New Adds Coming to Snapchat

Snapchat has become popular among teens and college students, but now it has become the media's new stomping ground for advertisements. In a recent article I read it goes into what companies have been utilizing Snapchat to market their products. The recent adds that have been appearing on the new social media craze is Taco Bell and Grub Hub. These company's hold contests and giveaways on Snapchat to real in customers to their stores and sites. This app is a new marketing tool for many businesses. If your target market is young individuals then this is the site to use. Snapchat is valued at 10 billion dollars and should be the new marketing tool for businesses. I think Snapchat will grow and expand and businesses will jump on board with it.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-discussing-new-content-service-with-advertisers-and-media-firms-1408486739

Ethics in Social Media Marketing

A hot topic issue in today's social media presence is the issue of ethics. Social media nowadays has been deemed unethical when it comes to privacy settings, advertising campaigns, and stalking of unwanted friends. In an article titled "3 Steps to Ethical Social Media Marketing" it goes through the steps a user of these sites can take to defend themselves against unethical social media sites. The first step is to disclose any advertising product samples or incentives, step two is to disclose any relationship marketers and third is to disclose all relationships with people you don't know. I think these three things are important, but there are some other things I think this article is missing. Obviously setting your privacy settings to protect yourself is a no brainer and will help shield you from people you don't know or don't want on your page. Reporting unwanted users is always a good idea when it comes to unwanted stalkers. So there are other ways to fight unethical social media sites and those need to be addressed as well. Ethics is important and if people care about their privacy and ethics in today's internet connections, then some might even leave these sites to be secure and safe.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-steps-to-ethical-social-media-marketing/

Google Plus The Future?

Google Plus has died in many wealthy individuals eyes. They have down played the power Google has to make this social network worth signing up for. In the article "Proof That Google Plus Will Prevail", it brings up a lot of good points about how Google is making everyone believe they don't have something special with Google Plus. It speaks about the fact that no one recognizes the fast paced site and how much it is growing in users. It will secretly make its way to the top of the chain next to Facebook and it will shock everyone. In my opinion, I do not use this site or know the benefits and features of the social network, but I am interested in seeing what it is all about and it could be a good change of pace from Facebook and Twitter. I think it will creep up on everybody in near future and trust that Google know what it is talking about.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3004448/plus-one-proof-google-plus-will-prevail

Quick Tips on LinkedIn

I read an article on Forbes regarding LinkedIn and what not to do for your professional career when optimizing a LinkedIn account. The article is titled "8 Mistakes You Should Never Make On LinkedIn" and it goes into some major mistakes people make on LinkedIn that hinder them getting hired. A couple examples of the 8 mistakes are things like not using a profile picture or using an unprofessional picture of other things but yourself, neglecting privacy settings, not having a summary, and eliminating past jobs or volunteer work. In my opinion all of these are good tips for every student coming out of college to be aware of when creating a profile and showing it off to future employers. I suggest following each one of these as it will help you look professional and ready to get that job you have always wanted.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/03/04/8-mistakes-you-should-never-make-on-linkedin/2/

Free Advertisement!

In an article title "5 marketing benefits of using YouTube" It gives us 5 good reasons why companies should be using YouTube to market their products, get customers in the door, and keep them coming back. The article goes on to list the 5 benefits: Ability to reach a global market, informative can be better than humorous, increase your rank in Google's search engine, it's free!, and people can subscribe or follow your channel. I personally think the best benefit is that YouTube is free advertisement! In today's business world you can't get much for free so take the opportunity you have to create a free way to advertise your product or business on YouTube. It doesn't hurt to see what customers you can gain by utilizing the use of this social media site. All of these benefits are important, but nobody can go wrong with free! Here is a Walgreen's commercial that not only grabs viewers attention on TV, but when posted to their YouTube channel, created a buzz in the comments section and even in sales.

http://blog.marginmedia.com.au/Our-Blog/bid/78075/5-Marketing-Benefits-of-Using-YouTube

Why Investors Love Pinterest So Much

This article I read is about investors pouring their money into the new social media site Pinterest. Last year investors gave the site another 250 million dollars for future enhancements of Pinterest which now stand at 3.8 billion dollars. The article is called Why Investors Love Pinterest So Much and it explains how Pinterest hasn't made money yet, but investors believe that it will be something international for the future of social media. Pinterest is currently working on step two to try and bridge the gap between getting users and making profit. In my opinion, Pinterest could become a cash cow with advertisements and selling products on their site. This site is already extremely popular and growing internationally. There is currently 10 countries where Pinterest is currently launched and operating. This will expand in the future and change the way buyers purchase items online.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/why-investors-love-pinterest-so-much

Vine: Why 6 seconds?

In an article I recently read about vine it explains why vine allows only six seconds and tells how they came to that conclusion. The article is called "How Vine Settled On 6 Seconds". Co founder of Vine Dom Hofmann explains the reasoning for only having Vine videos run for six seconds. They went through some research and did some testing on some other times, ten, nine, seven, and even five seconds to see what would be the perfect time for a Vine video. Five seconds was too short to get any message across and ten seemed to loose peoples interest. They compared their app to Instagrams new video feature where you can post a fifteen second video... Vine didn't like it, it looses people interest and humans attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Dom claims it just kind of came to him: six seconds would be the perfect amount of time to capture peoples attention and keep it there for six seconds per video. Dom also noticed that once the clips ended it was too abrupt and didn't feel right, so they made all the video clips loop to pose an anti-climatic ending to the videos. I have a Vine account, but I enjoy watching other users post videos instead of making my own. It is a perfect time for a video to keep my attention. Long videos do not interest me and Vines are just long enough to keep me entertained. I will continue to watch vines on Facebook and Twitter because they keep me interested. Six seconds is perfect for this social media account.

Click Here for Video: <iframe class="vine-embed" src="https://vine.co/v/hB2FwpJYtMa/embed/simple" width="600" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe><script async src="//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/20/213846816/how-vine-settled-on-6-seconds