Conclusions Drawn

After a little less than four weeks, we've reached the conclusion of "The Art of Social Media." In recap, I think the book had a lot of good ideas about what social media can be used for and what its true power is in terms of promotion and public relations. There is a lot of advice in there that I would have never considered, and while there was good there was also some bad and/or irrelevant ones. But I've already talked about that before and that's not the point of this post.

The point of this post is to appreciate the depth that social media has in terms of usability and viewership. That's something that no book could cover perfectly and it's only going to get deeper and deeper. There will always be a new social media platform to add to your lineup, or always another algorithm to exploit, so your content is more viewable. Those are constants in the social media driven world.

In terms of advice, the book did a great job of offering many different ways to really use social media to your benefit, and interacting with the people that consume and influence your content. Those are important skills to have and be able to use if you're working in a social media environment. They're skills that are considered valuable to many companies as well, which shows just how far social media has come in public relation senses, or even just general information consumption, and the final chapter of the book really makes that apparent, with how promoting a book can have so much go into its campaign. It highlights the fluency you have to have to fully take advantage of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In the last chapter of the book, the authors even mention that all of this is only for people who are "untrained amateurs" by saying, "don't try this in the office... It will make your head explode if you're a trained expert who's accustomed to weeks of strategizing, testing, and consensus-building." So, my takeaway from it all is, this is just the beginning of something that when taken to the next level can be insane.