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)

Social media as a new marketing channel: Case of Dumb Ways To Die

Safety PSAs are gloomy and tedious and largely ignored by young people hardwired to resist them—except when they’re irresistibly fun and impossible not to share with friends. McCann Australia managed just such an evolution of the genre with “Dumb Ways to Die,” its animated train-safety spot for the Melbourne Metro. The three-minute music video shows adorable blobs making the stupidest decisions ever—messing with animals, sticking forks in toasters, eating superglue, etc.—leading to all sorts of gruesome, fatal accidents. The dumbest way to die, the ad suggests at the end, is by being careless around trains.

“The idea for a song started from a very simple premise: What if we disguised a worthy safety message inside something that didn’t feel at all like a safety message?” said McCann executive creative director John Mescall. “So we thought about what the complete opposite of a serious safety message would be and came to the conclusion it was an insanely happy and cute song.”

Within 24 hours of its launch on 16 November 2012, the Dumb Ways to Die song reached the top 10 chart of iTunes and was ranked number six on the singer/songwriter category on the global iTunes chart just 48 hours later.The video ‘Dumb ways to Die has now amassed close to 86 million views and 4.4 million shares. In July 2013, Dumb Ways to Die was still the fourth most shared ad of the month. Supported by an integrated advertising campaign, it spawned a plethora of global parodies and spin-offs with over 30 million combined views, attracting massive global media attention for Metro Trains and its safety message