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)