Week 9 Reading Reflection

The most surprising thing for me in the reading were the statistics about social media and its effects on social media marketing.  Forrester research estimates that online spending will reach almost $250 billion a year, which is 8% of the total retail market.  With no in store costs, this raises profits for the companies by a ton, and marketing over social media is relatively inexpensive as well.  It was also interesting to see that social media marketing is different from regular marketing because it is a two way street instead of a one way one, from the marketer to the consumer.  On social media, consumers can respond and give their honest opinion about a product, where people can see it.  It was a little confusing when the chapter mentioned that companies should categorize social media platforms and focus its efforts on the ones that have the largest relevancy to their products.  In my opinion, most social media networks are used by an extremely wide range of people, so it would be hard to distinguish networks from each other.  Almost every demographic is on Facebook and twitter, so how would you categorize those from each other in order to find one where the audience appealed most to your product?  If I were to ask the author, I would ask what the effects of advertising and marketing are on social media.  Is it possible for people to be annoyed at the advertisement and therefore become annoyed with the product?  Adds on youtube can sometimes get annoying and repetitive, and may even anger some consumers. There was nothing I think the author was particularly wrong about, I was just confused in some sections, as I mentioned before.