Student entrepreneurs use social media to promote businesses

When Ethan Jones gets home from class, he gets on Facebook and Twitter like many students. But he doesn’t use these platforms for fun -- rather, he operates a business based almost 3,000 miles away.

According to a USA TODAY article, many entrepreneurs find ways to promote their businesses using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

As these platforms become more and more important in the business world, social media courses have sprung up at universities nationwide. Southern New Hampshire University offers a degree in social media and San Francisco State University has a social marketing program.

But social media is an ordinary skill for most college students, said Jones, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. He certainly did not take any classes, and it appears he did not need it.

Jones planned a 400-person party at a local venue after his high school graduation in Salem, Ore., in 2011. The event made a profit, and demand grew for more events in different cities, he said.

In response, Jones founded Elixir Productions LLC, a company that coordinates primarily music events. In 2011, the company planned 10 events in Oregon for high school and college students. Currently, he is coordinating a concert at the University of Oregon featuring the rap artist Tyga.

Jones coordinates the “big picture” planning from Philadelphia with the help of his girlfriend in Eugene, Ore. Using social media like Facebook and Twitter, he oversees his employees on the West Coast. Without the help of technology, he said Elixir Productions would be impossible.

“I can’t be there in person, so online promotion is what drives the whole business,” Jones said. “It’s a living case study of social media accomplishing things that couldn’t be done in the off-line world.”

Jones said that online identity is crucial to successful social media usage, and that users should let their personality show in their posts. He regularly posts from his personal Twitter account as well as networks using his Elixir Productions account.

“We’re just starting to see the beginnings of social media,” he said. “I follow big brands and see how they use social media, and they are constantly innovating and changing how to use these platforms.”

Matt Triana, a senior at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, hopes his business can use social media to change the world.

Triana and his two brothers, Scott and Brad, are co-founders of modernADVOCATE, an online store. The brothers created the company in August after Scott returned from a trip to Indonesia, where he was struck by the dire living conditions that many people there faces.

Styled like TOMS Shoes, modernADVOCATE is a for-profit venture that donates proceeds to various non-profits and causes. The company currently sells three different cotton t-shirts. Portions of the profit from two of the shirts are helping fund the construction of a medical facility in Nepal. All of the proceeds of another shirt goes towards the Alzheimer’s Campaign in recognition of their grandfather who suffered from the disease.

Matt acts as the company president and uses Facebook, Twitter and blogs to spread awareness of their business and cause. That awareness, he said, has spread worldwide.

“On our Facebook page, we have fans from the UK, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Malaysia, all over,” Matt said. “We can spread our message of corporate responsibility internationally, which is huge.”

The future holds many options for modernADVOCATE, Matt said, but he hoped someday to have a full line of apparel and an online marketplace where artists could sell their work for good causes.

“We don’t use social media just to build a community and we don’t see our customers are just customers,” Matt said. “They are fellow advocates.”

The company will be a success, he said, when others pick up on the idea and launch philanthropic businesses of their own.

“We’ll know the movement has taken hold when we see our fans starting companies that try to fix this world we live in, rather than making money for the sake of making money,” he said.

Emily Atteberry is a Spring 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.