Many different social media platforms started as just places for regular people to share their life and interests with other users. Currently many social media sites have been almost taken over by advertisements and posts made by big companies. A lot of companies have their own pages that people actively follow, because they produce content that might be even something completely different than the product or service they sell. Having a presence in social media is a priority in the marketing plan of many companies and when done right, this kind of advertising without actual ads might be a very succesfull business move.
Since I am currently unemployed, I chose to write about 3 platforms that I used for work when I was a marketing trainee and 2 applications I use currently every day in my free time. I used to work as a marketing trainee for a fiber-optic internet company after I graduated from university of applied sciences. My job included making social media posts, operating Q&A lives on different platforms, preparing live events, making different kinds of ordering forms etc. The main applications I used were Facebook, Zoom and Youtube.
Facebook was mainly used to make posts to inform the customers and to give them an easy and approachable way to get in touch and ask questions. I used to make posts about different holidays, about possible live events and about how the building of the fiber-optic cables are coming along in certain areas. Because the company I worked in had operations in many different locations in Finland, they also had multiple different Facebook pages for all the different locations. This was pretty tedious and soon after I left the marketing department, there were some big changes and a lot of these pages were connected into one etc. I also used to operate Q&A (Questions & Answers) lives on the Facebook pages. I would create an event inside the page and people who were interested could follow it and get notifications when the live was on. The live itself was in Zoom, but I set it up so that it broadcasted on the Facebook page. People could then comment their questions and the hosts would answer them. More about this under the Zoom – title.
I felt like Facebook was a very good platform for this company to use. It reached a lot of people and sparked conversations and questions from them. The company also did paid ads on Facebook and those usually reached some of the customers the ad was relevant to, thanks to the advertising tools. Ads can be targeted by location, age group etc. so it was easy to get the right group to see the ad. The problem with advertising on Facebook is that there are so many ads when you scroll on the front page, and yours just might get lost in the sea of ads. The traffic from Facebook ads to the website were usually pretty low and especially when there were multiple different pages for locations, it just wasn’t very efficient. The posts and lives reached good amounts of people and also received good feedback.
Zoom
Like I mentioned before, I organised Q&A lives through Zoom to Facebook. I created a live space in Zoom and invited the speakers to join. Because audience couldn’t join the Zoom-side of things, we had a chance to go through things and prepare before going live on Facebook. Zoom also offers an option to record the live so that it can be posted and viewed after it has ended. There weren’t a lot of live-viewers usually, but the recordings got good amounts on plays so the option to save them was very useful. Zoom is also very easy to use and you can tweak how the layout looks. For example, you can hide the participants who are not talking and make the active talker bigger on the screen. You can join Zoom meetings with mobile devices or PC’s and you don’t have todownload the app to join meetings. Also a lot of public meetings or seminars don’t require you to sign in to a Zoom account, but that depends on how the meeting is set up by the organisers.
Youtube
The company I worked in used Youtube to post different kinds of informational videos for example about the building progress or about the benefits of fiber-optic compared to other methods. The Q&A lives were also posted on Youtube sometimes. Youtube also has different kinds of advertisement possibilities. The company made targeted ads for areas in which they were planning to build a fiber-optic network if there was enough interest. The ad had a link to a form in which customers could fill in their information if they were interested, similar to the ads they did in Facebook as well.
The benefit of posting videos on Youtube is that when videos are hosted there, they can be shared on other platforms very easily either as a link or an embedded video.
Instagram is a social media platform that I use the most in my personal life. I joined Instagram pretty soon after it came out so I’ve had an account for a long time. I follow all kinds of accounts, from my friends’ personal accounts to tattoo artists and meme pages. I have 2 accounts, one is my personal account and the other is a shared account for a DJ collective that me and my friend are in. I rarely post anything on my personal account, I mostly just use and post to the stories. The DJ-account is more active and has livestream schedules and pictures & videos of us playing sets.
Instagram is my most used platform because I like seeing what people do in their day to day lives. I also follow a lot of different kinds of artists, so I love seeing their work on my front page. I also see a lot of upcoming events on Instagram and some events you can only get in if you contact the organisers in the private messages! The negative side of Instagram (and many other social medias) is the picture it creates of other peoples lives. People post mostly about the positive and good stuff in their lives, so it might create an idea that “oh this person lives a perfect life, why isn’t my life like that”. It’s very easy to start comparing your own life to others in an app like that. I personally have stopped following people who make me feel bad about any aspects of my life, like my body or lifestyle choices or whatever.
TikTok
TikTok is an app I use a LOT. The reason it is such a popular app is how well the algorithm forms and builds based on the users preferences. Most of the videos I come across on TikTok are videos that I wanted to see and enjoyed seeing. I find new music through TikTok, I see cute videos of animals, I see funny videos, I see videos that have to do with politics that interest me etc. There is a lot of content on the app and that’s also why it is so addicting. Theres a lot of negative things to say about TikTok like the addictiveness, the questionable content you might find, the sometimes dangerous “challenges” that spread across the platform, the cyberbullying and mean comments etc. the list goes on. But it is also entertaining and in some cases even educational. For companies, TikTok can also be a goldmine of advertisement. It is a very different platform from other social medias, so if you want your company to have a presence in TikTok you really need to know what you’re doing. The algorithm is also a very tricky thing, because some videos might become viral and receive millions of views sometimes pretty much randomly. Some people have TikTok to thank for their whole careers that might have started because of one video that went viral.
I think TikTok is a very interesting and unique platform and even with all the negative things about it, it’s probably just gonna keep growing and I am probably going to continue using it. I might put a time limit on the app though…
This was an interesting assingnment and it really made me think about how much different social media platforms are used in different work settings. A lot of platforms offer options that are spesifically made to be used by companies for marketing or other purposes. I looked at these platforms from a marketing viewpoint, but there are so many other ways to utilise them in a workplace setting. I will have to take a peek at some of the other students’ blogs to see if they’ve approached this from a different point of view.