Blog 1

This week in class we talked about myths in social media. There were seven main ones that we mentioned in class plus a couple of extras that we came up with ourselves. Some of those included that social media is just a fad, just for the young, it's too time consuming, it's free, or that everyone is using it. Well the truth is none of these are completely accurate. Not everyone is on social media, there are still a lot of people that are not on it and therefore the need of the old ways of marketing are still needed to reach out. As for some of the other myths, social media is not going away, it will be there and continue to only grow. Those people who aren't on social media will start to be and social media as a whole will continue to grow. The point of what all we have learned so far is that we need to adjust with technology and time as we are moving towards a more technological world, but at the same time, understand to not ignore the old ways all together and learn to find the medium between both.
In an article I read, they talked about the myth of customers finding the company on social media if they wanted to. This is somewhat true in that people who really want information about a company will go to facebook or something of that sort to find out about the company. I personally used this tactic just a short time ago. I was going to Thailand with the school for a study abroad trip and we were going over there to help out small social enterprises with their business. The first thing I did to find out about the business was go to facebook and check out their page. I was able to find out a lot about they business just from the page and I also noticed how many promotions they had on their page which I thought was very smart. It's good to be on social media as a business but it's gotta be more than just being there. Something that is also talked about in our book is that you want to drive traffic through your business and through the pages. Something that I read was that if a business is good they can drive the traffic to these platforms, and then drive that to their websites and in to their retail stores. So it is something to have a social media page, but there has to be more to it with activity and continuing to bring the consumers in.
So in our first week, we learned some important concepts in marketing through social media. There are the old ways and there are the new ways, some of the old ways are fading and the new ones are emerging, but both are still useful in today's world. It's about adapting and moving along with the changes while still using those building blocks of marketing. Along with that, is that there are a lot of myths about social media, but don't buy into them and understand that social media can and is helpful in marketing.