institutional use of social media | InforMedia Services (IMS)

Throw in LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and region specific social networks like Vkontakte and Sina Weibo and WeChat, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s online but isn’t on social media.

What has led to the rise of these social networks? What kind of people do they attract?

What is their psychology? What kind of content do they like to consume? And most importantly for bloggers and marketers – what works, what doesn’t on social media?

Facebook has become the ‘home base’ for most people online. While they may or may not use other networks, a majority maintain a presence on Facebook.

Popular: Used by 72% of all adult internet users in America.
More women users: 77% of online female users are on Facebook.
Younger audience: 82% of all online users between 18-29 are on Facebook
USA (14%), India (9%) and Brazil (7%) form the three largest markets.

Twitter’s quick flowing ‘info stream’ attracts an audience that swings younger and is mostly urban/semi-urban.

Younger: Used by 37% of all online users between 18 and 29.
Educated: 54% of users have either graduated college, or have some college experience.
Richer: 54% of online adults who make over $50,000+ are on Twitter.

nstagram recently overtook Twitter to become the second largest social network. Pew estimates that 26% of all online adults are on Instagram in the US.

More women than men: 29% of all online women are on Instagram, vs. only 22% of all men.
Overwhelmingly younger: 53% of all 18-29 year olds are on Instagram.
Less educated: Only 24% of Instagram users are college graduates, while 31% have some college experience – fitting since its audience is largely younger.

Google+ is a mysterious beast. It is ubiquitous, yet doesn’t attract nearly a tenth of the attention as Instagram or Facebook. Some marketers swear by it, while others are busy proclaiming its death.

More male: 24% of all online men are active users of Google+. For women, this number is 20%.
Younger users: 27% of all 16-24 year olds online are active members of Google+. In contrast, only 18% and 14% of 45-54 and 55-64 year olds are active on Google+ at the moment.
Large non-US user base: Only 55% of Google+ users are American. 18% are Indian and 6% are Brazilian. One reason for this international user base is Android’s popularity outside the US (since Google+ is baked right into Android).
Even income distribution: According to GlobalWebIndex.net, 22% of people in bottom 25% of income earners are on Google+. For the top 25% of income earners, this number is 24%, while for the mid 50% earners, this number is 23%. This means that nearly all levels of income earners are nearly equally represented on Google+.

Pinterest’s visual nature makes it a fantastic marketing tool for B2C businesses. And it’s got the potential to drive a large amount of traffic to your blog if you have a solid strategy.

Here’s what you should know about Pinterest demographics:

Overwhelmingly female: 42% of all online female users are on Pinterest, vs. only 13% of men.
Older audience: 72% of Pinterest’s audience are 30 years or older. Only 34% are between 18 and 29. Significantly, 17% are over 65 years old.
Distinctly suburban: Suburban and rural users form the largest share – 29% and 30% respectively. This is distinctly different from other networks where urban users rule.
Higher income: Given the higher average age, Pinterest users also have higher disposable income, with 64% of all adults making $50,000+ on Pinterest.

The professional networking site LinkedIn attracts an older audience that is largely urban, wealthier, and more educated.

Older: Only 23% of users are between 18-29 years old. 21% are over 65 years, and 31% are between 30 and 49 years of age.
Urban: Very limited number of rural users – only 14%. 61% are either urban or suburban.
Wealthier: 75% of users earn over $50,000.
Highly educated: 50% of LinkedIn users are college graduates. Another 22% have some college experience.

Snapchat is the newest social networks on this list, but also one of the fastest growing. Here’s what you need to know about its demographics:

Dominated by women: 70% of Snapchat’s users are females.
Overwhelmingly young: 71% of users are younger than 25.
Limited income: 62% earn under $50,000 – fitting given the average age of Snapchat’s users.

ere’s what you should take away from all these stats:

If you’re targeting younger users, stick to Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.
If you’re targeting women with disposable income, head over to Pinterest.
For professionals with better education and income, use LinkedIn.
For everyone, go with Facebook.

The psychology of social media users

Facebook is a ‘closed’ network where your friends list will usually be limited to family, friends and acquaintances you’ve met in real life. Privacy is a big concern for Facebook’s users, and all posts are private by default.

This ultimately affects the way users interact with each other and with businesses on Facebook.

According to a Pew Internet study:

Facebook users are more trusting (since the network is closed).
Facebook users have more close relationships. Pew found that heavy users of the platform are more likely to have a higher number of close relationships.
Facebook users are politically engaged and active.

To understand why people share or follow on Twitter, researchers at Georgia Tech and UMichigan analysed over 500M tweets over 15-months. They found that the three biggest reasons why people share/follow on Twitter are:

Network overlap: Your network is similar to your followers’ network.
User tweet-RT ratio: The number of tweets vs. the number of RTs for a user.
Informational content: The more informative the content, the better.

As per one study, a person’s Pinterest boards represent his/her “ideal self”. That is, it is a representation of everything the user would want to be or have. This is in opposition to Facebook that represents the user’s “real self”.

keep the following in mind:

Instead of marketing yourself on every network, pick the network whose demographics matches your target audience’s.
Positivity always wins – unless you’re deliberately trying to create controversy (not a good option for most non-media businesses).
Rules of content: Informative content on Twitter and LinkedIn, aspirational content on Instagram and Pinterest, fun/positive/uplifting content on Facebook.

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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media

22
Jul
2017

snapchat for patrons

categories: announcement, Digital literacy, social media

Using Snapchat to Reach Library Patrons Workshop

A two-part workshop running 90 minutes each session on Thursday, August 24, 2017 at 2:30pm Eastern/1:30 Central/12:30 Mountain/11:30am Pacific and Thursday, August 31, 2017 at 2:30pm Eastern/1:30 Central/12:30 Mountain/11:30am Pacific

Snapchat is one of the 10 most downloaded apps in the world and a key means of communication for individuals aged 13-34. Emerging quickly onto the social media scene, Snapchat has left many librarians wondering how to incorporate it into their outreach strategy. In this two-part workshop, social media expert Paige Alfonzo responds to this question and teaches you how to successfully leverage Snapchat as a marketing tool—one that can be used for readers’ advisory, promotion, information dissemination, and a variety of other marketing purposes.

In part one, Alfonzo covers the ins and outs of the platform—from teaching you the basics of setting up an account, adding friends, and sending snaps to demonstrating how to annotate snaps, incorporate filters, and use Snapchat Stories and Memories. In part two, Alfonzo delves into the specifics of how to make Snapchat work in libraries by discussing how librarians have successfully used Snapchat to promote their services, then she provides you with an opportunity to participate hands on with Snapchat by sending snaps to each other. The workshop will leave you with useful approaches to get creative with the app and expand your social media strategy.

http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=12115&zbrandid=4634&zidType=CH&zid=45997474&zsubscriberId=1026665847&zbdom=http://ala-publishing.informz.net

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more on social media for the library in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media+library

09
Oct
2015

social media and freedom of speech

categories: social media

the use of social media, personal versus institutional, or personal in the context of an institutional repercussions, is a complex and thorny issue. How much can one criticize the institution in their personal social media? And if the institution responds, when does it become silencing the social media as expression of free speech?

Is the article below touching only a specific [political] issue, or academia, as an institution, goes beyond this issue in imposing on freedom of speech?

Why I Was Fired

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Was-Fired/233640

My tweets might appear uncivil, but such a judgment can’t be made in an ideological or rhetorical vacuum. Insofar as “civil” is profoundly racialized and has a long history of demanding conformity, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication. This choice is both moral and rhetorical.

Academics are usually eager to contest censorship and deconstruct vague charges of vulgarity. When it comes to defending Israel, though, anything goes.

Students are capable of serious discussion, of formulating responses, of thinking through discomfort. They like my teaching because I refuse to infantilize them; I treat them as thinking adults. My philosophy is simple: Teach them the modes and practices of critical thought and let them figure out things on their own.

Professors are often punished for disrupting convention in informal ways, however. My case is interesting because administrators ignored the de facto standards that regulate our behavior and exercised their power directly. This should be worrisome to any scholar who isn’t a sycophant.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here.
Benjamin Ginsberg points out that in the past 30 years, the administrator-to-student ratio has increased while the instructor-to-student ratio has stagnated. The rise of untenured, or non-tenure-track, faculty exacerbates the problem; a significant demographic in academe lacks job security or the working conditions that allow them to maximize their pedagogical talent. Over a recent 10-year period, spending on administration outpaced spending on instruction. At American universities, there are now more administrators and their staffers than full-time faculty. In the past 10 years, administrative salaries have steadily risen while custodians and groundskeepers suffer the inevitable budget cuts — as do the students whose tuition and fees supplement this largess.

When so much money is at stake, those who raid the budget have a deep interest in maintaining the reputation of the institution. Their privilege and the condition of the brand are causally related. The brand thus predominates. Its predominance often arrives at the expense of student well-being.

critical thinking is a terribly undesirable quality in the corporate world, much more damning than selfishness or sycophancy. Let us then be honest about critical thinking: On the tongues of cunning bureaucrats, it is little more than an additive to brand equity, the vainglorious pomp of smug, uptight automatons who like to use buzzwords in their PowerPoint presentations.

Critical thinking by faculty is even more undesirable. In research institutions, we are paid to generate prestige and to amass grant money; in teaching-centered colleges, we enjoy excess enrollments according to fine-tuned equations that maximize the student-teacher ratio. (In elite liberal-arts colleges, we pamper the kids with simulations of parental affection.) Critical thinking is especially harmful to adjuncts, reliant as they are for income on the munificence of well-paid bosses who cultivate a distended assemblage of expendable employees.