If you’re a marketer or an audience engagement professional who uses social media to connect with your community you should check out the Social Media Cheat Sheet.

Social Platform Cheat Sheet from 360i

Why we like it

This super handy sheet pulls together the top eight social media platforms and lines them up side by side so you can keep yourself straight on what they are, what they do and who uses them. All on a single page!

Created by Orli LeWinter at 360i, the Cheat Sheet is a grid that lines up the key differences between platforms: who’s on it; MAU (millions of active users); how people use it; how brands use it; most impactful content types; what are the paid media options; what to use it for and major KPIs (key performance indicators). This means at a glance you can make a decision on key channels based on key points of difference.

Ready reckoner

• Cross channel – useful for organisations who are active on multiple channels to think through where to place key content.
• Segmentation – useful for marketers working on specific campaigns to quickly spot the most appropriate channels for target audiences.
• Getting beyond Facebook and Twitter – a great reminder about those channels that you might not be using every day but that you shouldn’t forget about. It’s a good summary of what they do and how they stack up.
• Advertisers – quickly outlines which platforms have robust paid media options and which are  unsuitable for advertising.
• The line up – with channels compared side by side according to consistent criteria, it tames the bewildering flood of information around digital marketing, making everything more coherent and digestible.
• Impacts – if you’re not sure what to measure, the final line gives a quick and dirty summary of the major KPIs.

Users will notice that almost all of the channels are most successful when they’re sharing strong visual (photo or video) content. It’s a good reminder to make sure that your materials are looking beautiful, whether you view them as a poster or a thumbnail.

Another consistent theme is that branding and awareness looms largest as a consistent strength across all the channels with direct traffic and sales lagging far behind. It’s a good reminder of what social media is great at doing and helps set clear expectations.

Main image credit: Sh13 Flush by Flickr user Upupa4me published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.