Ask any business which is the best platform to use for social media marketing, and what’s the betting on their reply?
Well, obviously the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will come out on top as you would expect. It’s natural enough that businesses would gravitate towards these platforms as they have such massive worldwide audiences. If any business engages with users on these platforms then they should, all things being equal, get some sort of return on the time and the resources expended.
However, the social media never stands still for long: new platforms and applications are coming onto the market all the time, and some of these newer entrants are taking the market by storm. A recent report from eMarketer has discovered that social media marketing campaigns are no longer the sole preserve of the big three: businesses are increasingly turning to smaller burgeoning platforms to maximise their growing popularity. What’s particularly interesting about the study is that it highlights how businesses are increasingly using specific platforms to target specific demographics.
One particular platform that stands out is Pinterest, the pinboard-styled social photo sharing service that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The study found that unique traffic to Pinterest has grown rapidly over the course of a year, with 11.7 million users heading to the website in January alone. To put that into some sort of perspective it needs to be remembered that the platform had a mere 400,000 users in May, 2010, and has since grown massively. The photo-laden social network has become especially popular among women, who use it to share different forms of web content. Businesses have quite rightly spotted the potential of the platform and are now targeting that specific demographic.
Another platform that catches the eye is Tumblr, the micro-blogging sharing website.
Tumblr’s growth has also been phenomenal year-over-year, and this has given many businesses the reason and motivation to use the website as part of their social media marketing strategy. Similar in many ways to Pinterest, Tumblr relies heavily on visual content, with users sharing photos, text, links and music. Businesses are targeting the platform when they wish to appeal to a younger, more web-savvy audience.
According to eMarketer, Tumblr has proved to be especially popular with media companies and fashion brands.
The reasons are actually pretty straightforward when you start to think about them. Any businesses with news content marketing campaigns can use the engaging platform to share images, which can link back to a primary website to boost traffic even further. The growing use of visual content is becoming increasingly important for any business that is looking to boost its SEO and increase its overall engagement with its audience. Even Google is now using an image search feature that allows users to preview related image searches, and therefore places a much larger focus on photo metadata to drive SEO.
