Intro.
My name is Sammie Pugh and I would consider myself a pretty avid social media user. I have done a couple internships where part of my responsibilities were to work with and curate different social media posts. This being said, I have never taken a class on social media, or read any books about it so I am excited for this class to learn more!
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Social media is such a vital part of marketing tactics for many different businesses. It is interesting that every company used social media, but the way in which they use it may be very different. It all seems to depend on their audience, and the aesthetic they are trying to portray.
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In this class, I am excited to learn more about the language of social media, as well as work on the ways in which companies use the combination of media and text. I also hope to create content that I will be able to add to my portfolio.
Mid Reflection.
Overall, I have really enjoyed learning in this course. At the beginning of this class, I didn’t realize how important social media is to daily life of businesses. On the surface, social media seems like such a small task ( it is only a paragraph on Facebook, for 180 character tweet) but in reality there is so much more to social media than that. There is a ton of planning and researching that goes behind every tweet, or post that as a viewer you just aren't able to see. Social media seems to be an every changing topic and sometimes decisions that you make may not have a lot of research behind them. You may be doing something ground breaking, and you may not even know it.
I think that what has been more influential in my learning of this class is listening to the lectures. When we have group discussions you are able to hear the whole classes ideas, rather than when you do group work, you only get the ideas of a couple people. Going off of that, I know that having group work is important, but it may be nice to switch the group work up every once in a while in order to get insight from other students. I really enjoyed the thought of making a Wix site because it makes me feel organized and like all of my information is in one place.
I definitely feel connected to the course material because a lot of the companies that I am applying to jobs for are expecting that you know how to use and analyze social media. The one thing that I wish we learned a little more about it what do social media numbers mean and how can they be used in order to analyze marketing tactics. I know that this course is not a business class, but maybe just a little sections about it cause i think many companies are trying to figure how to use social media to their advantage.
Final Reflection.
This is my semester long portfolio for a project that I did for my Professional Uses of Social Media class that I took my senior year at the University of Pittsburgh. We were tasked with the project of picking a company and creating a strategy to better their use of social media. The company that I decided to choose was Visit Pittsburgh. The reason that I decided to pick Visit Pittsburgh is because I was born and raised here and I am very proud of how our city is evolving. Being a senior I have heard many of my friends say “I have been here for 4 years and I feel like I have never left Oakland”. That makes me sad because although Oakland is great, there are so many cool places to experience in Pittsburgh. On top of that, many of my friends who went away from Pittsburgh for college and are coming back have not gotten to fully experience the changes. I think Visit Pittsburgh has a really cool opportunity to be the go-to place for people not just visiting Pittsburgh, but also people who are rediscovering Pittsburgh in a new light. My goal for this project was to find a way to take Visit Pittsburgh and make it more than just a tourism company. I wanted to implement social media strategies that emphasized cool events, blog posts, and instagram post that will get people excited about exploring Pittsburgh. On this site you will find my process documents and final strategy for this project.
