Important Tactics for Social Media Optimization

This week in class we discussed how social media impacts businesses and studied what companies do to make themselves stand out from the competition.  I started thinking about the companies that I pay attention to or that piques my interest when browsing the web.  I ended up choosing Old Spice as my subject to write about in our discussion board because I had no brand loyalty or preference in the products they sold, but am now a customer simply because I like them more than their competitors because I think their advertisements are funny.  

Like many people my age, I have a number of social media accounts that I am active on currently including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Vine.  Although I do not personally post on the majority of these sites very often (Instagram most frequently), I do use these applications several times a day to see what my followers/users I follow are up to.  Facebook and Twitter posts capture my attention most often when a video or photo is tagged to a post.  Instagram and Vine are platforms that run 100% on a photo or video for every post and have become extremely popular.  I came across an article that titled "Why Images and Photos Rule Social Media" and round some interesting facts on the topic.  Below you can see a chart the article featured that shows what is most important to include in a social media post to generate interest.

I was really surprised to see that videos scored so low in the important tactics used for optimizing content.  The article did state that "videos are 12 times more shared than links and text posts combined, compared with photos, which are just two times more likely to be shared than text updates" and that photos can often stop users in their tracks like videos but can be viewed at work and do not require sound.

The more I read about Social Media's impact on a company's marketing campaign, the more I come to realize that the advertisement industry has come a long way from print ads and now require skills that connect with consumers on a personal level through these platforms.  I'm excited to see how it continues to evolve!