01/04/15- Blog post 9 

                                                      Social Media for Bushiness

This week as it is Good Friday we do not have a E-Lab as it is good Friday. Therefore in this blog post I will talk about what we did in class this week.

Today's class was on Social media for business and was given by a guest speaker from the university of Economics in Prague called Lucie Bohmova. 

    -We started out by watching a brief video about what exactly social media is. 

    -Lucie taught us the 4 C's that need to be taken in to account by businesses when using social media, they          are; Creation, Creative, Connected, Community. 

    -She then told us how to successfully use social media for businesses using a 4 step strategy. These steps        where; 1) get people to know the brand. 2) people will learn more about the brand and begin to like it. 3) this        like turns into trust. 4) they buy the product.   

    -Business can connect with their customers through social media by interacting with them in various ways          such as; commenting and liking comments on Facebook, re tweeting their tweets and commenting on their          blogs. 

    -Lucie also gave us some tips about using social media to promote a business such as; using multiple sites        to attract more people, make sure to be active and interactive so the customers will too, keep it personal real      and authentic, use it often, maintain it well, aim to chat not to sell and embrace your audience.

Towards the end of the class we split up into groups and were given two tasks to complete. The first task involved us coming up with a business idea, name and a strategy for how we would use social media for our business. My groups idea was a frozen yoghurt shop called 'The frozen cow'. we agreed that we would use Facebook, twitter, instagram and snapchat to market our shop. We also decided we would have give-aways in which customers would be asked to either like and share the page or hash tag #thefrozencow for a chance to win. Another idea we had was every Friday having a thing called 'Frozen Fridays' in which customers would be offered some money off their frozen yoghurt for checking in to the shop on facebook. 

The second task we had was to write down what we thought Social media would be like in 2020. Our group agreed that with tools such as Google glass coming in social media would become even more embedded into everyday life. One point that Shane made that I agreed with is that social media sites have become more and more used by companies to expand their customers. I think this will continue to become more and more prevalent on social media as companies are only now truly seeing the advantages of social media.