Review of Essentials of Social Media Marketing

Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing was the textbook used to teach PR 1401: Principles of Social Media for the Fall 2021 semester. We covered the first 13 chapters of this book in class. I feel like it was a good book for the course. It covered all of the large social media platforms used today. The content all seemed useful to me, although I have not applied any of it in the real world. There was a fair amount of duplication among each platform’s chapter in terms of content to post, but that makes sense. Overall, it seems like users of each platform will respond well to similar content but formatted differently.

The simulation was very useful. I enjoyed completing it. It was nice that each platform was distinct. I would’ve liked all six weeks of simulation to have involved posting, as the two influencer only weeks put a dent in the platform charts. I also felt like it was too easy to cheese the simulation. Quantity over quality seemed to be the name of the game in this scenario. A lot of my posts did not actually mean anything and were simply made to meet the n posts per day requirement for each platform. I personally would have interacted with at most a tenth of the posts I made. There was also some inconsistency between the simulation and textbook. For example, the textbook said one should make between three and seven posts per day while the simulation suggested between 15 and 46. I am not sure what would cause such an extreme discrepancy, but it seems like that is a pretty big oversight.

The textbook did have a few flaws, though. The biggest flaw was that there were a few outdated parts. The one that stands out is Twitter Fleets. These existed from early 2021 to August 2021, so it makes sense that they were included in the book. I don’t think there is any way to write a book that will be up to date constantly, especially with a subject that changes as regularly as social media. The book was up to date on most things, but a few were outdated. The simulation that came with the book had a few references to Google+ which hasn’t existed since early 2019. Google+ was never used in the simulation, but I think it was okay that it was referenced in some of the documentation.

Comments

  1. Emily SignorDecember 9, 2021 at 9:48 AM

    Hi Danny! I really like your review of the textbook. I mostly wrote about the positive experiences I had with the textbook, since I have worked with other online textbooks that are much worse. However, after reading your comments I do see some of the flaws as well, especially in regard to the simulation inconsistency.

    ReplyDelete

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