Final Week 12 post !

     This is the last week of the college semester, and we have been finishing up our group app project as well as all other aspects of the course. I learned a lot over the twelve weeks in this module. Social media is a vast modern field field and is a part of most people's lives nowadays. It's place in the workplace is essential in terms of marketing and advertising as it's where the public will see your ads. We have made an app which was very interesting as none of us had every made one before and it's brilliant to see the finished result (a working app!).
     This week we discussed in the lecture what is in store for social media in the future, new apps being developed, improvements in existing social media and new breakthroughs in the field! We had ups and downs in the project but we learned a lot from it and overcame the difficulties. The e-labs and tutorials that took place in the semester were very useful and it let us gain practical insight into the topics at hand rather than just knowing the theory. My favourite was making the mash-up using google maps.

Augmented reality in social media is a likely possibility in the future. 

Social Media for Business

   The topic this particular week was how effective social media can be for a business. We learned that it can be very effective, although i already knew as it's used by most brands and firms today as a method of advertising and increasing their customer numbers. It's really useful for any business if it's done right, you have to be active online whether it be a facebook page or twitter profile et cetera. The big brands like Coca Cola, Adidas and Starbucks are seen a lot on the various social networking sites, and it does help increase revenue as people use hashtags to talk about them, they post cool photos and posts which people like and so on. They use social media as a platform to connect with their customers as you can access the majority of people this way. The concept is still quite modern but had only grown and improved more and more in the past few years. A lot of companies nowadays have their own social media teams who come up with strategies and plans to promote the company.

Visual social media: Flickr (Wk8)

  We focused on visual social media for that week, which is where images are the main focus of a social media site. In our e-lab we learned how to make a Flickr account and manage it as well as posting photos to our page. We had to use images that allowed us to post them on our page (copyright).

 Flickr is easy to use once you get the hang of it, but it takes a while to get your bearings on the site. I prefer Instagram in this photo-based social media genre, but that is mainly focused for phone use, whereas Flickr is focused more for use on computers.

 Here are some images I posted on my account with the theme being scenic landscape photos in Ireland;