Visual Platforms

Discuss!

Instagram appears to be oriented entirely around sharing photos, allowing for a short caption and user comments on each photo, and plug-ins to other popular social media platforms.  Tumblr looks to be super customizable and seems a lot less restrictive on the format and type of content posted, whether it be blog entries, photos, video… even literature and music.  Pinterest’s focus (at least for non-commercial entities) is pinning visual content, mostly from external websites, to virtual pinboards, which can be browsed and followed by other users.  Youtube… has videos.  Lots… of videos. 

What all these platforms have in common is a focus on the all-mighty Follow button: driving content to build an audience.

Tumblr definitely seem like it has the potential to be a good fit for creating and sharing bite-sized content of varying format for a service-oriented company.  While video content certainly has very high value, the business I’m using for the class is largely made-up, so I think attempting to produce believable Youtube videos that would be of any real value would be overly difficult.

Here are page post insights terms as defined by Facebook:

• Reach is simply the number of people who have seen a post on your page.
• Engaged Users are the number of people who clicked anywhere on your post.
• [People] Talking About This is defined as the number of people who have created a story from your Page post (Sharing, liking or commenting, answering a question, responding to an event, etc).
• Virality is the number of people who have created a story from your post as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it.

Businesses can use Facebook insights to identify content that effectively engages their customers, expending more effort on topics that their fans have interest in and reallocating resources away from content that isn’t as effective.  They will also benefit from analyzing how well their page posts are reaching their target market and how they can improve their content to reach the demographics they’re targeting.