An Overview of Visual Social Media for Newbies

If you are like me and are relatively new to visual social media, you may be feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the wide choice of platforms.

Where to begin?

Where do you begin? What is the right platform for you?

I have become increasingly active using social media for work-related reasons using classic, very well established platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and also our own website. No sooner than I began to feel comfortable on these platforms, I learn that the trend is now increasingly shifting towards visual social media. This shift is not surprising as we are naturally drawn to visual content.

Today’s major visual social media platforms

The major players of the visual social media platforms today are:

• YouTube (owned by Google, videos, second most popular search engine)
• Instagram (owned by Facebook, showcasing lives with high quality visual content, lots of selfies)
• Vine (owned by Twitter, 6-second videos)
• Pinterest (strong visual content for discovering new things and products)

Somexcloud’s Visual Social Networks module

Aldo Gnocchi, one of Somexcloud’s social media experts, gives the course participants an excellent hands-on introduction to all of the above visual social media platforms during a very inspiring and informative afternoon module.

My favourite – your favourite?

At the end of the module it became clear to me that my favourites are definitely YouTube and Pinterest. I’m sure you’ve already checked out the occasional video clip on YouTube but there is so much more to this platform than first meets the eye. You can find almost any video that has ever been made on YouTube, watch it and elegantly share it on other social media platforms. You can make your own videos, edit them and upload them to YouTube. I will be using YouTube more in future for work-related purposes to share video content via Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest also grabbed my attention straightaway as it covers a wide range of subjects with excellent pictures. For example as an avid cook, I was immediately inspired by the beautifully illustrated recipes on Pinterest and will definitely be using this platform for private purposes. On the other hand maybe you want to use one of these platforms to market your brand. This is also definitely worth exploring as the top visual social media sites collectively have billions of people actively using their platforms every day and many of them come armed with credit cards.