It is no secret that the way companies and corporations are marketing and selling products is changing drastically—mostly due to the rise of social media. Instead of learning only traditional marketing techniques, we are learning more about how to have a presence on social media and why it is important. New types of jobs are being created specifically to run and develop a company’s social media, and figure out exactly what their consumers are asking for.
The rise and use of social media, for our generation especially, cannot be ignored. According to a study done by Infusion Soft, nearly 90 percent of young adults use social media, and a third of millennials say that it is one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses. Whether it is positive, negative, trustworthy or plain false, it is where we get most of our information. If this is the direction public relations and marketing are going in, there is no question as to why it is so important, especially for those of us currently in or finishing college. A company’s persona on the web ultimately decides its fate today, and it is important to know the ins and outs of the analytics behind it. Something that I have enjoyed learning about in PRSSA and my general college classes is why things like click-through rates and views matter, and how to become an expert in these things. What may seem like a minuscule detail could be paramount to a company’s image and how its audience responds to it.
The biggest take-away for me with social media in mind is understanding that in today’s world, everything has a brand, right down to our individual selves. Whether we are updating and connecting on LinkedIn or posting a new picture to Instagram, we are creating an image and representation of who we are. Once we are good at figuring out how to do that for ourselves, then what’s stopping us from doing the same thing for a major company or product? Social media can no longer be ignored as a major tool for the corporate world and as its usage only grows larger, it will be interesting to see which companies can use it to their advantage, and where others might fall short in understanding how to do so.
Olivia Wise is a freshman Journalism-Strategic Communication major. Follow her on Twitter @LiviWise!