Chronicles of Carson

Howdy readers!     This week we are learning about marketing with TikTok! For those of you who have not experienced this social media platform, TikTok is a short video sharing platform that has taken the world by storm over the last two years following it being the most downloaded app of 2020. TikTok boasts a monthly active user count of 689 million and ranks 7th among all social media platforms. TikTok's users fall mostly within the 13-24 year-old age bracket, representing 69 percent of the population. TikTok is used more by females than males as there is a 60 40 split in percentages, respectively. TikTok is available in 155 countries, 75 languages and users spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the app.       While TikTok is mostly user generated content, brands have found significant success in leveraging the platform to grow their business. Over 1,000 major brands are already using the app and have found an average engagement rate of 9 percent on th...

 Howdy readers!     This weeks edition of what are we currently learning about is on Chapter 10 of our book, Marketing with YouTube! So, what is YouTube? In short, YouTube is a media sharing platform that began back in 2005 with the ability to post, watch and share videos created by its users and has blossomed into one of the largest and most visited sites on the internet. YouTube has over 2.3 billion monthly users who watch over 5 billion videos each day and is the second most visited site in the world, behind Google. About one-third of the entire internet uses YouTube and this allows for a very diverse and wide reaching audience. 78% of all males, and 68% of all females use the site while location is also fairly even as 77% of urban users are on YouTube, followed closely by the 74% of suburban users and slightly lagging is the rural community, but not by much at 64%. Income and education demographics are spread out well as each income bracket from >$30k to $75k+ is r...

Howdy friends!     This past week, as a trend in most of my posts, was all about lacrosse. There was a bit of school here and there but the most exciting part of my week was definitely our first game of the conference season on Saturday against Mount Union.           So, I guess I should touch on the school stuff first to get that out of the way because I know you were all on the edge of your seats to read about that. But the main school event for me was simply a large case study assignment I had in my managerial economics class, and when I say large I mean it took me way longer than it should. We had to review a companies supply and demand curves and apply a lot of our economic principles to find out at what price point a company should sell their product to remain in business and at what point should they, at least temporarily, halt production. This took me a majority of my Thursday night and Friday morning and when I turned it in, it turned out...

Howdy readers!      This weeks reading took us into the depths of LinkedIn, AKA "Facebook for Businesspeople". While LinkedIn may be a great place for people in the professional world to connect with each other, it is also a great marketing platform for businesses and brands. LinkedIn has a versatile page creator for businesses and individuals alike and an algorithm that allows users to reach extremely large and diverse groups of potential consumers in a way that many other platforms do not. When a user comments or engages with a post, that post is then shared with that users network as well, allowing for a chain reaction of engagements and new markets that would not normally be reached organically on other platforms. LinkedIn also allows businesses and brands to target their audience by a plethora of categories, such as job title, function and industry that are not normally accessible on other platforms.     Another advantage that LinkedIn has is that is great ...

Howdy friends!      Last week was our first week back from spring break and let me tell you, it was difficult getting back into the swing of a regular schedule again. I went from a week where each day all that I thought about was lacrosse to waking up to my horrible alarm and going to class for multiple hours each morning and only having to focus on lacrosse for about two hours a day. The actual week itself was pretty uneventful, although I did have another lacrosse focused day on Wednesday when we traveled a few hours west to play a Trine University in Indiana. It finally felt like spring was coming back during that game as temperatures were cool and the sky was clear. Trine likes to compare themselves to us and they believe they're on the same level as we are when it comes to a lacrosse program, so we had to make sure they knew where they stood and that was below us. We still haven't played a complete lacrosse game at our teams best, and we still beat them pretty handil...

   Howdy everyone!      This weeks social media platform of study was Pinterest! This is a site I was much less familiar with compared to previous platforms as I believe I've only ever accessed the site twice and don't think I even have an account on it. So lets dive into my quick review!     Pinterest is a visual pinboard-style platform that allows users to discover, save and share ideas. The platform allows users to create ideas themselves or browse others and "Pin" them to their own boards. User's can create different boards to create theme's or if they're looking to start a project, they can save others ideas that they have found and would potentially like to incorporate in their own project. For example, my girlfriend has already created a whole board for the items she wants to get for a future apartment or home. This allows users to find ideas or styles they may not have thought of previously and save them for future use so that it's easily acces...

 Howdy everyone!  This weeks post is all about spring break, which was last week. And my spring break was all about lacrosse! We started our spring break here at home, playing a game against Centre College from Kentucky on Saturday. This is a team we've only played once before, back in 2020 where we beat them in overtime at their home field the week before the breakout of the pandemic that sent us home. It was great to play them again because they had a bunch of excuses as to why we beat them the last time we played and I have a former high school teammate that plays for them so it was great to see and get to talk with him and his dad after the game for the first time in a few years. We played a pretty good game and were able to defend home turf with a solid win, 14-9.      After this game we spent the next two days practicing at home and preparing for our road trip out to the east coast to play two top ranked teams, Salisbury in Maryland and Gettysburg in Penns...