1.    For an IMC plan there are many factors to consider when choosing a social media platform. There are many different platforms out there, but they specialize in their own niche of content and demographics. The first question to consider is, does my demographic for customers line up with this platform. For instance if you are a skateboard company that usually appeals to teenage boys between the ages of 14-19, then a site that is catered to adults like LinkedIn is not a good choice. The next thing to look at is size of the platform for instance Facebook has over a billion users while Linkedin has "only" 100 million people. Another thing to consider during the selection process is budget and staffing. Every platforms advertising costs a different amount for instance a newcomer to the advertising business like Pinterest is cheaper than Facebook. Also another cost associated with the budget is hiring staff to manage the advertising and maintain its upkeep. This can get expensive as you are adding on salary and benefits. While size is good for reaching more potential customers, it also means more competition and makes it easier for your message to get lost. Next, another thing to consider is the content you are delivering. Some platforms are limited to certain formats such as YouTube only deals in videos and Instagram does pictures or ten second videos. Finally the last thing to consider is content posting rates. On a site like twitter tweets can become buried in cyberspace in less than ten minutes, but on a site like Facebook, you can advertise through pinned posts that stay in the top of a persons news feed, and posts do not have to be as frequent as on twitter in general. It is also good to look at what your competition is doing in the market as well. By looking at this you can look at what avenues have been most effective for them and where they are lacking. This can help you reach new markets before your competition does, and also take market shares away from them as well. Social media can be a big part of a marketing strategy, but it also can be a very small part as well. It is all about where your customers are and the best way to reach them. If they are mostly Linkedin users, then that is where your strategy should be focused. However, if your ideal customers are not on social media then it should be a smaller percentage. Social media though should always have some place in your plan though just because of its ability to reach so many people.

2.      The demographic I choose to look at was white teenage girls with smartphones, from middle income households. I chose this demographic because it is one of the larger demographics and America and is heavily targeted. To cater to and reach this demographic I would choose to use Pinterest and Instagram. Both of these sights have high rates of use throughout the week and are heavily populated with this specific demographic. While neither of these are bigger than Facebook, they also have less competition and they are loaded with our kind of customer.

3.      The kind of ads I would run would be picture and short video humor ads. I would also try to appeal to a sense of adventure and scarceness with this age group. Also as this demographic is always on their phones and statistics show that posts can become obsolete after a certain amount of minutes there would have to be multiple posts per day.

Examples:

Number of users on each Social Media platform :http://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

Sources:

http://advertising.about.com/od/advertisingprojects/a/Different-Types-Of-Advertising-Methods.htm

http://marketingland.com/social-media-advertising-set-explode-next-3-years-121691

http://blog.hootsuite.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media-advertising/

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-network-advertising