As social media becomes more and more of a marketing tool for all kinds of companies, many smaller, niche companies generate most of their business from their social media accounts. Me and My Golf is a small company started by two young golf professionals, Piers Ward and Andy Proudman. The small business offers coaching videos for general advice and tips as well as personalized golf swing analysis. They have a strong presence on Instagram in the golf community and are well known by many of the PGA’s top golfers including Rory Mcilroy, DJ, Speith, Fowler, and many more. They have 130 thousand followers and have great ways of getting people involved including giveaways, free videos, and fun interactive content. While this company is still small, I believe that is where it should be. Golf is slowly declining and Me and My Golf is making it seem fun and less difficult than most believe it is. They are promoting a great game and making money doing so. 
Author Archive for hanglitersr17
In 2005, David and Catherine Cook, both high school students, came up with an idea for an online yearbook as opposed to the traditional hard copy. This brother and sister team started “myYearbook,” it became popular with schools who would pay to have their yearbook on the site. Over the years however, David and Catherine would figure out ways to expand myYearbook’s reach including making it available for older demographics, introducing online chatting, gaming, and moving into different countries as well. They ended up merging with Quepasa Corporation and renamed their company to MeetMe. Today MeetMe is worth over 100 million dollars. This is just another example of how a simple, yet innovative, idea can be extremely successful and make a dent in any market. 
A new game hit the market on July 25, 2017. This game was Fortnite a co-op sandbox survival video game developed by People Can Fly and Epic Games, the latter also publishing the game. Since published it’s users have skyrocketed and is now one of the most hot games on the market. It is still in beta testing and isn’t fully released until 2018 but it has already amassed over 10 million players since its launch. Gamers are quickly becoming engulfed in the exciting play that Fortnite offers. Millennials are the target customer and rightly so; colleges are being taken over by Fortnite and it is now uncommon to walk down a hall and not see someone playing. Fortnite will continue to grow and be successful as more and more millennials catch a whiff of this exciting game.
Spatty, as seen on Shark Tank, was started by Cheryl Rigdon. The company started by selling a product called the Spatty which is basically a spatula with an extremely small blade that can fit into makeup bottles and containers to pull whatever is left, out. It is also used to scrape the last of the peanut butter or jelly out of the containers to get your money’s worth and not waste the stuff you couldn’t previously reach. As great as an idea this product is, it is not as great as what Cheryl is doing with the company’s profits. She sees a need in third world countries for clean water and is donating a percentage of her profits towards sustainable clean water for those countries in need. The social impact that companies like Spatty can make are incalculable. Spatty continues to be successful and has a whole family of products including the Spatty Daddy which is a bigger version of the original Spatty.
The Spatty Family of products
In 2011, Tipsy Elves was founded by Evan Mendelsohn and Nick Morton. It started as a seasonal business for goofy and ugly Christmas Sweaters. In the first year of business they had $370,000 in website sales and the next year proceeded to reach almost $1 million in sales. With a booming business and bright plans for the future the two young founders took their idea to Shark Tank in 2013 where they received an investment from Robert Herjavec for 10% of their company. It has since become the most profitable investment that Robert has made in his history on Shark Tank. In 2014, their revenue was close to $12 million. The success of this funky company is mostly on their Christmas season sales of the ugly Christmas sweaters, however they have also introduced Halloween wear, beach wear, and ski wear.
A strange idea for a business turned into a multi-million dollar one because Evan and Nick found a demand for ugly Christmas sweaters that no one else saw. If they can stay focused on the Christmas sweaters and not overt a lot of energy on the other less important products they feature, they will continue to grow until Tipsy Elves is at every Christmas party in the world.
One of the Most Popular Products
As social media has become increasingly popularized in this generation, companies are using all social media platforms to market and reach customers. However, reaching the public and getting activity on their accounts turns out to be a lot harder than they thought. A lot of companies didn’t understand how people moved through social media: what caught their eyes, what they click on, what they care about. But people who are regularly using social media know how people use it. Millennials are, for the most part, masters of social media. Many use various social media sites every day and some have millions of followers just because they post content that the users want to see.
Because millennials are so knowledgeable about social media, companies are looking to hire millennials to coach them on how to manage their accounts or to completely run the account. This is a great opportunity for millennials to aid companies in reaching the market and getting the most out of traffic through their accounts.
Tracy Samantha Schmidt who is 32, is a social media educator and digital marketing consultant. She says social media coaching is a low-cost, potentially lucrative business idea. She has helped various companies with their social medias and is getting paid for it. If you use social media every day chances are you know more about social media than the average person. Why not put that knowledge to good use and make money for it? Start small and help a local company or friends company. Then use those experiences to work your way up the ladder and maybe someday you could be the Social Media Manager at a Fortune 500 company.