By,

Johanna Tikkanen

I’m a Business major, who is pursuing a minor in Journalism. Last semester I took ENGL275, Introduction to Multimedia Journalism and loved it. This semester I took a step higher class, Intermediate Multimedia Journalism. I really like this class, and one of our assignments was to take a course online at Knight Center. It’s called Social Media for Journalists, and I believe that all Journalism students should take it.

I learned a lot from the 5 week Social Media for Journalists course hosted by Knight Center. To be completely honest, I though it was very boring at first, but when I decided to take a right mindset towards it, I felt like I got a lot of useful information out of it. I think that the lecture of “Find Sources and audience with social media.” was the most helpful for me. I learned how to use social media to target the right audience for me; I started to think more about the audience, and what might be unique that could appeal to them. Also one important (Kind of obvious) was learning that word of mouth is one of the most powerful thing and its rife among people in social media. So if I connect with those that are connected to my target audience, it might be a job worthwhile. Then I started wondering, who is my target audience, and what’s funny is that you can use Google Analytics to find that out specifically.

Also, the importance of social media websites as; Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin was highlighted. By creating accounts or pages on this websites, you can interact with people more effectively. There are 1.4 billion Facebook users and the average time these people spend on Facebook is 15 hours per month.

If starting a new business, you must have the previously mentioned, its basically free advertising and grows your business avareness. Google Analytics is a perfect tool for figuring out the target audience. I definitely learned a lot from this course and have an idea how Social Media could be useful in Business.

By,

Johanna Tikkanen