The 4 Horsemen of Visual Social Media

FIRST....I am shocked by my research on Tumblr! 
Given my experience of seeing mostly magazine, food, and clothing sites, I was convinced that Tumblr's demographics would be mostly Caucasian/Women/18-34. Well, I was WRONG- Tumblr's highest demographics are MEN/18-24/Asian & Hispanic! 

Now, back to the assignment...
Time to Compare

YouTube seems to be the big-papa of Visual Social Media. With the highest number of users, 490 million and over 2 million views daily, YouTube is undeniable. I have a difficult time imagining what company wouldn't benefit from a YouTube channel.
Pros for Business:

• + Popular: 490 Million Users & 2 million daily views.
• + Demographic estimate: Predominantly male, studies have shown men prefer videos. 
• + International Accessibility: On servers around the world. 
• + Virality: The "holy grail" of internet marketing, going viral, is immensely more possible with the use of YouTube due to Mama Google (owner of YouTube). If your video is gaining popularity, Google will add SEO points to your page, giving you more visibility in search engines. 
• + Interest: People are more likely to stay on your webpage longer if they are watching videos. 
• + B2C Connection: Consumers feel like they "know" the business by seeing videos of the product (i.e., demonstrations, How Its Made, etc), speeches by the owner (i.e., Apple Keynote speeches), and more. 
• Tagging: YouTube uses keywords for you to add to your video for better search capability in their search engines. 

Instagram is a phone app for photographs and recently, now short video clips. NEWS ALERT: Instagram will be adding advertisements, which is a mild disappointment as a casual user, but from a business minded aspect, I'm interested to see how they go about this. I do believe that these advertisements may lower some peoples interest in Instagram, but we will have to wait and see how it fends.
Pros for Business:

• + Popular: 86 Million Users. 120,000 new blogs are created daily, creating 18 billion page views per month. 
• + Demographic estimate: Women- studies have shown women respond and enjoy images most. 
• + B2C Connection: Consumers can "get to know" the company better through "Behind the Scenes" photos, action photos, action video clips, and more. 
• + Interest: If one person sees and likes one of your photos in their photo feed, then they are likely to go to your page and see what else you have posted. 
• + Tagging: Instagram also uses hashtags to connect topics throughout the realms. 

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Like YouTube, Twitter is owned by a top search engine company, Yahoo. Although, Yahoo is the 3rd search engine in traffic, Tumblr's affiliation can help SEO on Yahoo for company's with Tumblr accounts. 
Pros for Business:

• + Popular: 50 Million Users
• + Demographics: As I vented earlier, Tumblr's demographics boggled my mind. Demographic highs are Men/18-24/Asian & Hispanic. This is actual eye opening to me that I may start a Tumblr account for my business, in that our demographic is men, 18-34, and not specific to any race. 
• + B2C Connection: Tumblr is a type of hybrid of YouTube, Instagram, and a Webpage- you can write blog material, post videos and photos. 
• + Typical Users: There are 3 types of blogs that are more successful than others: fashion, large websites and publishing/broadcasting media. 

Pinterest is a content sharing service that allows members to "pin" images, videos and other objects to their virtual "pinboard".
Pros for Business:

• + Popular: 11 Million Users. 1.36 Million users daily.  
• + Turnaround: Second only to Facebook, Pinterest drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter and YouTube combined. This is very positive & hopefully lucrative for companies successfully using the website. 
• + Demographics: Women/ Mothers/ 28% of users have $100,000 annual average income. 
• + B2C Connection: I don't think that Pinterest connects the user to the company as much as YouTube or Tumblr, but it does let the consumer visually see exactly what the company sells. 
• + Virality: Though these images don't go viral onto the internet and major search engines, they do have a way of going "viral" within the Pinterest realm. When one image is pinned to someones board, their followers see it pop up on theirs, and those pins that are extremely popular and pinned a lot, go in the Popular category for all to see. 
• + Interest: Those who pin, spend a lot of time on the site. From my perspective, it's addictive. 

Which would work best my product or service?

Our service is manufacturing welding equipment. My goal in using our social media is to get consumers to "know" us, create brand recognition. When potential consumers even think about welding, I want them to immediately think "Pro Spot".

My company currently has a YouTube channel and Instagram:

YouTube: We are showing promotional videos and demonstration videos of our products.
Instagram: My goal with Instagram is to get people to constantly see our name "Pro Spot" when they see anything involving body shop repair. I post images of our products, weld art, interesting welding gear, and short videos of our manufacturing facility making parts as a "How Its Made".

What this lesson taught me: Aside from great information on each site that I didn't know about, I learned that I may be interested in starting a Tumblr account for my company. Previously I thought that Tumblr was geared more towards a female audience for fashion etc, I've learned that the demographics actually favor my customer base more. I would need to find enough information to make my Tumblr account a place where people go to learn about car body repair or car restoration. My only hesitation is finding material to post.