REFLECTION #1
Facebook Continues to Advance

The way in which new media continues to change nowadays is actually interesting to watch it all unfold. Where social media started to where it is now, I didn't really personally see it being that big of an impact on not just our lives as college students but it affects the whole world. Technology just continues to become more advanced day by day and it is becoming a center piece in how most people connect, network, talk to family and friends, and even gain their knowledge of exactly whats going on in the world currently. Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook are constantly finding new ways to incorporate new aspects and make the platform more enjoyable for its users. These platforms were so simple when they first were created as they were solely kept to themselves but now today most if not all of these platforms are connected in some way. If I try an upload a picture to Twitter, these platforms are linked now that through my Twitter application I can send that same picture to Instagram as well as post it on my Facebook all from one location. On top of joining the various platforms they are trying to move past that and advance even more. In Baym's essay it was stated that "People are not going to want to leave their homes when they can have more fun in cyberspace..... Public life will have disappeared we did not see, in time to reverse the process that our dazzling technologies were privatizing almost all social activities... We replaced meeting friends with video telephone and electronic mail...". Everything now a days is really becoming digital to the point where we can literally do anything we need to from our smart phones or our laptops and be completely connected to the world without every physically seeing anyone or anything. Now why stop here, technology is going to keep advancing to these platforms are constantly looking for new ways to incorporate new elements.

In an article i found titled "Facebook's New Metrics Are Changing the Game for Marketers", "they were talking about how marketers continue to focus on how to wring better performance out of their advertising there as they are barraged with conflicting data and surveys". Then they go on to explain that "these new advancements are reminiscent of when online display advertising introduced time spent on site, ad engagement metrics, view-through attribution, and other metrics to evaluate the performance of ads that did not immediately convert. For all publishers including Facebook, all targets and ads do not have equal value, nor do they have similar performance objectives to big brands to e-commerce companies". One of Facebooks biggest problems is how ineffective they are at tracking their marketing success because they have limits in their ability to track those types of things. "Facebook's measurement change is primarily related to how it accounts for and reports on of the way users interacting with and click on ads and content. Both ads and content play a critical role in the social network success of brands on the Facebook ecosystem, as well as on sites like Twitter, Google+, FourSquare, Pinterest and others". Overall the article is saying that over time they expect Facebook to give better analytics to greatly influence advertising and marketing as a whole. This is a huge step for another huge media platform that we have and it is only going to keep becoming more advanced and adding new aspects day by day. 

Works Cited  

Baym, Nancy K. "Making New Media Make Sense." Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010. 22-49. Print.

Williams, D. (2012, July 20). Facebook’s new metrics are changing the game for marketers. Retrieved February 7, 2017, from http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/facebook-s-metrics-changing-game-marketers/236218/