A picture is worth a thousand words. A cliché because it’s true. One good photograph can convey much more than a thousand words of website or brochure copy any day. What we think of as marketing “content” is evolving. Marketing and communication materials need more than text to tell the story of your organization – they need visual elements: infographics, charts, photos and/or video. What’s more a picture in itself is “multimedia” content, defined as text, audio, photos, videos, presentations, infographics, etc. Why is it important to produce multimedia content for your organization? Because when you share it through social platforms like Flickr, you are amplifying and enabling your organization’s story to be shared, tagged and talked about easily online.
With the increasing popularity of multimedia consumption online: photo sharing in Facebook, video surfing in YouTube and the exponential interest in Pinterest, we wondered what social networks nonprofits are using to share their multimedia content. Can you guess? Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter topped the list as the most popular platforms. Fascinatingly, no one surveyed identified Instagram a platform Facebook plans to acquire for $1 billion dollars.
Now look at the chart below. Can you immediately identify the top sites for sharing multimedia content? I bet you can.
The results above are from our Q1 Sage Nonprofit Insights Survey 2012. A full survey report can be found here [pdf]. Did we miss a top site? Let us know what social platforms your organization uses for sharing multimedia content in the comments.
Patricia Tynan
Social Media and Community
Abila blog 