The Philantrepreneur Journal Vol2 Spring2016 | Page 18
Where practitioners and thought leaders share commentaries and insight
SIMPLE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES FOR 2016
Debbie Harris, MA
[email protected]
I
nstagram, Snapchat & Periscope – is it time? I look at the
“flavor of the month” platforms that come out and I am
often asked “what should I do with ______”? As you are
probably aware, younger people tend to be early adopters of
many of the social platforms/apps that come out. Instagram,
Snapchat and now Periscope has emerged. Instagram and
Snapchat have consistently grown even though both still have a
majority of users under age 29. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
investigate and use them for your business. It always depends
on your target market.
Let’s take a look at all three:
Instagram – this platform has consistently grown over the
past five years and in 2012 was purchased by Facebook for the
amazing sum of $1 billion in cash and stock. Looked upon as
yet another “teen” platform, it has matured and now as over 300
million users. Interestingly, the majority of Instagram users, at
present, are out of the United States but we continue to grow on
the platform as well. Not really a surprise to anyone, teenagers
consider it the most valuable social platform. While teenagers
might not be your target market, they are going to grow up to
be adult consumers. Think about adding Instagram to your social media marketing strategy.
Snapchat – this is the one that caused such a furor when
it first arrived because young people were taking “inappropriate” selfies and sending them off. Presumably, these photos
would disappear after a few seconds but the challenge was, you
could save them and then share them. Much was made of this
as I was working on a platform at the time that got me involved
in cyber-bullying, sexting and nude selfies that teenagers and
younger kids were sharing with this app. Now Snapchat has
over 200 million users and yes, they are predominately under
the age of 34 and mostly female. Should you incorporate this
platform into your social media strategy? Time and budget are
always an issue. I would skip Snapchat unless you are really mar-
keting to a young female demographic.
Periscope – Periscope was purchased by Twitter in January
of last year and is an application that allows you to share live
video from your smartphone. It’s primary audience is the 16 –
24 year old age group but that is only part of t