Innovation and Investment: LJ 4

This week’s materials focused on emerging social media trends and technologies and how businesses are investing efforts toward their innovation and development. It was interesting to read about the evolution of social media and how it tied into opportunities for companies. Social media innovation attracts entrepreneurs, forward-thinking minds looking to build startups and/or products, and already established businesses wanting to advance. When looking at the past, “the same open approach to development that was seen during the personal computer and Internet revolution seems present with social and mobile media” (Lipschultz 2020). Evidently, social media innovation has been revolutionary, and its future looks bright.

Social media is taking over the advertising world. TikTok is becoming huge for businesses’ marketing efforts, Instagram and Twitter are predicted to remain as primary platforms for advertising, influencer marketing will increase in importance, smaller networks (such as Pintrest and Snapchat) are increasing in popularity for advertising, and more (Geyser 2021). I think that in the coming year, the aforementioned social media platforms will continue to be on the rise in terms of advertising, number of users, ways to utilize them in business, and overall technological development. These factors have all exponentially increased in the past two decades and will continue to do so.

Along with changing the world as a whole, social media and technological innovation will also affect my life. This is especially true in the professional sense. I want to work in marketing, and staying on top of the latest technological developments in terms of social media and advertising will be of the utmost importance. Regardless of what field of marketing I end up in, I will definitely need to develop competencies in various technical skills such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, SocialInsider, SEO, SEM, CRM, and many more. I will need to know how to properly create and implement ads on social media, because “social e-commerce trends will boom in 2022…social ads will develop to help brands offer more personalized services…and learning paid advertisement is critical” (“10 Social Media Trends of 2022,” 2021). It will be necessary for me to take extra time outside of school and/or work to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. This may be challenging, but it will certainly be worth it in the end.

Geyser, W. (2021, December 14). 17 social media trends for 2022 and beyond. Influencer Marketing Hub. Retrieved May 2, 2022, from https://influencermarketinghub.com/social-media-trends/#toc-2 

Lipschultz, J. H. (2020). Social Media Communication (3rd ed.). Routledge.

10 social media trends to know in 2022. Techfunnel. (2021, December 22). Retrieved May 2, 2022, from https://www.techfunnel.com/martech/social-media-trends/