WHICH PLATFORM?
Here’s what our experts had to say about some of the Internet’s most popular social media tools.
FACEBOOK:
With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the behemoth of social media platforms. Kristelle Siarza, founder of digital communications and marketing firm Siarza Social Digital, said Facebook “is mainstream media now.” “If a client comes to us and they don’t have a Facebook page, there are some serious implications there,” she said. “Facebook should be a part of every strategy.”
INSTAGRAM:
Facebook also owns Instagram, an image and video-sharing service with an audience that tends to skew younger than Facebook’s. Maurizio Leo, founder of The Perfect Loaf baking website, says an organization’s Instagram posts not only need to be aesthetically pleasing, but also carefully curated to avoid irritating followers. “I treat my Instagram as a behind-thescenes, personal thing,” said Leo. “You don’t always want to come across as sales-y. You want to create a natural sense of people getting together around something that resonates with them.”
TWITTER:
Twitter is a news driven platform that allows users to comment on and share messages. Though some tweets have images and videos, many consist only of text. Deena Crawley, marketing director of Dion’s Pizza, says the company has found success on Twitter not only with its news updates, but also with the occasional foray into memes: a kind of inside joke that is widely shared and sometimes personalized.
PINTEREST:
Like Instagram, Pinterest’s content is pictures and videos, but the site is more focused on users collecting and storing actionable “ideas.” Jessie Tootle, director of content and advertising at Lady Boss, says the company has had success reaching out to its audience on Pinterest with recipe and workout posts.
SNAPCHAT:
Snapchat, the mobile app for which images and messages are only available to users for a finite period, is big with teens and twentysomethings. Siarza says she uses Snapchat to create “a fear of missing out.” For example, when she represented a mud volleyball event, Siarza uploaded copious images to show young people how much fun the event would be.
LINKEDIN:
University of New Mexico Anderson School of Business Professor John Benavidez calls LinkedIn “underrated” in terms of its reputation as a marketing tool. This Microsoft-owned site is focused on professional networking, and many of its users are job hunters and recruiters. But Benavidez says he’s consistently surprised by the amount of engagement his LinkedIn posts garner, and strongly suggests organizations in business-to-business industries, sales and real estate include it in their social media strategy.