WEEK 3: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Ruben Ochoa by Sofia Araya
By UCLA X469.21 Student Sofia Araya
Ruben Ochoa killed it so much as guest speaker at our UCLA class last week that almost one week later I’m still thinking about it (yes, I was procrastinating, and according to this TED talk that’s not such a bad thing to do).
Ruben stood out for me because he made me learn something new about almost every social media platform out there, and the various insights he provided exceeded my expectations for a class like this.
His approach for picking an audience or target market was incredibly refreshing. Instead of referencing the usual audience member descriptions (e.g., vegan mom, loves to shop, named her poodle “Penny,” etc.), he gave suggestions that went much deeper and made me think about how brands can benefit from their social media audience in ways that aren’t so obvious. The questions that I find the most interesting and that have the most potential to help a social media presence are: What’s interesting about the audience in relation to the situation, and what’s going on culturally that is relevant to them? There is so much information out there on your audience; you just have to know what to look for.
Having been in another social media class, I had heard about analytics and received an overview on how to use them — but Ruben went beyond the usual, expected level of information. I learned a lot about Twitter specifically, as it had never occurred to me that it is the platform with the most audience insights. I had no idea that you could learn just about EVERYTHING about your followers for free.