Anna Bowman

BY  ANNA BOWMAN Everyone wants to spoil their dog -- it's only natural, especially with such a cute pup, and seeing their excitement when their BarkBox shipment arrives at their doorstep is one of the biggest benefits to ordering the box. BarkBox is a subscription box catered specifically to dogs, where you receive a box each month with toys and treats based on different themes. Approximately 600,000 people receive a box monthly, and this is shown by how much engagement they receive on their social media. Not only does Bark (the parent company) and its two sub-companies (BarkBox and SuperChewer ) have strong social media presence, but BarkBox itself has very popular profiles on Twitter (310.5k followers), Facebook (2,994,942 total likes), Pinterest (6.4m monthly viewers), and Instagram (1.6m followers). Across all platforms, BarkBox posts very frequently and receives plenty of engagement from its followers, but Instagram appears to be the most active of the four with new...

BY  ANNA BOWMAN Today, social media platforms exist as one of the most effective ways to promote online. Within the entertainment industry, social media is another form of advertisement, whether for your brand, your company, or yourself. Platforms provide a new realm of communication unlike any other the internet has seen before, and culls the divide between celebrities and their audiences: not only do posts feel more personal, but audiences are also able to connect with their favorite celebrities directly through comments and tags. For the entertainment industry, social media is said to be a "leading driver" for growth. Trailers for new movies, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens are shared exponentially more on social media than anywhere else. In the first 23 minutes following its debut , the Star Wars trailer had gained over a million views solely through shares. There are a variety of positives and negatives that come from the entertainment industry using social medi...

BY  ANNA BOWMAN Today's online world is all about brands: they're everywhere! While companies encourage strong branding methods to make themselves appear not just as another friendly brand on social media, many of them have taken to reaching out to online influencers to become brand ambassadors -- like Electronic Arts, who - after seeing how popular The Sims 4 was on YouTube creators - formed the " EA Game Changers ", a team of content creators who the company uses in order to garner opinions from the creators' communities and implement these opinions to improve the game. This tactic is commonly referred to as "employee advocacy". Essentially, the tactic boils down to the employee becoming a promoter of sorts for the company, swiping aside advertising and marketing schemes in order to reach out to their own circles and make the company's promotions feel more personal and intimate. Bambu gives an excellent example of how employee advocacy works...

Image: Pixabay.com BY  ANNA BOWMAN Smartphones have become an essential to our daily lives: photographs, text messages, contacts - our lives are now stored digitally. Social media has risen in popularity alongside the smartphone, providing more ways for us to keep in contact with friends and share what's going on in our lives. For some, this is the primary reason for owning a phone: what's the harm in sharing details of your life online? It's harmless, you'd think; who would care about what day you were born aside from the friends that want to wish you a happy birthday? Why does it matter? Except it does. Data collection is rampant on social media, more now than ever. Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world and has had a long history of issues with user privacy, dating all the way back to 2006. In 2018, a massive breach occurred on the platform and Facebook finally promised to implement new "policy changes" twelve years after the init...

Image: Ign.com BY  ANNA BOWMAN In the days where most entertainment was digested primarily through television, online streaming was only just burgeoning. Television viewers griped about lengthy commercial breaks and how much they took away from their amusement based on what they were watching, but they were correct on their complaints: since 2017, the number of advertisements squeezed into a show's broadcast time has increased. The American public is being exposed to more advertising than ever before, even when solely basing the intake on television viewing. Commercial breaks and the complaints surrounding them pushed people to inevitably jump on the bandwagon of streaming services when they became popular. Many people "cut the cord" to their cable providers and strictly stuck to services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon's Prime Video in order to keep up with their preferred entertainment; in a survey conducted by Deloitte, a consulting firm, 88% of millennials ...

Image: bbc.co.uk BY  ANNA BOWMAN Social media’s traction has granted modern-day society a new method of communication: the means to reach out to anyone in the world at any time. This has brought about new ways to make friends, relationships and other meaningful connections with those one may not have been able to reach in any other way but online. These friend groups are often just as valued and as impactful as their real-life counterparts. People seek out connections like this online for a plethora of reasons as society turns to become more integrated with the online world, and like how people are desperate to fit in in their real lives, people are desperate to fit into what's "on trend" in the digital environment of social media. In a Mashable article by Jess Joho, this feeling is defined as "JOMO", or "the joy of missing out"--a backward version of what's popularly known as "FOMO". Mental health and emotional distress have bo...