Social Media is the ultimate way for people to share, create and develop networks on a global scale. These various platforms allow instant access to people, businesses and communities, building brand visibility through establishing effective communication channels and relationships (Poulis, Rizomyliotis & Konstantoulaki 2018).

For businesses this has created a global platform to enhance awareness of their brand creating company growth, the ability to establish and maintain consumer and partner relationships as well as marketing insights that businesses are able to strategically exploit (Sharp 2011). Not only have businesses benefited from the social media frenzy, but the consumer experience has also been enhanced with the ability to ingest as much information as possible at the click of a button.

So, what social media platforms are consumers using you ask, well according to Buffer Marketing Library there are at least 21 Social Media sites worth taking a look at for your brand enhancement (Lua 2019). Pretty much everyone can guess that Mark Zuckerburgs creation of Facebook is the penultimate engagement platform that has at least 2.23 BILLION monthly active users (Lua 2019). This obviously is a great and free I might add, place to start developing your brand and enhancing its overall awareness.

Taking second place is YouTube with a leisurely 1.9 Billion active monthly users, with messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebooks messenger taking out third and fourth, because let’s be honest how much are we utilising our unlimited calls and texts in phone plans anymore? Where is Twitter and Instagram you ask, well the rise of Instagram is still coming tenfold sitting sixth on our chart with 1 Billion users and interestingly Twitter coming in twelfth with 335 million active users which is a personal surprise to me as everyone loves a good tweet war (Lua 2019).  

So, if everyone is utilising these platforms how has social media been benefiting these brands and their businesses? Well, as we all know brand awareness is incredibility important to businesses due to the influences it can have on consumer decisions (Wirtz, Lovelock & Patterson 2015). Therefore, the more people finding your brand and interacting with your content, the greater the brand awareness and reach you have. Engaging with your target audiences and building a brand reputation can assist overall consumer growth, with new potential clients gaining information through consistent exposure (Wirtz, Lovelock & Patterson 2015).

Through social media platforms data, businesses are able to gain insights into what content is receiving the most engagement and strategically utilise this to further awareness. Any marketing and communications savvy business is going to be all over their social media, particularly with the cost-effective component elevating financial stress (Kirtiş & Karahan 2011).

I recently spoke with Elyse Murray, Maintenance Officer at Glen Eira Sports and Aquatic Centre to chat about their social media engagement, whilst I posed the ultimate question, how has social media benefited their businesses brand awareness?

Have a listen here:

I really appreciate Elyse’s time, and it’s great to have an insight into how an Aquatic and Recreation Facility is adapting their business to gain brand awareness of their facility and their programs and services to have greater engagement with the community.

It is also really interesting to see that like Elyse, marketers around the globe in the State of Social report 2019 are seeing that ‘stories’ in the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Snap Chat have great organic potential with even paid advertisements becoming increasingly popular (State of Social 2019). Another area GESAC could use to increase their overall brand awareness could be other influencers such as sporting stars utilising their facilities with 88.4% of marketers in the State of Social Report looking at utilising this influence with consumers (State of Social 2019).

Overall brand awareness increases tenfold for businesses with the effective usage of social media platforms. In this social climate consumers want things instantly and easily, and if they don’t know something they just ‘give it a google’.

Sources:
1. Kirtiş, A & Karahan, F 2011, ‘To Be or Not to Be in Social Media Arena as the Most Cost-Efficient Marketing Strategy after the Global Recession’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 24, pp. 260-268.
2. Lua, A 2019, ‘21 Top Social Media Sites to Consider for Your Brand’, Buffer Marketing Library, retrieved 30 August 2019, <https://buffer.com/library/social-media-sites&gt;.
3. Poulis, A, Rizomyliotis, I & Konstantoulaki, K 2018, ‘Do firms still need to be social? Firm generated content in social media’, Information Technology & People, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 387–404, retrieved 29 August 2019, <https://www-emerald-com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ITP-03-2018-0134/full/pdf&gt;.
4. Sharp, J 2011, ‘Brand Awareness and Engagement: A Case Study in Healthcare Social Media’, Frontiers of Health Services Management, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 29-33.
5. State of Social 2019 2019, retrieved 30 August 2019, <https://buffer.com/state-of-social-2019&gt;.
6. Wirtz, J, Lovelock, C & Patterson, P 2015, Services Marketing, World Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore.

Welcome to Blunt.

Please enjoy this short video of the recent Catfish and Bottlemen Melbourne show review.

For my first ever blog post and video I really wanted to engage the audience by talking about an interest of mine Music. Hopefully this finds viewers who are genuinely interested in all things that encompass a great live music performance, festivals, touring and above all the required pre-music eat outs. By sharing experiences, you are able to target an audience with similar interests and opinions, creating a really organic and true following. 

I believe that a video comes across authentic when the individual is genuinely passionate about what they are talking about and have done their research as required to know any additional content. By actually attending the music events that are discussed also gives the audience the feeling of being a part of the experience. 

I have seen this video opportunity as a potential to further expand my portfolio by displaying my ability to create and produce video content showing my personal brand, as well as a way to stay in touch with all things music industry for my career goals. 

For the video I really wanted to focus on my personal interest of music and make an interesting video. To do this I had to write an overall plan as to what I wanted in the video, where I wanted to film and what shots we were going to take. In additional to this I wrote a script to accompany the plan, so I knew what I was going to be talking about and how long for. This made the process easier to stay on top of and increased the production time. 

For my framing and positioning of each of the shots, I wanted to firstly make sure that the background was on brand to what I was talking about and as interesting as possible with what I had to work with. From there I took into account balanced space and that mid shot of myself talking to the camera. 

To engage with the audience, I chose to show a personal experience of attending a live performance as well as explaining how it was and showing merchandise from the show. 

The video editing software I used was adobe Premier pro. This was a first for me, but it helped transition the clips together edit out anything that I didn’t want and add effects to the video. The program additionally helped with editing the audio making sure it was loud enough throughout the video. 

The overall experience of creating a video was really interesting to learn in particular putting the video together. I believe I learn a lot more by doing and actually creating the content myself gaining that hands-on experience. No experience comes without it challenges and this time was no different, from being sick all week with no voice and trying to get it back to film, to learning adobe Premier pro as a video editing software that I had never used before. To overcome these problems, I really had to be organised and self-motiving to learn about the software and complete everything I could prior to filming to accomplish the task. 

Thanks for reading my first post the creation of content. Until next time, stay classy San Diego.