My original research idea was a vague title about how social media affects people’s perception. I decided that this was too broad an idea because social media can affect people’s perception on various things, like themselves, their job, their friends. The list can go on and on. Instead I narrowed down my topic to how social media marketing impacts consumers audiences. It’s my hope that with this topic, I will be able to explore the direct impact on how social media marketing and its various marketing schemes  seem to change or challenge normal marketing practices and how the consumer deals with them. A big topic I would like to cover in my paper is how influencer marketing on social media changes consumer opinion on a brand or an item.

To try and find scholarly and peer reviewed articles to use as my base of research for this paper; I found that EBSCOHost was a really great database, along with DOAJ, and lastly GALE ONEFILE. I liked how easy it was to search with the keywords I associated with my research idea in these databases and found really relevant information geared towards my topic. Some key words I used to find some beginning research reads were: Influencers, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Platforms, Digital Marketing. I have been fortunate to have had EBSCOhost back in high school, so I knew when that was provided as a resource from our college that I would be using it, as I am most familiar with how EBSCO works. I then chose DOAJ based off of the information that this database was geared towards, I figured having abstract articles would allow me more examples to gather more information on my topic. The database of GALE ONEFILE was the one I wasn’t sure about, as it was listed as a computer science database. However, when I entered my keyword searches, it pulled up a list of really interesting article titles.