Which Social Media Tools Reach
Audiences Effectively?
A picture is worth a thousand
words. Never has that been more true than with social media. Sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr
are built around images rather than text.
This visual marketing revolution includes more than six billion photos
published each month, worldwide (CITE).
Even social networking sites that were built around words, like Twitter,
include image sharing. Pretty pictures,
funny memes, graphic mashups guarantee more user engagement on sites. In 2013, more than half of user activity was
image uploads (Ionescu, 2013) .
It makes sense that the most effective social media tools are those that
capitalize on images. According to
Coleman “….visuals have been linked to increased attention and involvement” (2006).
This tool would be great for
listing geographic resources, like support groups, historical societies or
health centers. The images are really
just a place holder and hard to see in detail, but they give the individual
pins a more finished look which I think would encourage more sharing of links
among users.
Next I tried
Tumlbr. I admit, I like this tool much better. It is kind of like a dressed up,
grown up version of Facebook. You can post images, audio, links and text and
there are no ads to clutter the layout. It is popular with artists and those
looking to express themselves in a creative format. https://www.tumblr.com/blog/dandelionwine76 Tumblr is just ….pretty. However, for commercial purposes, I don’t think it would be
the best format for getting a message out. Users on Tumblr follow personal interests and
I didn’t see a way that they would be exposed to other areas, like a “What’s
Trending Now…” list that other social networking sites use.
My freelance job
requires that I have an active Twitter account, but I am rarely active on that
particular social networking site. Instead, I use Hootsuite to post all my
latest articles in one foul swoop to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For
this experiment I thought I’d try posting a tweet with an image (something I
didn’t know you could do until this week’s assignment). As much as I don’t like Twitter personally, I
do think it is effective for relying messages to a large and diverse audience. And
as I already mentioned, messages that include an image are more likely to get
clicked on. https://twitter.com/Abt_Restaurants
Images can make people laugh and cry. They can shock and motivate people to action.
You don’t need to think too much when looking at an image. It can encapsulate a message that would
otherwise be ignored by the masses. This
visual form of communication will continue to grow and evolve with social media
and I suspect be a major way businesses, organizations and individuals
communicate in the future (Ionescu, 2013) .
Works Cited
Coleman, R. (2006). The effects of visuals on ethical
reasoning: what's a photograph worth to journalists making moral decisions? Journalism
& Mass Communication Quarterly, 835-850.
Ionescu, N. (2013). Online political communication:
the role of image upload on facebook . Romanian Journal of Journalism &
Communication , 53-58.
New Media Tools . (2014, October 8). Retrieved from Aids.Gov:
http://www.aids.gov/using-new-media/tools/
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