Blog task 3a: Compare 3 Social networks – Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr

 You are what you share.
― C.W. Leadbeater, We Think: The Power Of Mass Creativity

While all conventional social media services are mostly text-intensive, some of them, particularly Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, have gone beyond text, and have introduced images as their building blocks. Consequently, these sites have gained immense popularity in the recent years, indicating successful entrance of image-based social networking sites (Mittal et al. 2013). Yet, according to social media marketing radar (Smart Insights 2012), Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr are categorised into different types of social media sites, namely social bookmarking, social streaming and social publishing.

 Pinterest

As an image-based social bookmarking media, Pinterest has gained a lot of attention from businesses that are in highly visual niches including fashion, food, photography and other artistic niches. Within 3 years since it was established in 2010, Pinterest has attained 48.7 million unique users. It describes itself as a visual discovery tool to collect ideas for projects and interests. Users can personalise their experience with Pinterest by visually bookmarking (called ‘pinning items’), sharing collections boards (called ‘creating boards’), and interacting with other members.

Instagram

Instagram is an online mobile photo sharing, video sharing and social networking service with 160 million monthly active users globally, 65 million photos uploaded every day and a billion likes per day. It enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters and a caption and then share them on a variety of social networking platforms, creating a wall of pictures that people can ‘like’ or comment on. Instagram makes it easy to create stunning photos that make individuals and ultimately businesses, look professional and creative.

Tumblr

As one of the most prevalent micro-blogging sites, Tumblr has become phenomenal in recent years. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make their own private blogs. By mid-January 2014, Tumblr has 166.4 millions of users and 73.4 billions of posts. Tumblr provides hybrid micro-blogging services: intermediate quality content and intermediate social interactions. Since Tumblr has a strong presence of photos, it is natural to compare it to other image-based social networks like Instagram and Pinterest

The basic differences between Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr:

• On Tumblr, one has a flexibility to post a short text, audio, image, and video, but Pinterest and Instagram are only restricted to images and videos. While all three sites have inclination toward image sharing and social networking, Tumblr is less of an image-bookmarking or image-sharing platform and more of micro-blogging tool. On other hand, Pinterest and Instagram allow texts and video posting but gives greater emphasis on image sharing (Taylor 2013, p. 25)

• Pinterest and Instagram interface is standard for every user and is unchangeable while Tumblr allows users to utilize a wide range of themes, edit pay layout, change header backgrounds and add widgets. Therefore, Pinterest and Instagram offers a high levels of professionalism and uniformity for businesses looking for these features while Tumblr’s versatility make it more popular for businesses who are looking to customise their page to make their brand more visible (Taylor 2013, p. 26)
• Tumblr and Instagram provide a single column display of images, Pinterest has a 5-column display, and thus a user can view more images on a single page on Pinterest. (Chang et. al. 2014)
• Pinterest emphasizes on discovery and curation of images rather than original content creation. While Instagram are majorly for content creators, Pinterest is for curators. People tend to use Instagram to deliver the content, but Pinterest to share the content with public thereafter (Mittal et al. 2013)
• Pinterest provides a strong commercial prospects by directly linking a pin to the commercial website where the product presented on the pin can be purchased. This accounts for a stronger e-commerce behavior on Pinterest, which Tumblr and Instagram do not provide. (Mittal et al. 2013)
• Tumblr and Pinterest also differ in terms of the target audience. Whereas Pinterest is used heavily by women in the age group of 25 and 44, Tumblr is targeted to younger people in the age group of 18 and 25 (Chang et. al. 2014)
• Although all three sites allow interaction among users, interaction in Pinterest and Instagram are more robust than they are in Tumblr because Tumblr encourages users to reblog posts they like but it does not encourage a two-way commenting approach across the site. This is a big limitation, especially for businesses that are seeking to establish more personal social connection with people in their niche markets (Taylor 2013, p. 27)

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How they can be used as part of an integrated marketing communication (IMC) strategy?

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) coordinates the elements of the promotional mix – advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion – to produce a customer focused message. (Mulhern 2009). For example, Instagram promotes customer engagement by giving companies perfect opportunities to show their customers a personal side of their business and tell their business stories. It also helps to build a level of trust and familiarity that allows people to connect with and business and can be used as a promotional tool for events (Leers 2014). In contrast, blogging services such as Tumblr offer firms the ability to connect with customers in a unique and personalized manner where everything from brand promotions to new product ideas can be effectively communicated (Singh et. al. 2008). Last but not least, Pinterest allows businesses to position themselves and gain positive word of mouth, referrals, and the opportunity to demonstrate expertise and credibility in any given area. Ultimately, it helps a business to establish the brand awareness through pictures and fulfill consumer’s expectations of authenticity (Leers 2014)

IMC brings all the available forms of communications and converts them into a continuous flow of solutions (Gonzalez 2012, p 35). To implement a successful IMC strategy, managers should include them in their marketing strategy by conveying a unified message starting with the website. Leers (2014) recommends to implement the Homeland/Embassy strategy for higher levels of traffic, ease of use for current and future customers following company’s various social networking platforms and a faster response time

REFERENCES

[1] Chang, Y., Tang, L., Inagaki, Y., & Liu, Y. , 2014, What is Tumblr: A Statistical Overview and Comparison, arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.5206.

[2] David B., 2013, How marketers use Pinterest and Instagram to win customers, The Guardian, 4 December, viewed at 13 September 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/04/how-marketers-use-pinterest-and-instagram-to-win-customers

[3] Gonzalez, L. Y., 2012, Social media in an integrated marketing communication strategy: Case: Off-road Finnmark in Alta, Norway, Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences

[4] Helen A., 2014, How to use Instagram as a content marketing tool, Power Content, 27 February, viewed at 13 September 2014, from http://www.powercontent.com.au/social-media/use-instagram-content-marketing-tool/

[5] Leers, A. 2014. Social Media Strategic Plan For Under Armour (Doctoral dissertation, Liberty University).

[6] Mittal, S., Gupta, N., Dewan, P., & Kumaraguru, P. 2013, The Pin-Bang Theory: Discovering The Pinterest World, arXiv preprint , arXiv:1307.4952.

[7] Mulhern, F., 2009, Integrated marketing communications: From media channels to digital connectivity. Journal of Marketing Communications, 15(2-3), 85-101.

[8] Singh, T., Veron-Jackson, L., & Cullinane, J., 2008, Blogging: A new play in your marketing game plan. Business Horizons, 51(4), 281-292.

[9] Smart Insights 2012, The Social Media Marketing Radar: Tap into the potential of niche social media communities, retrieved 14 September 2014, from http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/social-media-marketing-radar/

[10] Taylor, G., 2013,  Tumblr for business: The Ultimate Guide, Global & Digital.