Austin Zhang's CSIT 155 - Spring 2025 Class Blog

The 7 business accounts I followed on my Facebook page were Panda Express, Uber Eats, Duolingo, Coca-Cola, Sprite, Pepsi, and YouTube. There are strategies involved regarding all seven of these businesses that can be either mutually beneficial or advantageous for us.  Panda Express: The reason why I chose to like the page of Panda Express is because of our similarities. Although they are a restaurant and we are a cuisine, both achieve the similar goal of serving Asian style food. As we may very well be competing for the same target customers and demographic, I believe that it would be very beneficial to keep close with competitors in order to potentially cling on to some internal or external secrets of success.  Uber Eats: I fully intend to allow companies such as Uber Eats to deliver our food to customers who prefer delivery. This will definitely help generate sales and can be mutually beneficial for both of us. Building a good relationship with food delivery companies is g...

      As Facebook continuously tracks media reach and engagement, these will both be important factors that will want to be consistently improving over time. As I post content regularly on YouTube, I pay pretty close attention to how the algorithm functions and can confidently say that engagement and reach are crucial aspects to track during social media posts. This can help let you know about all the little details such as viewer interest, average duration (if it's a video), click through rate, like-to-view ratios, and so much more.     Engagement and reach are important due to giving creators a scope and insight on their success. Being able to track how your videos are doing comes with benefits. If they are doing poorly, the algorithm (which includes engagement and reach statistics) can help guide you on ways to improve.           This will not be specific of course as it could only show that your content is not performing we...

As my fictitious business will be an Asian cuisine that focuses on the delicacies throughout the many cultures in Asia, I would definitely want our target market to be as widespread as possible. I understand that the food served as well as the restaurant name and style will definitely attract customers of Asian descent more due to cultural familiarity. This would be great, of course, but I would try to think of ways to market and make the restaurant family feel as inclusive as possible to people who may not be as familiar with the culture and food. I think the three main factors towards a successful food chain are great customer service, top-notch food quality, and smart advertisements. Since this will be fictitious, I won't be able to relay much information regarding the creation of a safe and familial atmosphere besides training the workers to perform in certain manners and passing it down to future employees. With that being said, what I will be targeting is finding ways to adv...

     I chose to observe the two sandwich businesses since I personally love eating Subway but have never heard of the other chain until today. This will help give me not only a deeper insight into chains that I'm respectively familiar and unfamiliar with, but also how size parity does not always affect product advertisement.      As for basic observations, the Subway website definitely appears to be more "bland", complementing the "less is more" motto with simple coloring and design. On the contrary, the Hungry Bear Deli website looks much more decorative and welcoming, with its great color blends and design. The website feels packed but in a very clean and not overwhelming way, while Subway has a lot of empty space that can easily be filled with the likes of enlarged images or even just simple coloring designs. The only relatively subtle difference I was able to notice was when you hover over section titles on the Deli, there's a cool effect that indicates...

     Developing a brand has been something that has never crossed my mind, but more so occurred naturally over time. As someone who owns a business, (although I view it more as a fortunate hobby) I'll be sharing my whole experience with all the shenanigans around it, the ups and downs, and how it came to be!     To begin, this business that I'm referring to is a YouTube channel that I started when I was just twelve years old back in 2019. I began with one of my middle school friends when we went through an intriguing phase of posting the games we play on the internet for people to see. At that young age, I was very interested in growing this channel to success and took a lot of influence from the creators I was watching. This led to many temporary brand creations through channel names, profile pictures, and styles of content. It was not until a couple years after the creation of my channel that I really stuck with a specific username and profile picture to prope...

For week 3, I commented on the posts of Jared Spurlock, Colby Parry, and Julia Hunter!

     For websites that I have a personal issue with, I'll start off with "https://sandiego.craigslist.org/". The three main problems that I noticed immediately is a lack of design, life, and direction. To begin with the critique on design, it lacks any sort of theme. Staring at it feels like reading a table of contents or scrolling through a Wikipedia page. Nothing particularly speaks out or "gives it any life" which may dissuade users from wanting to browse and explore the website, given their seemingly dismissive welcome. Additionally, since all the topics and subtopics are grouped together on one tight page, people may find it annoying to read through it all despite the separation and labels. It definitely seems like this website has all the necessary information down, so the only thing I would recommend is to add warm and easy-to-look-at decorations and life while maybe spacing texts out with an increase in font size! A second website that I found to be quit...

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/ Amazon is a huge business centered around the shipping of all sorts of products all throughout the world. Upon research, the biggest social media applications that Amazon uses is Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. These social media accounts were not linked to their official website and I had to search for it myself. When I checked their twitter, they do post advertisement skits and media regularly, however, engagement seems very low. YouTube, on the other hand, seems to take a different approach with less frequent posts but higher engagement and reactions. From what I'm seeing, the videos are a mixture of sneaky advertisements as well as what seems like guides and tutorials of some sort. Their other social media accounts seem to follow a similar trajectory to Twitter. Facebook: last posted 16 hours ago with 29 million followers. YouTube: last posted 4 weeks ago with 816k subscribers. Twitter: last posted 13 hours ago with 6 million followers....