social media

· Social Media Marketing 
This week’s assignment will build on your work last week, and will be more social media focused. Now that you know more about your brand’s key messaging and the audiences your brand depends on, we’ll look more closely at how brands communicate in the social media space. 
Facebook 
Facebook is – by far – the largest and most widely used social network in existence today. As of June 30, 2015, Facebook had 1.49 billion monthly active users, with 968 million users logging in at least once per day.

·

· On Facebook, individuals have “profiles” and brands/organizations have “pages.” There are some subtle differences between profiles and pages :

· ●  You add profiles as “friends”; you “like” pages 


· ●  Profiles can have up to 5,000 friends; pages can have unlimited likes 


· ●  Profiles can be made private, so only specific friends can see them. Pages are 
public. 


· ●  Profiles don’t offer advertising options. Pages can be boosted through Facebook 
advertising. 


· ●  Profiles don’t offer stats and demographics on who views them; pages do. 
Facebook offers brands some hard-to-beat advertising tools, which allow for targeting advertisements using almost any data a user puts into Facebook. For example, it’s easy for a brand to target all 22-year-old men in the City of Detroit who like Corvettes with a Facebook ad for a General Motors event. 
Twitter 
Twitter is one of the most immediate social networks. The service consists of 140 character text message-like updates that lend themselves to wide-ranging discussions, real-time event reporting and more. 
While Twitter is not as widely used as Facebook, it’s still critical for most organizations to have some sort of a Twitter presence. Twitter is one of the best social networks in terms of reaching members of the news media. From print to TV, journalists often turn to Twitter for on-the-spot reactions and color commentary that can be used to enhance their stories. 
Twitter also offers brands the ability to advertise their tweets and accounts. A brand can promote a tweet to users interested in a certain topic, or can promote its own account to people searching for a topic or tweeting about it. 
YouTube 
Every minute, more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube – which is the platform for online video. 
As broadband internet availability has increased, so has the popularity of online video. Most brands now use YouTube to not only share their commercials, but also to share content produced exclusively for the Internet. Freed from the constraints of 30 second spots on television, online video allows for brands to target niche audiences and interests. 


Best Practices

There are some best practices for marketers common to all social media platforms that you should keep in mind:

· ●  Add value for your audience: Your posts should add some value to your followers’ lives. Don’t just post promotional content or things that you don’t think people would be interested in. Think: “If I didn’t work at this brand/company, would this be of interest to me?” Remember: everything you post on social media competes with personal, non-brand content for attention – so it needs to stand out. 


· ●  Keep in mind the restrictions of each platform: Each platform has specific native features that you should keep in mind. For instance, don’t just post a 30 minute TV show to YouTube, since users typically prefer shorter clips. Don’t post a blog post-length update to Facebook. Take advantage of each social media network’s strengths. 


· ●  Don’t shout at your audience: S ocial media is – social. It’s not just a one-way megaphone to shout at your audience. Think about two-way communication you can have with your audience; ideally, social media leads to conversations. 


· ●  Be professional : By this, we don’t mean “be boring” – we mean, use proper spelling and grammar. Make sure any images you post are well-designed and look great. 
Required Reading 
Please read through these resources on social media platforms before completing your assignment: 


· ●  Pew Research Center: Social Media Update 2014 (this is really good information) 


· ●  Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015 (also from Pew) 


· ●  SocialTimes: STUDY: Big Retailers’ Strategies for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram 


· ●  The 4 Essentials to Building Your Brand on Social Media 


· ●  New Data: What Types of Content Perform Best on Social Media? 


· ●  How Oreo owns social media through Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Pinterest 


· ●  How the most successful brands dominate Instagram, and you can too 
Assignment 
Use the same brand from your last assignment, and then write a 500+ word professional audit (an overview in narrative form, written for a client – so make sure it is clear and well-written) that focuses on how your brand uses social media. Make sure to cover: 


· ●  What social media platforms does your brand use? (include links) 


· ●  How does your brand use social media on each platform? (Check out the “4 
Essentials To Building Your Brand on Social Media” to see how one study 
examined 


· ●  Facebook posting strategies for a few big retailers as an example for this) 


· ●  What’s most interesting to you about how your brand uses social media? 


· ●  What audiences did you identify as important to your brand in Week 1? How is 
your brand using social media to reach those audiences? Is it doing a good job? 
Why or why not? 


· ●  What kinds of conversations do you see on your brand’s social media accounts? 
Does your brand respond to others? 


· ●  What content is used most effectively on your brand’s social media channels? 
Please make sure to cite and thoughtfully analyze content from this week’s readings in your response. 
Requirements 


· ●  Include two external links 


· ●  Include one photo or video 


· ●  Assignment title must be catchy and interesting ( see this report for a good 
example 
https://www.psychotactics.com/general/why-do-some-headlines-fail-and-how-to-c reate-headlines-that-work/) 
Expectations 


· ●  Must be client ready, nicely formatted and formal in language. 


· ●  All sections must include detail about what you found and what you’d recommend 
be done to improve. 


· ●  Your recommendations must be justified based on your own research or 
information provided as part of this lesson or class.