The Power of Social Media

In the summer of 2005 I started a small record label called Everafter Music. I was the sole employee and the sole client. By the same time in 2006, I was moving to Lubbock, TX, to finish school at Texas Tech University. Essentially, the company hadn't taken off in that year and I was closing up shop.

So what happened? At such a young age, I didn't fully understand how to run a business. I wasn't prepared for the grind and hustle it was going to take. I didn't understand how to market a business. Without being able to market a product, no matter how good the product may be, it will fall flat.

Today, we have seemingly unlimited social media platforms out there to choose from, and we use as many as we see fit to market our product, often cross-posting to see which platform will have a more positive reaction to a particular post. Back in 2005, Twitter was roughly 2 years away from its big break. The social media world has exploded since then.

Technology has changed the way we do business as well. When was the last time actually looked at billboard or watched a television commercial without looking your phone, effectively tuning out the message in the commercial? A large part of marketing has shifted as well. Phone calls and email are still useful tools, but are slowly being replaced by web-based campaigns. Social Media based marketing campaigns have created the startup culture we now live in where anyone with enough hustle to execute an idea and survive until the money starts rolling in can be an entrepreneur. Perfect strangers are now liking, commenting on, and sharing our posts on all social media platforms. We now have a culture of marketing for free. Of course, there are the options out there to sponsor posts, or whole pages, to get more traction and reach out of a single post. Instead of relying on commercials and print ads, businesses are now relying more and more on content put out on their own company blogs.

By the end of September 2016, Me, Myself, and Cuisine, reached it's first milestone of 2500 views.

Back in April of 2016, I rebooted my food blog, Me, Myself, and Cuisine. 98 percent of my marketing efforts have have relied on grassroots social media marketing through Facebook and Instagram. The above milestone is based solely off of social media marketing efforts, a mix of organic reach and promoted posts.

Continuing with the knowledge that digital, primarily social media, is the most influential and powerful sources of marketing, I dove in to some other ventures over the last few years since 2016.

First, I expanded my blogging presence into a whiskey blog, called The Whiskey Tapes, where I explore primarily whiskey, but also cocktails, beer, and wine. The Whiskey Tapes was born out of having more to say than just writing about than just food and recipes.

As things would have it, I found myself with more to say than just food and whiskey. With each creative project I take on, I find myself going down a path that leads to more. Once I got The Whiskey Tapes established along with Me, Myself, and Cuisine, I launched in to a publication on Medium called Penny Thoughts. Penny Thoughts is a space for me to present my thoughts as they are sparked by daily encounters. It’s amazing how life can get your mind going and how beautiful your thoughts can be if you will let them. Writing on Medium then gave me a platform to write about all things writing.

Every bit of exposure that my writing has gotten, has been through digital outreach/digital marketing. I don’t have a newsletter that blasts to followers every week, just the reach I get out of social media.

Now, I have to ask, what can a social media marketing strategy do for your business? If you haven't adopted it yet, what are you waiting for?

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn