Morgan James gained valuable social media skills when she was a student in my Spring 2019 Social Media Marketing class at Belmont University. You can read her testimonial about the class here. Below is information from Morgan’s Final Report that outlines her own SWOT analysis about her internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as her external opportunities and threats. Morgan did a great job on her campaign and recalls some of her own practicum experience below.
“This class taught me very applicable skills to the real world that I believe will transfer and build our skill set for our job search. I think that Dr. Huggins was very knowledgeable on the topic of social media and is even now still working and expanding this knowledge to continually put new ideas into The Social Media Magnet. This is encouraging because you feel like you are learning the most current information about social media. This also makes for a great portfolio you can submit to prospective companies.
I wanted to take this course to gain a better understanding of what exactly social media marketing entailed and what it requires of someone. Especially in this day and age where it is so prominent I see the importance and wanted to invest time in this area of marketing because I believe these are marketable and applicable career skills. The programs associated with these tactics are also useful to know how to navigate and can give you a leg up in the employers eyes if you know how to work these programs.
Some goals I had for the course were to create a loyal following and have consistent click through rates. This shows that you are producing dependable and valuable content. It puts a purpose behind what you are writing and why you create a campaign like this. Since this was my first time doing something like this I honestly didn’t know how much work or time this would take so I set it for 100 subscribers because I wanted to try and set reachable goals. I was thrilled to have reached this and passed it. Lastly, I wanted to pour more into this project in order to gain the experience of the class and actually feel like I learned something I could use in the future. As I poured into it, I think several revelations occurred through the process relating to my strengths and weaknesses, as well as some additional opportunities and threats.
Strengths: The content I produced throughout my campaign was engaging and based on story telling which is always an important factor when trying to engage the reader. This consisted of featuring a new person every week to highlight what they are doing in the world and how they are spreading kindness with their own endeavors.
Weaknesses: My social media platforms lacked a strict aesthetic which could have taken away from the sites visual interest and subconscious draw to the site. It was hard since my site was based around specific stories and an abstract concept to drive traffic back to the site or always tie in the website at the end to gain more followers. I think for others in our class if they were working with specific products or music etc. this was easier to post about something when necessary rather than being more locked into a schedule. I also didn’t put out enough content in the very beginning of the campaign and this set me back and caused me to pick up the slack at the end of the campaign.
Opportunities: The biggest opportunity I found was that I could partner with other organizations and companies to highlight what they were doing as well as what KSWY was doing. This allowed for more traffic to be driven to my site by others posting about my website when I featured them in a blog post.
Threats: My content of choice wasn’t necessarily a hot topic for my age group and since this was the base of people I started from this actually became a threat. I think it is hard to make your site memorable and unique while there are so many other sites out there trying to do the same thing you are, as you have to fight for the attention of the readers. I also was at the hands of others throughout the process when I needed feature stories from them and they were unable to execute things in a timely manner for me. This was difficult because my reliance on others was causing me some major inconveniences and making the process difficult.
Overall, I believe this class was very applicable to the professional world. I don’t even think I realized how much time and energy something like this requires so this was a great trial process to learn just what exactly something of this capacity takes. I think social media marketing is the future of marketing so this is a highly valuable skill to have going into the work force, which will make you more marketable to businesses/companies/organizations.”
– Morgan James, Belmont University, Spring 2019 Certified.
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