21A Reading Reflection Part 2

1) What was the general theme or argument of the book?

I read the book The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users. Overall, the book is sharing different tips and tricks for maximizing views on your profile such as staying consistent across all platforms and posting content frequently enough to keep your audience interested. The biggest overarching goal that the book discusses is how to get people to reshare your posts as this gets the most attention to your post and profile. Resharing is essentially the online version of word of mouth advertising and everyone knows word of mouth is the most effective advertising so getting reshares should be everyones goal online. One of the most effective recommended ways to do this was to center posts around popular holidays that generate a certain level of buzz already.

2) How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

A large part of entrepreneurship is not only learning how to present ourselves and our human capital to the best extent, but also to market our product and company to the right market in the best and most effective way. Without proper marketing, the entrepreneurial venture will not be a success. People need to know the solution to their need is out there, which is where an effective social media presence comes into play.

This book discusses how to cleanly and appropriately present oneself online, which helps to establish trust and credibility to our own human capital that we are brining to our ventures. However, the book also describes the most effective ways to get posts to spread, which is how to properly promote the products and business ideas we are learning to develop in ENT3003.

An idea is only as good as the marketing done for the idea. And in the 21st century, social media marketing is the most widespread and cost effective method of marketing so it is crucial to know and understand how to most effectively use it to our advantage.

3) If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

A great exercise based on this book would be to establish a social media profile on a professional network such as LinkedIn or Facebook and to use the principles described in the book to see how effective the profile becomes at either creating business and buzz for the product or connections for the entrepreneur. You would be able to track analytics on the profile over a week and report on what you found, the most effective profile that garnered the most hits could receive a bonus point. 

It would be up to the student to read and understand which types of profiles get the most traction and which types of posts they should be making to get attention to their profile, which are all topics discussed at length in the book.

4) What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations?

I had no idea you could switch your view to anonymous and use an incognito mode on Google Chrome in order to view your completed social media profiles in a way that others may such as future employers. This is especially helpful on websites such as YouTube and Facebook that can dramatically change for first time viewers.

Something that differed from my expectations was that they recommended pushing out content more than twice in one week. From what I have experienced, not only do users typically not enjoy nor react to content that frequently produced as heavily but they also unfollow the profile. This may be a result of the markets I had been targeting that may have just considered frequent posts to be spam-like or, as the book pointed out as a warning of something to avoid, creating that many posts often leads to a lesser quality in content due to the want to have quantity over quality. However, the frequency with which one should post would most likely differ for each profile and each generation.