For the purpose of this
assignment, I decided to focus on analyzing the social media impact of Rosetta
Stone, McGraw Hill Education, Pearson, Cengage, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
which are educational companies that rely on e-learning to some extent. Since
Codex Alexandria, my fictional company, is an educational software company,
these well-known educational companies were probably the most effective,
similar actual companies that I could compare to Codex Alexandria… Rosetta
Stone seems effective because they link to blogs made by famous Rosetta users,
who advertise Rosetta Stone products well by writing blog entries about their
travels abroad and how their language learning with Rosetta Stone has helped
them navigate the world. Rosetta Stone also successfully advertises to people
on social media by asking users to respond to questions that company poses, and
then asks users to tag the company in their responses. These tagging requests
indicate that Rosetta Stone is interested in advertising their products through
active social engagement. Meanwhile, McGraw-Hill Education seems to use
advertising effectively to recruit potential employees by creating posts to
encourage them to apply to job offerings on their website. In addition,
McGraw-Hill Education indirectly advertises itself as reputable, interesting
educational company by posting links to interesting educational articles and
responding directly to users who comment on their posts.
Pearson advertises its
products well on social media because its social media accounts do not directly
advertise to users. Instead, the company posts interesting articles on social
media accounts and shows photographs of happy employees and others enjoying the
fruits of the learning products that they produce. These tactics give the
impression that the company truly has faith in the quality of its products. Cengage,
although it is a popular educational company, does not successfully advertise well
to people on social media because it appears to post advertisements that are
all written similarly and contain videos that possess the same statistics and
calls to action. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt seems to effectively advertise their
company by relying on links to random educational articles and advertisements
for their live videoconferences. The company does not directly advertise its
products or rely on advertised sales; it instead advertises its worthiness as
company by gently encouraging people to respond to its posts on social media.
One of
the major components of social media advertisements that have I noticed is the
fact that they frequently rely on brightly colored photos to attract viewers’
attention. In addition, many of these photographs or images are accompanied by
product descriptions and prices in the titles of the ads, which alerts viewers
immediately that these companies definitely want to persuade potential
customers to visit their websites. I suppose that their calls to action are
probably that people should considered buying their products because they are
sale and probably meet their needs and desires. They effectively using imagery
because it does manage to catch my attention, but it does not hold my attention
when I actually visit the advertisement links their websites and discover how
much money they want to pay for products that they will never even offer free
shipping for. In general, the most annoying ads on social media are the ads
that appear after I have just recently finished looking at certain retail
websites, but did not make the decision to purchase anything from them. I feel
this way because it is blatantly obvious at this point that companies are being
overly pushy and persistent. After all, if I did not ultimately want to buy any
of their products a few minutes ago, what makes them think that I would now
change my mind? Besides, these type of ads remind me that Google is spying on
me and collecting data about my online habits, which annoys because I value my
privacy and I did not think that any government or corporate entities have a
right to potentially use Internet browsing history to potentially harm me or
extract money from me.
Compared to traditional advertisements such as television
advertisements or Internet ads, I respond to the advertisement done on social
media a lot more effectively and positively. Traditional advertisements seemed
to be aimed at the older generations, who were more likely to have grown up
with regular television watching than millennials, who are generally less
interested in television and prefer to use the Internet and video-streaming
services to watch film productions. For
one thing, I find traditional advertisements to be such a turn off because
those advertisements often appear too aggressive and solely promote an agenda
to sell me stuff, whether or not I actually need it or want it. I resent feeling
pressured to buy something any time I see a traditional advertisement, and in
response I am actually less likely to
buy whatever they are trying to market to me because I can obviously tell the
these companies have no real interest in me or my well-being beyond finding
some way to convince me to spend my money. Whenever I look up a traditional
advertisement, I do not think that I am valued as a potential customer or even
just a human being because the company that is pushing this traditional
advertisement is not engaging a social dialogue with me, nor does it
particularly care about taking my opinions into account by creating products
that fit my needs and interests.
Companies that use social media advertising, from what I have
observed, seem to be the companies that best understand how to court customers
(and keep them) in this changing, modern, Internet-driven economy. Although I
doubt that companies that use social media advertisements care any more about
customers than companies that use traditional advertisements, I (and probably
many other people) can at least respect the fact that they at least pretend to whenever they try socially
interact with social media users in fun, light-hearted ways. Generally
speaking, I have more respect for companies that realize that their survival
depends on what their customers want (more social interaction on social media,
less direct pressure to buy products) rather than company CEOs and other
officials who stubbornly want to stick to outdated ideas about how to attract
customers, and then complain when potential customers do not respond the way
that they want them to their advertisements. In addition, social media advertisements
are more likely to influence millennials and teenagers because those groups are
known for using social media regularly. Companies that cleverly use social
media advertisements know that as people become more and more tech-savvy, most
of the successfully advertising campaigns will have to occur on the Internet,
especially on social media, not outdated platforms like television or on
billboards.
