Social Media Marketing 2020: What I Will Take Away?

To say that this has been a crazy year would be an understatement. Between Covid-19 spreading like wildfire throughout the world and the resulting lockdowns, it felt as though everyone’s life was put on pause during this year. While in many cases we did have to hit the pause button on certain social aspects in our lives, thankfully we were still able to continue our education NWTC due to online classes being widely available. The quality of the education may have suffered at times due to the new normal that we had to adjust ourselves to, but ultimately I would say that I have gotten a lot out of this Social Media Marketing class and will continue to use a lot of what I have learned from this course as I begin to pursue a career in marketing. 

When the class started it was really nice to be getting back into the swing of things with some refresher stuff off of Stuknet like SWOTS and personas. It also went over aspects of social media that I had never really thought about before, such as content marketing and what that is. Content marketing is basically a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain an audience contentmarketinginstitute . According to our textbook, Social Media Marketing, content marketing is

“…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience”

After taking this class and starting to use editing programs like photoshop, I think that I have discovered that I really like creating content and will probably pursue something involving making content for social media sites. I have actually started doing a few projects for some of the local bars in the area around Green Bay hoping to get some experience in that field so that when I graduate from NWTC I already have a little bit of experience that will help push me higher on a list than other possible candidates for a job opening. I have even started to explore other forms of content creation like Canva to make things like posters or infographics.

Another thing that I know that I will take away from this class is how to make a marketing strategy report like we did for our final project. It was such a big and complicated project, I’m very glad that we were able to work with someone else on it to help bounce ideas off of one another. It was a very confusing project for me to work on too because I haven’t seen anything like this other than the example that we were given to base our project on. There are so many different parts that are involved in making a report, I can see why it is such an important piece when it comes to marketing. 

A question that I have when it comes to social media marketing is, what kind of content works best in general and for what situation does each content type work best for? Since I really want to start making content for businesses, I need to learn what kinds of content work best and when they work best to really maximize the effect that I am going for when I’m making that content. 

Overall 2020 has been a hell of a year, and Social Media Marketing was a great way to end that year. I plan to take all of the skills and things that I have learned throughout this class, in particular I really want to use all that I have learned through content marketing. With what I learned from content marketing, I will apply my developing photoshop and other photo editing skills as I design and create new and unique images for businesses to use as they see fit. One question that I ask my fellow Social Media students is, what aspect of this class did you find was the most difficult? For me it was definitely the strategy report we had to make because it just involved so many different parts and it was such a new thing that I had never really had to do before, so I’m curious as to what everyone else thought about that project in particular. Overall, the class was very enjoyable in my opinion and it let me think outside of the box in ways that I think will be very beneficial to me in whatever future career I find myself in.