To understand the needs of social media, it’s important to understand the social media platforms used by our families, friends, clients and customers. Like the highway system, social media platforms are different roads that take you different places. It’s good to know who you’re traveling with and what you’ll be doing once you arrive at your destination.

When we looked at social media use at Go East and the platforms preferred by our colleagues, we discovered some interesting things: More than half of us use five social media platforms. A quarter of us use at least seven. We lean toward using the most popular platforms to find each other and stay connected to our industry, clients, family and friends. Year after year, our adoption of social media is in alignment with similar demographics and adoption is higher among iPhone users. In fact, there’s not a BlackBerry in sight.

While everyone at Go East uses Yammer for our internal microblogging platform (How else would we know where to go for lunch?), slightly more than half of us use Twitter as an external microblogging network.

Work and personal life find their way to social media. Ninety-four percent of us are on Facebook (it’s good to know what we’re all doing the few hours we’re not together at the office). LinkedIn has 79 percent of our work histories listed in case we forget what we did before joining Go East. Mobile apps like Instagram and location-based apps such as Foursquare and Yelp are used by a core group of iPhone users. Posting to Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr is clearly popular, and we’ve started our own YouTube channel. This is the mashup of our lives: friend and follower, colleague and buddy, online and offline converge. Social media makes the boundaries less opaque.

 Loading ...

2 people like this post.

Like

Unlike