Essentials of Social Media Marketing Book Overview

For our Principles of Social Media class, we were instructed to use the Essentials of Social Media Marketing book. The book covered everything from developing your personal brand to blogging and podcasting. Each chapter in the book explores social media marketing and explains in detail the popular social media platforms today.

When working through this book, we began with chapter one, understanding what social media marketing even was and how to use social media to our advantage. We also learned how to develop our own brand and market ourselves online on LinkedIn and X. The book provided best practices when creating a social media marketing strategy for a company and provided an overview of multiple social media platforms.

The book provided a lot of information about each platform, the best ways to use different advertising formats and how to choose a platform based on what you want to do with your campaign, whether it is reaching a larger audience or increasing engagement. The book advises which platform and how best to accomplish different goals. For each social media platform, we were provided with statistics on which gender used each platform the most, the largest age group, and the optimal times to post. This is something that I use personally when making social media posts for different clubs.

After reading this book, I learned so much about multiple social media campaigns that leveraged unique aspects of social media platforms to accomplish goals. This was my favorite part of the book because it helped me see examples of how a real brand could apply features on a media platform to launch a successful campaign. One that stood out to me was when Snapchat and Shake Shack partnered, and Snapchat had a 4-day takeover of Shake Shack. In the partnership, Snapchat created augmented reality lenses that allowed users to shop for limited edition merchandise and even get free fries. Another that stood out was McDonald's collaboration with hip-hop stars to launch their National Menu Hacks campaign on TikTok. The celebrity partnerships and unique menu hacks encouraged users to engage with their content and even try the hacks themselves. The campaign was so successful that almost two million users were using the campaign’s hashtag to share their own hacks.