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Does The Walt Disney Company Hold Up To Today's Standards? - Intro

The Walt Disney Company was founded by Walt Disney and his brother Roy on October 16, 1923. Their primary purpose is entertainment through creative storytelling that revolutionized the market.

Social media is essential for their business for a multitude of reasons. It is necessary to advertise their content in the modern digital environment properly, to humanize their brand through interactions and showing the joy their products provide, and to clearly address any issues or controversies that may arise under their jurisdiction. It is also crucial for them as it helps them learn more about their audience by gauging audience sentiment and seeing the massive amounts of personal data users post online.

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Which platforms are in use and how successful have they been?

They primarily use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for promotion, interaction, and info gathering for their audience. Of course, these aren’t the only platforms they use. Their use of YouTube is mostly for entertainment purposes, and LinkedIn provides a clear portfolio of their work culture and park experiences. Their main Facebook page “Disney” has the most followers by far at 54 million. If all of their pages’ follower counts were taken into account, it would easily surpass 150 million followers. Instagram follows close behind with close to 35 million followers.

What's their purpose, and how do they engage with the audience?

The primary purpose for selecting blog-like platforms like Facebook and Twitter would be to simply gain interactions with their audience and, subsequentially, their feelings and metrics. These and other more content-focused platforms are used to spread their content to wider audiences to garner viewership and support. Disney is highly regarded for their audience engagement, and this includes its social media presence. planDisney is an online forum where past guests can assist others with their insight for having the best experience for certain Disney vacations. This effectively allows Disney to let others do promotions and explanations for the more specific parts of a trip for them.
 

Are they using their tools effectively?

I believe that they are using each different social media platform to its fullest potential. They use the absolute importance of pictures in telling stories to encapsulate and present the magic of their products to the world. Showing and describing such wonderful experiences causes readers to also want to experience everything they’ve heard about.

What are the pros and cons of the company's use of social media?

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Pros:

  • They do an amazing job at capturing the joyful essence of their products through pictures, posts, and interactions with those that have previously been/experienced their services. Users then grow a desire to share the same experiences.

  • They have a massive array of different accounts focusing on specific aspects/films/companies, allowing users to find the one that suits/interests them easily.

  • Everything they do over social media adheres to the image they want to keep. Their desire to provide great experiences is very easily ascertained from their posts.

Cons:

  • There may be too many account variations for someone to get a complete grasp of. This isn’t a fully formed issue, as they do an excellent job at differentiating each page.

  • Their wide range of accounts can seem to monopolize some users and can seem overwhelming or pressuring.

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Which social media application seems to be the most effective/popular one for the company?

Facebook is by far the most lucrative for Disney, as their follower count across their many pages easily eclipses their other social media platform numbers. This should come as very little surprise, as Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform in the world, so one of the most popular media companies using such a website would assuredly gain a large following.

Is the company effective at maintaining social media accounts?

Despite their massive number of accounts across all platforms, they are surprisingly apt at posting regular updates across many of them. Their hyper-specialized accounts may not get as much traffic as their main accounts, which shouldn’t be too surprising. I believe that their current social media applications are perfect for their business plans as they are using them almost perfectly.

Conclusion

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Overall their social media use is top-notch, attributed to the fact that they were one of the first major media companies to utilize social media when it first surfaced, granting them an early foothold and experience. Their mission to spread joy far and wide was perfectly encapsulated in their social media presence. Audience interaction, highlighting certain figures within the community, promoting upcoming and old works, and sharing endless joy through imagery and stories are some of the key features of their social media use. They expertly retain their humanity, unlike other corporations that can appear robotic or mindless over social media. If there were to be any recommendations, they would revolve around increasing viewership/followers on TikTok and Twitter. Their Twitter posts are more promotional than their other platforms, so they could follow the strategies for their other platforms. Their numbers on Twitter are nowhere near close to the others, and TikTok is a massively expanding platform, so gaining more than just their 5-10 million current followers would help spread their products to the younger generations. They could do this by matching the number of specialized pages they have on Facebook to the other platforms. They have incredible potential to dominate TikTok, as the algorithm could easily benefit them.

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