Top Ten Revelations of Social Media

1. Social media plays a big part in everyone's lives.But it can also affect businesses as well. I learned this while creating my SHU Social Media 4 Social Change project called Paws for A Cause. Businesses are affected by this because of how it helps connect companies and consumers everywhere. "Social Media is also a medium. Like print, broadcast, radio, it is a method of communication. unlike print, broadcast, and radio, however, it can be shared with many people in a scalable way."(pg. 2).
2. Another thing that I learned is that there is not really a thing called privacy anymore. On social media websites, people can see everything that you post on the internet. So nowadays, you have to be extremely careful not to post anything that you don't want other people to know about because you can't take it back afterward. Privacy simply does not exist in the digital world. Once you turn on your computer, your privacy is at risk. Be smart. Be transparent Only put out there what you want people to see, and think about longer-term ramifications of the content you develop"(pg.55).
   
   
3. As I have seen throughout the SHU Social Media 4 Social Change project, Blogs can be used for many different reasons such as being used for personal blogs and marketing blogs. Also, a blog can be a primary tool and can help keep in contact with customers and seeing what needs to be modified with products or the websites. “Blogging can be one of the most important ways for marketers to communicate in today’s online world. Marketers as individuals can absolutely use blogging as a way to demonstrate thought leadership, expertise, and transparency around the work they do” (pg.212).
4. Another thing that we have incorporated into our social media projects are something called hashtags. We see these all the times on social media websites like twitter and Facebook. The user can make their own hashtags (or keywords) to find, all posts that have the same hashtag in them. This can be useful especially when you have the shift through hundreds of posts on blog, twitter or other social media sites, “Hashtags reflect the notion of keywords for search-engine optimization (SEO) in that they enable you to ensure that content on a Web site or another online portal is featured within Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines” (pg187).
5. In the book, it states, “It’s never too late to join social media” (pg.244). I can definitely understand this quote. I didn’t start using twitter a few weeks before we started the semester. But it’s important to join social media websites since nowadays all the most recent news is being posted online. We see on all the news stations that they now use live twitter tweets to show the most recent news in local areas. Social media is a great way to connect to the consumers in a fast and efficient way.
6. For each of our social media projects, we also had to sort of advertise our projects on our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages. By advertising our projects on social media, we brought more awareness to our blogs since we are linking our blogs to our social media websites making it easier for consumers to find our blogs. “Social media marketing is all about increasing brand awareness but also about moving from awareness to engagement to, ultimately, advocacy.” (pg.225).