Marketing Communication Strategy: Social Network

Social networks are growing faster than ever, and they have brought many new opportunities for businesses to optimize their brand reputations, and taking the lead in the market. Today I will compare three picture centric social networks, and how they can be used as a part of an integrated marketing strategy.

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks at the moment. It is a network that specified for smartphone users, with the features of taking pictures, edit them in various ways, and post them on the network. The pictures will instantly be linked to other popular social network such as Facebook or Twitter so that the user’s friends can also see it. Besides those, Instagram also let users in its community follow each other, tag peoples into photos and videos, let they comment and “heart” (like) the photos similar to other social network. The difference of Instagram in comparison to other social network is probably their target users, which are smartphone users mainly; and the pictures that users share are more personal, compare to Flickr or Pinterest. Since Facebook bought Instagram in 2013, the network has welcomed even more users and it has grown to become top 8 of the most popular platform in 2014 (Stelzner, 2014).

Pinterest is another commonly used social network with main feature of uploading, and sharing pictures. At first, it can be seen that Instagram and Pinterest seems to be similar at photo sharing platform; however, there are a number of differences between these social networks. Pinterest’s images can be linked to other landing pages, let users “Repin” the content to optimize its reach, and the “Pin It” button to allow users to share the photos they like from anywhere.

One interesting thing about Pinterest is that more than 80% of its users are women (Moore, 2014), and they are more active compare to men.

A bit different from other two social networks, Tumblr is a platform for microblogging with short content that readers can capture the whole idea of the post within a few seconds. It let users share almost anything on its platform. Text, photos, quote, links, music, and videos are all included. The network also let users customize everything on their page/blog, from the colours to the theme’s HTML. Its users are also able to write long-form blogging as normal blog sites, but they are not very common. Another distinguishing feature of Tumblr is that it is a land of animated pictures (GIF), which is something that other social networks have not been able to compete. According to Smith (2013), Tumblr users are generally young and very engaging by spending a large amount of time on this network.

Social Network for Businesses

For businesses, social networks are the new communication channel to gain advantages in the market. Not only that business can increase their exposure to the market, but they can also boost traffic to their websites, develop loyal fans, gain market insight, improve sales and search rankings on the internet. For social networks with visual-content sharing platform such as Instagram, businesses can create a photo sharing contest of users who had a trip, a picture with the company’s product, or simply a selfie contest. It would increase the engagement, as well as the brand awareness of the community towards the business’s brand. With Pinterest, things would be a bit more difficult for men targeted businesses to focus, as 80% of the users are women. However, to fashion companies, Pinterest is a gold mine as it delivers them the perfect place where their targeted audiences gather and have conversation. Businesses using Pinterest can share the new product on their website and let the people do the word of mouth marketing via “Pin It” and “Repin” buttons to their friends to see. Tumblr would be a social network for businesses to engage with their users easier even when they are considered to be not appealing in other social networks, as they communicate and interact with young, engaging audiences, and they also can customize their page to become more likable for the users. In overall, each of the social network has different features for businesses to take advantage of, depend on the type and use of business, they can apply different marketing communication strategy.

References

Instagram, accessed 14 September 2014, http://instagram.com/

Pinterest, accessed 14 September 2014, http://www.pinterest.com/

Tumblr, accessed 14 September 2014, https://www.tumblr.com/

Moore, RJ 2014,”Pinners be Pinnin’: How to Justify Pinterest’s $3.8B Valuation”, The Data Point, viewed 15 September 2014, http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2014/05/07/pinners-be-pinnin-how-to-justify-pinterests-3-8b-valuation/

Stelzner, MA 2014, 2014 “SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETINGINDUSTRY REPORT”, viewed 14 September 2014, http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2014.pdf