Reading Reflection # 2

The Art of Social Media- Guy Kawasaki, Peg Fitzpatrick

This book offers 123 tips for using social media as a powerful tool. It’s written as a list and each tip is short and to the point. It starts with creating accounts and the best methods to set them up and walks you methodically how to use each account to your advantage. It’s a quick read, but if you follow step by step you really will see a difference in your reaching engagement. It’s laid out in a simple manner, so anyone can do it. The overall goal is to increase your engagement and reach, but also to help you understand your audience better. Ultimately it’s a no nonsense guide to kick starting or vastly improving your social media strategy. It’s efficient, easy to do and you will see results immediately.

We recently learned about social capital and in this day and age, a large part of social capital is social media. Are networks are online and virtual. Our networks have expanded globally; we are linked with people across the world through similar goals, values and passions. Social media has helped us unite with people over common goals without physical distance being a limitation. Social media is the modern form of PR and marking. Television and print ads are old school. They are expensive and do not allow the majority of people to meet the need of their customer at the exact moment they need it. Social media gives us instant and constant access. I put the pointers from this book into practice and saw our reach expand. I have also seen our engagement increase.

The exercise I would do is to have people create a social media page for their business. This could be done as a description of the details each person would put into creating the page if they were not ready to create the actual page. If they are planning on creating an actual product or business, then they could create the page. They would need to research one segment of their target audience and create a page to appeal to these people. Is is snap chat? Facebook? Instagram? Difference demographics are more active on different formats and researching your segment will help you find this. If they are not ready to create a real page, then they would be asked to fill out form with all the components they would put. This would include profile image, description..etc. They would also be asked to explain why they selected this particular social platform and why they think it’s the best space to reach a specific segment.

There were actually a lot of tips I did not expect or even think of. Some stuff is really obvious. One thing that really surprised me was a quote they used to describe optimizing each platform. “The five Ps of social media: Google+ is for passions; Facebook is for people; LinkedIn is for pimping; Pinterest is for pictures; Twitter is for perceptions." It made me think differently about what I post on each platform or how to phrase things differently for the same image. 1 post doesn’t necessarily work, as is, for all platforms. I also figured the list style of the book might be more quantity than quality, but actually the quality of about 90 % of the tips was really high. I’ve read longer and more in depth social media strategy books and believe I actually leaned a lot more from this style.

Social media really is an art and I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t have a lot of time, but who wants to understand and get better at social media. It’s part of the world we live in, so might as well rock it and get the most out of it!