Ken's Corner: Social Media Marketing

Last week I talked a lot about how burn out has been impacting me as an artist and someone who is interested in possibly looking into the marketing world. A lot of the experience that I have as a marketer so far has been within the social media sphere. Social media is a great way to get information out quickly and to a larger audience. It is also a great way to directly engage with an audience if you are marketing for a larger company or even smaller companies that people may not know a lot about yet. Before I became president of Agon, I handled a lot of the social media work for the club. It was hard to get engagement though because nobody wanted to engage with us as a result of the pandemic. Now it feels as though things are starting to return to normal within the marketing sphere, but there is still a sense of this hesitation, especially from generation Z. Plus there is added frustration where people may engage with your content online, but they may not take the time to remember who your company is or what it is about. This is because a lot of people tend to scroll quickly online and like quickly because the newer generations have shorter attention spans. I say this as someone who is a member of these newer generations, I do find it is harder for me to engage in longer form content, which is a shame because I definitely used to be able to focus a lot easier. As a marketer, I do have to take this into consideration, especially in terms of the trends that I chose to take part of. For example, I help to run the Instagram page for my school’s career center and I sometimes have to do more information-based content as opposed to promotional content about upcoming events. When I do that, I have to see what is trending in pop culture at the time. For example, when Harry Styles released his album “Harry’s House” I tried to create content relating to the album and I was able to get a lot more people to share the work that I created. Social media is really cool and helpful, but it also is very fickle and is really hard to get the public opinion on what everyone likes and what everyone does not like. My hope for the future is that social media becomes a space where marketers are able to engage with others in a way that does not feel as forced as it does right now. Of course, there are some companies that do a really good job engaging with younger people, but I think there is still some cognitive dissonance between the general public and companies as a result of these newer generations. It will be interesting to see how Generation Z learns to interact with Generation Alpha and if that relationship online will be similar to the way Millennials and Gen Z interact now.