This past week, my ADPR 4300 Emerging Social Media class had the pleasure of listening to two experts in social media.
The first speaker, Augie Ray (@Augieray) talked about the use of social media in the industry and how each brand should maintain high engagement with their audience. If the brand does not maintain engagement, then “they are just talking to themselves”. With the abundance of social media channels to use, it can be difficult to figure out what is a trend and what accounts are here to stay. Fortunately, Augie came up with rule of thumb that everyone should abide by for new social media accounts: “would my mom be able to use it?”
I asked myself this question about my new obsession and the site that takes up a majority of my free time: Pinterest. For those of you who do not know, Pinterest is an online bulletin board that allows you to “pin” things online, just as you would pin them on a real life bulletin board, but instead, Pinterest saves all of your pins on your account so you can access them easily. Pinterest is a simple way to compile all of the great things you find online. As you start pinning, create boards that categorize your pins making them easier for you to find later. Usually, I use Pinterest for leisure purposes like where I want to travel and recipes ideas. Because I do not take it so seriously, I do not understand why companies are jumping on this bandwagon or what the benefits are.
It wasn’t until our second speaker, Tim Cigleske, (@TeecycleTim) came to our class to further discuss how to use social media that I realized the benefits. Tim manages all of Marquette’s social media channels and does an excellent job to maintain high engagement with the Marquette and Milwaukee community. On the day he came in, he announced that Marquette just launched its own Pinterest page. He started to explain the benefits of this site. Because Pinterest is a massive social network, the domain authority is excellent. The more items people post on their boards that link to a brand’s website, the more the site will benefit not only from traffic, but also allows the brand to interact and promote its content. Therefore, it is a virtual catalogue that is there for sharing. Pinterest is a rapidly growing field and gains mass amounts traffic daily. In fact, in a years time, the website has gained more than 3 millions users.
Based on this information, I believe that companies would be foolish not to be involved with this site. However, both of the speakers said that each brand needs to figure out how to best use the different social media accounts and what works for one brand may not work for another. By having high levels of engagement with its users, brands can have a dominant social media presence.
The Social Networks 