websites using SEM to make data-driven decisions, while that can be harder for someone using SEO. Finally, SEM allows for further testing within your marketing, letting you test different options for different searches. An example brought to my attention was, “when someone searches for “cool t-shirts” you can test sending them to a page with many options for t-shirts or send them to a page with just your three best-selling t-shirts.”

Ultimately, SEM and SEO are great ways to optimize your search for whatever you want to market and optimize. It allows websites to push products fiercely through paid advertisements or let a company gain traction through different searches for free. It’s a great way to capitalize off targeted keyword searches.

Blogs had the biggest glow-up in the past 30 years

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Blogging has evolved significantly over the past thirty years, and it’s crazy to think that it has been in existence for that long. Initially starting out as just an online diary, it has transformed into a platform where individuals can express their passions.

Blogging appeals to a wide range of people as there is probably a blog written on every possible topic in the world, waiting to be discovered by the reader. Popular subjects such as fashion, sports, parenting, etc. have the capability of attracting substantial attention based on the writer’s perspective and the reader’s connection to it.

The popularity of blogging partly can be attributed to human nature. People always seek to connect with others or to compare themselves, as it enables them to gather information about their desired goals and receive valuable feedback on their progress. Alternatively, readers may find a writer whose style resonates with them. For example, I cannot read sports writers who are overly optimistic, as I, as a fan, tend to be pessimistic, so I follow writers who share my way of thinking.

All this ties into engagement and how it is crucial in the world of social media and blogs, even more so than having a large number of followers. A drop in engagement is a telltale sign of a decline in popularity, even for celebrities with a massive following. Engagement creates a pathway for the audience to voice their opinions, and it also provides valuable feedback for the creator to enhance their product. In conclusion, engagement is the king of social media as it keeps people coming back and enables them to be heard. People desire to have their thoughts acknowledged, which engagement achieves by increasing numbers through comments, likes, shares, reposts, etc.