How are enterprises using Twitter and/or other social media sites to draw in more customers?

Enterprises like Twitter and facebook draw in more customers by displaying advertisements to their audience on a more personal non-ad look basis.

Facebook uses fan pages, which allows people to identify themselves with that particular brand. When signed into your facebook account on the right hand side you see little boxes of things like sports teams, or ideas, or products that you and your friends can "like."

For example, when comparing if someone is an Adidas person or a Nike person. So by having a fan page on facebook, and stating you "like" it, the brand is able to pull in more customers because users are wanting to be branded as the type of person who wears that kind of shirt, sneaker, or whatever the brand is trying to sell. By having the fan sites, facebook also shows you what your friends are fans of. Therefore if showing you what the people you associate with associate themselves with, it might generate more attention to the product or brand in interesting you to "like" it or associate with it yourself.

Now sites like Twitter are a little bit different. Twitter lets the company interact with the individual so they fell more connected to what they're buying. It gives them a more personal connection to the customer, as they are able to advertise themselves to you directly by tweeting about their product or promotion.

For example a hotel may leave a comment about telling you to book a 2 night getaway for the low cost of x amount of dollars when you book it in the next two weeks. Therefore it gets you thinking about that vacation to your family or friend's house you've been trying to plan for the past month, and just haven't been able to think too much about the cost or when to do it.

Getting back to facebook for a minute...if you haven't noticed that besides the fan pages the advertisements you see when your logged into your own personal account...they are ads that are concerned with things that you state are in your hobbies and activities. This is a marketing technique that looks at your interests and complies directly with the brands you would potentially buy or have a general interest. This technique seems a little creepy because its going into your information, but its also very intelligent because it pinpoints your interests rather than showing you what your friends associate themselves with.

By using these more personal-like ads social media sites get a more emotional-like attachment to their potential customers, and are able to draw more people in.

Is technology becoming more personal or professional?

In MY opinion, I think that people these days rely too much on technology.

Don’t get me wrong, technology these days is great with how quick and easy you can access things like the internet, but are we taking it too far?

Over the past summer I landed a job in which I travel all over the state. My dad had bought himself and my brother a GPS for last Christmas, because they too travel a lot for work. During the summer I constantly had to keep borrowing my dad’s and my mom would get slightly annoyed, because a GPS isn’t always 100% reliable. I work at events such as festivals, fairs, and sporting events, and some of these fairs would be in Nowheresville, Pennsylvania.

When I would borrow the GPS it would take me on these random dirt roads, state parks, anywhere but main roads to achieve my destination. (Don’t get me wrong this didn’t happen all the time, but it did happen quite frequently) When I would tell my mom this, she would laugh at me and say this is why I gave you an atlas in case you ever get lost. Now I know how to read a map, but when I would carpool with my friends to work I noticed none of them had one.

When I asked my friends about this, they would say yeah I know to read a map, but when do I ever need it, when my GPS is in my glove box, and my boyfriend can MapQuest my destination at home if I get lost. As for my generation, we still resign in that transition of being able to do things the old fashioned way, and using the technology that’s right at our finger tips. In these cases, technology tends to win.

A few days ago I was discussing this matter with a fellow student, and we were discussing about how long we sit in front of a computer every day. Clearly being a college student and in the Comm. /Journ. major its obviously pretty necessary how often we need to use a computer; but we joked about how much our homework is specifically directed at using our laptops. Our brains our constantly looking at screens, and when we used to use the computer for downtime, we talked about how much we’d rather just read a book or take a nap, because we’re sick of looking at a screen.

Of course technology is beneficial to us on many levels, such as for school, jobs, networking, and keeping in contact with friends and family, but it appears to sometimes to get over-excessive. I personally will dread the day when it comes to just reading full books on a tiny hand-held screen. I feel as if I just look at a computer all day long. When I go to my French class, it’s almost weird as to how much I’m dependant on that book alone, but when I’m in my media classes, I’m almost always only looking at a screen.

If we become so reliant on technology now, what will happen to our future generations? Studies about kids and the increase in obesity blame technology and that we allow them to just stay inside and play video games or watch TV. I’m not trying to justify that constant use of technology is a bad thing, because it does have its good qualities when listening to the news or weather reports. Yet the concept of Twitter still comes to my mind.

I don’t know all that much about Twitter, but I do know that it is constant updates of somebody’s status. I personally don’t always want to know what someone is thinking every five minutes. When the whole issue of the Kanye West and Taylor Swift VMA’s debacle came about, signing onto Facebook alone everybody had something to say about it. When events like this happen, it gets me to question, how far is this going to go?