Surviving School

  Chapter 6 details the essentials of social media marketing. I learned the opportunity for businesses to use Twitter to promote Ideas and goals, build relationships with customers, connect with their audiences, and keep up with the competition. I also learned that Twitter is not like Instagram or Facebook. While they are all communication platforms, those apps are used to do a lot of promoting. Twitter on the other hand, shouldn’t be used to promote and instead should invite questions and encourage engagement. Engagement shows that the business has value. When it comes to tweeting, tweets should not be long paragraphs but rather short, to the point messages. As someone who occasionally uses Twitter, I never read anything longer than a few sentences. Anything longer than that, I skip past it and ignore. Another thing I picked up on is that when businesses are trying to promote something, they should post consistently and at times when they can reach most of their audience. Also, they s

Matt Wilder, your lacrosse student-athlete with another blog. I have to say that this week has been the most taxing on my body. It started on Thursday when we had a lift. It was leg day and I decided to go all out for this workout. You are probably guessing that this was a mistake, especially considering we had an overnight game on Saturday in Michigan. Surprisingly, I wasn't in that much pain when we arrived Friday night but that following morning I struggled to get out of bed. It only got worse as the day went on. During our game, I had to do a lot of standing in the cold and was praying to get some playing time so I could move and stop my legs from hurting. I was also motivated to get my first goal. I got the chance to go in toward the end of the second quarter and had a longer shift during the fourth quarter. The first game of my college career was a little scary but also fun. I even had an opportunity to score and ripped a shot that looked like it was going in, but the goalie

Chapter five focuses mainly on Instagram and how to use the platform to market. Instagram has more than 1.22 billion active users. Maybe not so surprisingly, most of their users are younger people, with the number of females slightly outweighing the males. Instagram was created in 2010, but only started to be accommodating for businesses in 2016. The platform allowed businesses to market and sell and get their message out through another app. Instagram allowed them to link their website on their profile and allowed them to provide more detailed and important information in their bio. When compared to all the other social media platforms, Instagram is most like Facebook. They both allow you to post pictures and videos which others can like or share. Where Instagram is truly better is with their reels and shopping options. Reels are little videos that are pushed to a user based on whatever the algorithm thinks they will enjoy the most. As a user this can be dangerous because you can go d

Matt Wilder, lacrosse student-athlete here again. I would have to say this has been my best week. Knowing what you know about my first four weeks, that might not be saying much, but things are moving in the right direction. The weekend following my last blog was our last full game scrimmage as a team. Going into it I was very nervous, because this was the last time the coaches would be evaluating us. I got in my head a bit so started off making mistakes in warm-ups. Thankfully this time when I got my opportunity to go in, I didn't waste it again. When I go in, my role is usually to clear the ball from our end to the other side, allowing our offense a possession and hopefully score. I went all out and ran hard on the first clear and we were successful in getting a transition goal. The only problem with doing that is the risk of getting tired too quickly. For some reason that day, I got unusually tired. Sadly, after that first score our offense wasn't really moving the ball well

It might be my generation really doesn’t use Facebook, but I have little to no knowledge on how to use it effectively. I do know over the past year or so, a lot has come out in the news and has been investigated on how they allow misinformation and how Facebook secretly collects information on people so they can affect what we see and when. In 2018, the United States Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into how a voter-profiling company, Cambridge Analytica, accessed the data of roughly 87 million Facebook users during the 2016 Presidential Election. At the time, it was the largest leak in Facebook history. This was huge because people didn't know how long this had been going on. It caused many to wonder what else was Facebook showing people to persuade them to one side and what of our personal data they were selling to help others target messages. With all the attention, people came out saying there is a computer that could tell how much screen time a person spends on

Matt Wilder, lacrosse student-athlete here again. My first couple of weeks this semester has had ups and downs and that’s the best way to describe this week. Just after my last post, I heard there was a chance for a lot of snow. I’m not going to lie, the prospect that classes could be canceled was exciting. Who wouldn't want to sleep in for four days? Sadly, that wasn't the case, when I had to be up at 9:30 for a class on Zoom. A little hint: it was Principals of Social Media. Beyond the one class, the rest of my day consisted of sleeping and scavenging for food. Friday was also a lazy day. After I got ahead on some homework, I went outside with some other students to play kickball in the snow. Let me tell you, it is a lot harder than it seems. Yes, that's coming from an athlete. Things came to a halt when one of the girls dropped her phone in the snow and was freaking out. We all spent like ten minutes looking for it until it was found. By that time, my shins told me to st

 Matt Wilder here and I am back with my third blog as a lacrosse student-athlete. My first two weeks were rough, but this week was much better even though it was incredibly busy. Since the student part was uneventful in a good way, I’m going to focus entirely on the athlete part this week. Saturday, we had our second scrimmage of the season and played four quarters to simulate a game. It was fun, but with no subs for either team, it was also brutal. Guys were getting tired and started to make mistakes. Thankfully we had a halftime and went inside to get a 10 min break. That was the best thing to happen. When we went back out there, my team started to click. We quickly scored a goal and on our next possession, I had a clear that led to a goal with another that quickly followed. We ended up winning the scrimmage. Sunday was supposed to be our rest day to recover and catch up on homework. We look forward to these days but because my homework was done, I stupidly I decided to run on the tr

  Chapter 3 covers how to use effective social media calendars and schedules to helps with efforts of maintaining a strong personal brand. The chapter goes in-depth on this topic, particularly in section 10 of the chapter. We learn that the social media content calendar is a subset of a larger marketing campaign calendar. These allow for social media managers to plan, create and schedule content on a weekly or monthly basis. We also learn that every content calendar must contain key themes and dates for the business, including holidays, events, press releases, news announcements, product releases, campaigns, and more. It makes sense that every calendar needs to contain these important dates, but it is not a static document. In fact, the social media content calendar should be a living document with multiple collaborators it on a regular basis as the needs of stakeholders and marketing teams change. Before reading this, I would have thought that posting your message across all social me