OLBlog: Social-Media-Marketing

10:05 AM

10 Reasons to Use Instagram Stories for Business

Instagram Stories enables users to post pictures and video to an album that disappears after 24 hours. At first, you might think this is an unnecessary or even useless feature. However, businesses can use Instagram Stories in their marketing to improve their engagement, visibility, and content. Here are 10 reasons why you should use Stories to market your small business.

Instagram Stories Benefits Your Business Marketing Strategy

Last August, Instagram switched the model of their feed from a linear chronological feed to an algorithmic style. This means that your feed no longer consists of every post by all of the users you follow, in reverse chronological order. Rather, your feed shows only the posts that the algorithm has determined you are most likely to be interested in, based on factors such as engagement and likes. This update meant that businesses had to change their Instagram marketing strategy. However, Stories allows for more flexibility with Instagram marketing.

Stay Top of Mind

The first reason to use Instagram Stories is that mind-blowing or fascinating posts aren’t the only means of increasing engagement with your followers. More “average” posts, published frequently and consistently will encourage followers to engage by checking your Instagram business profile for the latest posts and useful information. Instagram Stories allows you to continue using (or start implementing) frequent posting as an engagement strategy—instead of only “wow” posting—to stay top of mind for your audience.

Diversify Your Strategy

It’s important to diversify your content to keep the attention of your target audience and cater to their many preferences. Often, this requires adding a new channel or social media platform to your strategy, where you will likely have to start from scratch with your profile and audience. The next reason to use Stories is that it is a new feature on an existing platform. If you already have an Instagram account and audience, you can simply diversify your content with resources you already have.

Use Real-Time Marketing

Rising marketing trends of 2017 provide yet another reason to use Instagram Stories. Stories support the use of real-time marketing, which is used to reach your target audience in the right moments. Posting live during an event or sale can encourage more people to attend, and can also help those who aren’t there to experience it feel connected to your business.

Have Fun Marketing

It only takes a few taps to post pictures and photos to your Instagram Story, saving you time with your social media marketing. Also, with less concern about perfecting your posts and more freedom to experiment, you can take a break from the more detailed and planned content you publish. Instagram Stories helps you to let loose a little more and have fun with your Instagram marketing.

Instagram Stories Benefits Your Instagram Engagement

Preserve a High-Quality Business Profile

The photos and videos that you normally publish on Instagram get saved to your profile (unless you delete them). The photos and videos you publish to your Story, however, disappear after 24 hours.

The reason why this is beneficial is that the photos and videos in your story have real-time and contextual value, but aren’t the highest quality photos. With Stories, you can reap the benefits of real time marketing without cluttering up your profile. You can then treat your profile as a portfolio, showcasing your best and most evergreen content.

Add to Your Business Profile

On the other hand, if you find that one of your pictures or videos from your Story is something you’d like in your profile, not to worry! Simply go to that photo or video, tap the three dots on the bottom right of your screen, and tap “Share as Post.” You can then post that picture as you would a regular Instagram post, with a caption, filter, and location. Not only is this a way to repurpose content, but it is also a way to test content before putting it into your profile.

Maintain Visibility in Your Followers’ Feeds

The new algorithmic model may reduce the number of times you appear in your followers’ feeds because your posts now only show to followers that Instagram deems will be most interested in them. This leads to another reason to use Instagram Stories.

While regular posts have to compete for a spot, the Stories of users you follow appear at the very top of your feed, with a colorful ring to indicate that a new Story has been published. This feature enables you to stay top of feed—and mind—for your followers.

Connect with Your Target Audience

Since your Story vanishes in 24 hours, there’s no point in spending time and effort on professional looking or high-quality photos. The photos are meant to be raw, real, and relevant to the particular moment. The reason businesses use this type of content is that it humanizes your business and gives it transparency, which allows your target audience to connect with you on a deeper level.

Instagram Stories Benefits Your Marketing Content
Save and Repurpose Content

One reason people might not want to use Stories is that the pictures and videos disappear after 24 hours. However, in addition to being able to save pictures and videos from Stories manually, you can also set Instagram to save all Stories content to your camera roll automatically. Now your photos and videos are saved, and you have content to use later on down the line!

Enhance Your Content

Unlike pictures you post to your regular Instagram profile, those you post to your Story can be decorated with drawings, emojis, and text. These markup capabilities allow you to make your content more eye-catching or more in line with your branding. You can even tag people on Instagram Stories by putting an @ symbol in front of users’ names in the post description or comments.

Instagram Stories adds more freedom and flexibility to Instagram marketing despite changes in the platform and user behavior. With so many reasons to use it, why not try an Instagram Story this week?

7:54 AM

10 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

When it comes to social media marketing and online business, there is a tremendous opportunity for growth. As a small business owner, entrepreneur, or business professional, this is the best time to dedicate more money, time and resources on social media marketing. The heart of your business lies in its marketing. 78% of companies use social media to attract new customers. 92% of marketers said social media boosted their sales & 80% indicated social media increased traffic to their website.

Every action you take on social networks should be intentional; it must be a part of a larger social media marketing strategy. This automatically means every post, reply, like, and comment should be guided by a plan that’s driving toward business growth. With social media marketing, you cover four different forms of marketing – advertising, public relations, promotions, and sales. Why spend money on four marketing channels when you can achieve same goals with one?

Here are 10 effective social media marketing tips that will help small business to increase brand awareness, boost their customer base and sell their products.

1) Listen to what your customers are saying –

The most valuable way to market your business online is to pay attention to what your followers are saying on social media. Monitor social channels for mentions of your brand, competitors’ brand or any questions or complaints about products or services offered. If you are listening carefully, you will hear them express some sort of need or problem. This is your light bulb moment to demonstrate your expertise. Engage those followers with answers to their questions, pointing them to places on your website or social media profile where they can find help, or entice them with products or services you sell.

Also read: Can You Become a Social Media Influencer?

2) Use Custom Hashtags –

Even though the primary use of hashtags is to help people find content based on categories, custom hashtags can be a great way to get people interested in your brand and encourage them to share your content and turn them into customers. When customizing hashtags, make sure it speaks about your type of product or services, the solution your business provides, your business sector and competition. The interesting thing about hashtag is that you can use the same hashtag across multiple social media platforms.

Also read: Social Media Optimization: How to Get the Right Eyes on Your Feeds

3) Make Your Followers Feel Special –

There’s nothing worse than being a loyal customer and feel like you don’t matter to the brand. If you want to keep your followers happy and engaged, reward them with sweepstakes, promotions, and giveaways to show them you care and that you’re not all about the sale (even if you are). This will not only make them loyal customers, but they'll also become brand ambassadors and help spread the word about your business.

Also read: 25+ Surefire Tools That Make You Successful in Digital Marketing

4) Reviews and Testimonials –

Play a huge role in social media marketing. People love to read reviews and get other people’s opinions before they purchase a product or service, so you should develop a strategy to solicit reviews from your past customers and post them on your social media profile. You can ask for reviews by using a personal email from the founder of the business or an incentive for leaving a positive review on platforms like Facebook, Google+, etc.; but either way, positive reviews need to find their way into your marketing strategy. It works great magic.

5) Write Great Content –

A big part of social media marketing is great content. Before you create content for your website or blog, research trending topics, so your article is of relevance; your target audience wants to see informational and educational content that’s meaningful. Don’t write good content—it has to be great – then publish the link on all your social media profiles to boost traffic to your website and ultimately create more awareness for your business.

Also read: How to Build Content Marketing Strategy Plan That Actually Unbeatable

6) Be more visual –

The importance of photos on social media cannot be over emphasized. Always remember that social media users are scrolling through tons of content–yours must stand out to gain their attention. Three of the “hottest” social networks, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat, are mostly driven by images; so you must leverage on the visuals when promoting your content. If you’re using a sponsored advert on Facebook or Instagram, be sure that your ad is aesthetically catchy and compelling enough for viewers to click on it.

Also read: Digital Marketing Platforms & Strategies For Your Business

7) Track Your Competition –

Did you know that over 90% of businesses use social media for marketing? This means that 9 out of every 10 of your competitors are using social media to market their products/services and build their brand. Don’t get obsessive about your competition, but it’s a good idea to know what they’re doing. You should ask yourself questions like:

How often is your game publishing updates?
What type of content are they providing?
Is their engagement better or worse than what you’re experiencing?
On which networks are they most active?
It may take a while to pinpoint your primary competitors and review their social media platform; but in the long run, it will be worth it.

8) Leverage Social Live-Streaming Video Platform –

Did you know that social media users spend 3 times longer watching live video compared to a pre-recorded one? Using live-streaming platforms like Facebook Live, Periscope, and Instagram Stories, are significant assets to your social media marketing strategy. You can leverage live-streaming to host a Q&A session to give your viewers the opportunity to ask questions in real-time, dig deeper into a favorite blog post or take your audience backstage at a live event. The possibilities are endless.

Also read: 7 Popular Marketing Techniques For Small Businesses

9) Track Everything –

It’s good to get excited about social media marketing and but you need to ensure that you’re moving in the right direction at all times. This is why it’s a must to track everything you’re doing. For example, here are some things you can follow in regards to your Instagram account:

Number of views & reach
Number of daily, weekly and monthly posts
Number of followers, with a focus on month over month growth
Total and average post engagement (likes, comments & reports)
When you track everything you’re doing, when you track your progress (both the good and bad), it’s easier to tweak your plan as the year wears on.

10) Be Consistent –

The biggest mistake you can make on social media as a business owner is inconsistent with your updates. It’s not good enough to provide quality updates for a week and then disappear next month. It’s also wrong to provide actionable advice a few days in a row, just to push more general updates the following week. If you want to grow your audience, if you’re your audience to trust what you’re saying, you need to be consistent with your posting schedule as well as the quality of your content.

With these tips, I can assure you that there will be an increased customer base that will attract the desired growth and revenue to push your business to greater heights.

If you need help implementing these tips or you need a social media manager to handle your social media profile, you can sign up for consultation by clicking the button below.

8:37 PM

Can You Become a Social Media Influencer?

There is a genuine power in becoming a social media influencer. You have to choose if it jives with your identity and also your business objectives. You can drive a lot of potential success once you get huge followers in your social channels.

The lines amongst business and life are developing increasingly obscured today. Social media influencer is a vocation now, and they are in the business of themselves. A way of life brand is a thriving on the web business specialty, where people basically spell out how they live and welcome others to come investigate.

The ascent and openness of social media has opened the entryway for more conventional business proprietors to end up influencers in their own privilege. The interest is there-how did X mogul get to where they are? What's it like in the background at an organization? How do fruitful people invest their energy, and what devices and administrations do they utilize?

These are the issues a social media influencer raises as much as they reply. As a business proprietor, there is an opening for you to end up noticeably an influencer in your own privilege. People need to realize what goes into the uncommon sauce, and business proprietors can give that knowledge.

There is a refinement between being a business proprietor and being a social media influencer. Influencers can transform their social media into a business, however business proprietors don't need to transform into influencers. You can remain in the background and let your business represent itself with no issue.

Anyone can become a social media influencer by using the platform and skill smartly. It takes a less little effort than you think to get success.

Also read:
Social Media Optimization: How to Get the Right Eyes on Your Feeds
How Brands Are Using Instagram Stories?

Would you be able to Become a Social Media Influencer?

The primary inquiry you ought to inquire as to whether you need to wind up noticeably an extremely open face related with your brand. Influencers profit by being the all important focal point. They share their voyages, their nourishment, their outfits, their instruments, and their sentiments on the majority of the above. On my organization's Instagram page I frequently share what a work day resembles for me.

Their brand is themselves so they need to share themselves. By putting themselves and their way of life out into the world for the viewing pleasure of anyone passing by, they charge a quality of realness that shoppers react to. (Particularly among the Millennial era.) There's no item or trick to take cover behind, which bonds them to their audience. Watchers feel like they know the real people, not only the brand.

As a business proprietor, you get the opportunity to choose on the off chance that you need to construct that sort of association with your audience. You can meld yourself with your brand or to keep them independent.

Also read:
25+ Surefire Tools That Make You Successful in Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing Platforms & Strategies For Your Business

The Benefits of Becoming an Influencer

By situating yourself as an influencer and an identity outside of your business you can possibly make two showcasing pipes. People tune in to people they really need to get notification from. You can coordinate your audience towards your business.

You additionally make buildup around your business. Take Mark Zuckerberg for instance. Zuckerberg exists as a constrain outside of Facebook. He's candid on political issues, began a LLC (The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) with the aim to channel some portion of his billions into philanthropy, and has even started gossipy tidbits that he's keen on running for President.

All of Zuckerberg exercises coordinate consideration back to Facebook. He even composed a post about the President bits of gossip (he says he's not running) on Facebook. In a wonderful influencer move, he took the buzz that his identity had made and stepped it back to his organization.

Choosing to wind up plainly an influencer additionally gives you more elbowroom to convey what needs be. You can state suppositions as an individual, and not as a whole organization. You exist outside of the business circle and you can demonstrate the world your different advantages and how you invest your energy.

Giving 'off camera looks and demonstrating the world that you're only a man like every other person makes a bond amongst you and your audience. It adapts you, though businesses are regularly considered 'cruel'.

The Case Against Becoming an Influencer

As I specified over, one of the principle downsides of turning into an influencer is opening yourself up to the world for feedback. There's no stowing away once you set out before people.

The web can be coldblooded, and the reaction of individual choices can adversely affect your business. As much as you can move positive consideration back to your business, you can draw negative consideration.

Kendall Jenner discovered that lesson from her Pepsi business fiasco. Pepsi chose her for the crusade in view of the quality of her social media following and offer to youthful customers. Be that as it may, the promotion was tone hard of hearing and killed many people. Her own brand took a hit also, and she was viewed as esteeming a paycheck over her fans. More terrible, she estranged a great deal of her fan base. It can be exceptionally hard to win people back after they abandon you.

Take the grievous Frye Festival as another case, (which Jenner was additionally a piece of.) The coordinator Billy McFarland, became involved with his own buildup and blew all his cash on showcasing. When it boiled down to really getting the celebration what it required like sustenance, cabin, and washrooms, he fizzled. He dismissed the business in the midst of the majority of the showcasing, and now he is synonymous with the words "trick" and "extortion."

His name as an individual conveys a shame. He made a massively negative media tempest and all the awful press arrived at the feet of the celebration that should create his pay.

Also read:
7 Popular Marketing Techniques For Small Businesses
5 Best Practices To Create Twitter Content Marketing Strategy for Business

Is it For You?

There is a genuine power in turning into a social media influencer. You have to choose in the event that it jives with your identity and in addition your business objectives. It requires building a faithful social media following, which is no little errand. Evaluate your business development design and check whether this bodes well for you.

6:12 AM

Social Media Optimization: How to Get the Right Eyes on Your Feeds

Few among us have shared content on a social site without experiencing a split second of doubt. That jolt of anxiety is tied to the knowledge that our post could disappear into a black hole, never to be liked, retweeted, or clicked on again.

Getting eyes on your social content isn’t easy — especially because it’s not just attention you’re looking for, but attention from a specific audience: Your target customers. So how do you make sure your posts are being seen by the right users? You’ve got to embrace social media optimization.

Get to know SMO

Social media optimization positions your content for maximum exposure and stands to increase awareness of your business, traffic to your website, and overall engagement with your brand. The ultimate goal of SMO (social media optimization) is to make sure your audience isn’t just conscious of your content, but actively watching for your new posts to go live. SMO makes it significantly easier for current and potential customers to find the articles, images, and videos you produce, both on your social platforms and your own site. As a marketing device, it’s just as important as the social content itself.

SMO starts with strategy. Once you’ve developed a social media marketing calendar, devise a plan to make sure all of that content gets the views and interactions it deserves.

Social Media Optimization reading list:

7 Tips to Improve Your Google Plus Strategy

How To Build Your Own Brand On LinkedIn

Optimize your owned media

The place to start is with your owned media: Your website, blog, and social accounts. Do you have prominent active links to your social feeds on your site and blog? Do your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles include a link back to your website? This form of cross-promotion encourages your followers to spend more time with your brand and creates a breadcrumb trail of content that they can follow all the way to your business.

According to research on sharing trends from Sumo, internet users primarily share content to Facebook (29 percent), Pinterest (13.1 percent), and Twitter (13 percent), so these sharing buttons should be front and center on every article page of your blog. Sumo recommends including no more than five icons in your share bar.

While you’re updating your social buttons, it’s also a good idea to review how your blog and site content is formatted for sharing. To boost your visibility, pre-populated tweets should include both your business’s social media handle and an image related to the blog post. Ideally, your content should be formatted to include a photo or illustration when it’s shared to Facebook as well. Twitter has reported that tweets featuring photos can improve engagement by more than 300 percent, and content marketing company BuzzSumo found Facebook posts with images receive more than double the engagement of text-only posts.

There’s an added benefit to all of these strategies: They won’t just improve your social media marketing, but your blog marketing too. Every post, tweet, or pin born of your blog increases your content’s exposure and attracts new visitors who could become regular readers.

Social Media Optimization reading list:

10 Must-Know Tips and Tricks for Improving Twitter Marketing Strategy

Maximize Your Website Traffic Using Flipboard Magazine

Optimize your social posts

To get the right eyes on your social media content, you’ll have to optimize what, when, and how you post. The composition, timing, and frequency of shared content all factor into its performance.

HubSpot compiled a useful guide that outlines the optimal length for every type of post, concluding that Facebook updates should be 40 characters, tweets should be 120 to 130 characters, and Instagram captions should be under 125 characters. Include hashtags to improve content discoverability; you should use two of those on Twitter, but up to 30 on Instagram.

To refine the content itself, take a close look at the length of your headlines. HubSpot’s data shows that blog headings eight to 12 words long get the most shares on Twitter, and 12 to 14-word headlines receive the most Facebook likes. Again, including images in your social posts will help users notice them.

Most brands use a mix of original and third-party (aka curated) content, like articles related to your business or industry trends. Social media optimization facts can be applied to both. Whether you’re sharing your latest promotion or tweeting a link to a relevant article, be concise and incorporate imagery. Adding a few lines of text to a repin can add a lot of value to the content. If it feels natural, include a call to action enticing users to respond to the post or a hashtag that will expose them to more of your social content.

Charleston, SC-based wedding designer Calder Clark’s Pinterest page.

In terms of timing, scheduling your posts around the time of day and days of the week when your audience is most active will amplify your reach. Take advantage of live-streaming content tools like Facebook Live to attract followers in real-time, too.

Analyze your results

Determining how effective your optimization efforts have been will come down to evaluating you social media performance. You’ll want to measure both social-media engagement and the influence that your posts are having on your community and target audience at large.

For engagement, key performance indicators (KPIs) like the number of retweets or content shares, favorite or likes, comments, and clicks will give you a good indication of what’s working and what still needs tweaking for maximum effect. Your follower growth rate and the overall size of your audience, along with the number of blog or newsletter subscribers that originated from your social posts and traffic to your website, may also reveal areas in need of improvement.

To gauge your influence, lean on social media analytics tools that help you to uncover consumer sentiment. Also look at conversion numbers, webinar signups, white-paper downloads, and the number of social influencers actively engaging with and referencing your brand. Influencers have become the preferred measure of social-media influence for brands, although you can still reference your Klout Score, a ranking from 1 to 100 that indicates your level of positive influence based on various social signals, as well.

When you optimize your social content to boost the odds that it will be seen, sharing isn’t nearly as scary. There will always be someone waiting to hear what you have to say next.

Social Media Optimization:

10 Mistakes to Avoid in Social Media Marketing

7 Ways to Improve Your Instagram Marketing

Originally published on Shutterstock.

9:20 PM

What is Social Media Marketing?

Marketing is one of the activities we always do, even unconsciously. Always do some promotion, advertisement or publicity will be in our daily walk. And what we dedicated to this marketing we noticed a little more of a spot in disguise or a marketing campaign discreet and safe.

However today we will talk about Social Media Marketing, a branch of Marketing that is more focused on the participation of users and that today with social networks is much more beneficial than before.

Social media marketing is a process of getting customers for your product/service through social media sites. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are a great example of social networking sites.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Let us then go to what we intended from the beginning. Social media marketing, it could be said that at the moment it is more a branch of the digital marketing, although one works of very different form. While digital marketing is based on advertisements or direct advertising on the internet. Social marketing focuses more on the activity of people in social networks, comments received, shared things, word of mouth participation on the web by a team, a group or a certain number of individuals.

The basic idea of Social media marketing is, through a short campaign, users will begin to share with others the product or service they have liked. This will make the social media marketing campaign by word of mouth a success. In fact, many goods and services have been handled this way, and we can continue to see them on the internet with free promotions shared by users.

Benefits of a Good Social Marketing Strategy

Of course, like every marketing campaign, there has to be a lot of advantages. But what happens in social marketing, the goals or results will never be similar. While in Digital Marketing the goal is to increase sales. In Social Marketing we know that sales will come by themselves later, so what matters is to get an increase in social activity and ready. So what are the Benefits of Social Marketing?

Higher Visibility.

A good Social Marketing campaign will bring, among other things, that your company, brand, product or service, have a greater visibility among social communities. The idea is that now not only know who you are but generate a positive image for your brand, so that when that person needs a product or service similar to what you offer, immediately remember you.
Basically, it will try to be at the head of as many people on social networks as possible.

Loyalty.

Something important to the social marketing. It is that this is not only carried out to get customers but also to keep those we already have. So, Do you answer all the questions in social networks? Show kindness, know more clients, who could be your customers, but still more to those who already were. Why? Because you know who is willing to spend on you, your store, your product or brand.
Therefore, Loyalty plays a critical role, make the customer come back and not go with the competition, if not from the beginning know and think that you are the best option.

Natural Positioning.

Personally, I consider it one of the most significant benefits triggered by a Social Marketing campaign, why? The natural positioning of your brand, benefits in several areas. You will never be penalized because your positioning was natural, at no time was manipulation of anything. Also, this positioning will make your sales increase like foam and that at the same time everything adds up, sales, followers, income, etc.

Consider this.

Many companies spend thousands of dollars in positioning their brand on the internet. However, a good social media marketing campaign will be able to save you that significant amount of money. The trick? Well just to make an optimal campaign, that the results are what you are looking for and not what it is. It is just a tip.

Greater Interaction with Clients.

One of the advantages that you have today with social networks is that your Social media marketing campaign can be a long-term and long-term success if you propose it. For example, talking with your customers, asking if they can be helped in something, making a purchase or seeing what is needed, this type of details also makes it possible for people who ask questions within the community to find the potential new customers. And while we know that keeping customers is indispensable, getting new clients will always be a primary goal.

Social Marketing is the Marketing of Social Networks?

In the beginning, it would sound like I'm just referring to social networks right? Even more so when today everything social is associated with these social networks. Yes, I accept that social networks are fundamental and that within a marketing campaign, it is a good way to catch customers or prospects. But when it comes to e.g. loyalty, we can use other tools such as email or phone calls. Even if it is only to ask how you are and that the company wishes you a good day. Such details can make a difference.

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, Social Marketing is a branch of Digital Marketing that today has become indispensable. Not only for a company to start growing, but for that same company or any other, maintain a certain prestige, a comfortable and stable sales level.
Remember that Social media marketing will not only help you to get followers and potential buyers for the future, but it will also give you the opportunity to strengthen relationships with your customers or consumers who have already tried your products, your brand, your services. And that part is as important as the first.

12:30 AM

How Brands Are Using Instagram Stories?

On August 2, 2016, Instagram announced a new feature: Instagram Stories. Companies now have the opportunity to get closer to their target audience and get into their tight circle.

Already used daily by 100 million people (about 500 million regular users), this new feature to upload photos that disappear within 24 hours. Thus users can give an overview of their daily life to their subscribers without the picture being on their profile.

While Instagram had become the privileged place to post its most neat and worked clichés, this update makes it possible to render to the social network the notion of instantaneous, present in its name.

But apparently, the similarity with Snapchat did not escape anyone!

Instagram Stories or Snapchat?

Snapchat, for more personalized content

The social network constantly reinvents itself to allow its users to express all their creativity, and create snaps in their image. Added filters, emojis, and more recently Emojis to the image of the user ... As many opportunities to build individual photos. And this, the brands have understood, especially with the Geofilters and effects on selfies. For a product launch or during a particular event, many have been offering filters, which the snap chapters have resumed with fervor.

For his part, Instagram is more rudimentary, proposing only the addition of text, color filter, and the possibility of drawing on his photos (nevertheless with a pen neon effect!).
Also read: How To Use Instagram For Business Marketing Success

Instagram, to reach a larger audience

While Snapchat is mostly used to interact with its close relations, Instagram has always allowed to follow and interact with celebrities, media and brands. The addition of Instagram Stories will enable these high audience accounts to disseminate their ephemeral content to a larger community.

And this seems to be the asset that Instagram wants to put forward in its next update: the addition of Stories in the "Explorer" section. This part is dedicated to the recommendation of photos and videos, which according to Instagram, are selected based on the tastes of the user, the people he follows and publications he loves.
Revealed by the media Techcrunch, this recommendation Stories would be built on the same criteria as photos and videos. It would allow these ephemeral contents to be seen by people not subscribed to the account but potentially interested in its contents.

So the two social networks each have their differences and benefits, the choice of which depends on your strategy. Instagram Stories being still quite new, new features should come up to improve the experience and customization. To follow closely!
Also read: Five Awesome Ways to Use Instagram to Make Better Career Moves

What uses for businesses?

If you followed our advice to get your business on Instagram and you know how to leverage its algorithm, then you have a real community behind you and who loves you, who is waiting for your Stories! But what to offer them? We have gathered for you some ideas of contents:

Show the life of your company:

Make room for spontaneous content in your stories! If you work in dynamic offices, have a corporate event, or are in a conference, share it with your audience, and give a human face to your brand!

Share the backstage of your publications

You have spent more than an hour on your photo so that it is as beautiful as possible: layout, decoration, lighting, everything is there; You even asked your model to take more than twenty different poses. It would be a shame to summarize all this work in a single photo, why not use the stories to spread the "making-of" of your contents? This is the perfect opportunity to share your Instagrammer skills and a healthy dose of self-mockery!

"Instagram Stories Takeover"

Instagram Takeover is a well-known technique, where a celebrity, blogger, influencer (or even a cute little animal) takes control of a brand's Instagram account, to offer its own content for a particular period of time. The Stories will make it possible to enhance the experience by showing how the person appropriates the account of the brand, its inspirations, its interactions with the community managers.

Make demo videos:

The Stories allow you to offer longer video content, the videos linking automatically. Take advantage of it to make presentations and demos of your products. Of course, avoid being too down-to-earth, where your audience is likely to make the legs around his neck.
For example, you can present unique tips to make the best use of your products, or offer off-the-shelf tutorials. It's up to you to see the tone of your brand!

8:32 PM

5 Steps to Promote Your Business on Instagram

Create an Instagram business account to take advantage of this social networking tool. You can use Instagram as a marketing tool to promote your business.

With 400 million active monthly users, Instagram has become the ideal social network for sharing photos and videos. Each day more than 80 million photos are published and 3.5 billion likes are exchanged.

It is a fascinating channel regarding commitment, with a strong popularity among digital natives, those people born after the 1980s, who will be the decision-makers of tomorrow.

In this article you will discover how to start their business on Instagram and how to produce compelling content regarding commitment, not to mention how your watch on this social network.

1 # Create your Instagram account

So you decided to create an Instagram account for your business, congratulations! But now, where to start?

First of all, you will have to choose an account name. The most obvious are to choose your company name or a name that allows for direct recognition of your brand.

Complete your profile with a photo of your logo, offices or products, as long as you identify your brand, and fill in your description with a short informative text about your company. In this bio is an element that will be decisive to redirect your public to your site: the link. Because Instagram does not allow you to insert clickable links in the description of photos, the bio of your profile becomes the only place to encourage your subscribers to visit your web page.
Also read: Five Awesome Ways to Use Instagram to Make Better Career Moves

There are two ways to use this link optimally:

A permanent link, which will return to the page of your most relevant site: presentation of your products, your spirit of enterprise, it will depend on your strategy.
A link that will change regularly. Do you have a blog or frequently have news to share? Instagram can be a good way to highlight these contents. Publish a photo related to this story and indicate in the legend that the link is in the description of your profile, link that you will have updated.
Whatever the strategy that works best for you, consider shortening your links, to lighten your description!

If you want to open several accounts for your business, as the industry or geographical area, Instagram recently introduced the ability to manage multiple accounts using the same profile.Enfin, remember to connect your Instagram profile to your page Facebook if you have one. Nothing like a little cross-channel to gain visibility!
Also read: How To Use Instagram For Business Marketing Success

2 # Define your content

Before posting anything set an editorial line, which will guide your content creation. What topics to address or avoid? What tone to adopt? What type of content to offer? The goal of this editorial line is to retrace the tone of your brand while taking advantage of the tools of Instagram. It can, of course, be flexible, and adapt according to the success of your contents and the trends that seem to you timely.

Your content must meet 3 of the most important criteria: Quality, Creativity, and Relevance.

Quality:

Mind the quality of your content. Your Instagram account will be a real showcase for your business, and if your photos are blurry or the sound of your videos saturates, your subscribers will quickly decamp.

To make good pictures it is not necessary to equip a professional SLR, the smartphones produced these days are equipped with cameras of a quality quite suitable.

Moreover, these have the advantage of often offering the possibility of taking pictures directly in square format, preferred form on Instagram. You will have a direct overview of what will be on your photo at the time of taking it, without having to crop it.

And the work does not stop once the picture is taken! Your photo can be improved before being posted. Many applications exist, here is a small non-exhaustive list:

Edit your photos: these apps offer effects that Instagram does not have, frames, filters and other original effects, there's something for everyone! Afterlight, Snapseed, Photo Editor.
Colorize parts of your photo only: Color Splash
Add text to your photos: PicLab and Typic
Insert emoji and stickers: Line Camera
Create collages of multiple photos: Layout and Pic Stitch
Make GIFs: Boomerang
Taking photos with long exposures (ideal for light painting type pictures): Long Exposure Camera 2
For copyright reasons, you can insert your logo and your signature on your photos: iWatermark

With every photo editing, you will find an application that will help you. After all, there are many applications to insert animal heads on our pictures.

Creativity

Instagram is not your catalog, do not just show your products, be creative. Many brands use the social network to promote a lifestyle and showcase its consumers.

Do not hesitate to visit photo sharing sites like Pinterest or Flickr to find ideas. Drawings, stop-motion or panoramic videos, any type of visual content has its place on Instagram, and many brands benefit, so why not you?

You can express your creativity as much on the background as on the form. The smartphone, compact and mobile, is a camera that offers more possibilities than you imagine, as illustrated in this video. Duplication, macros, underwater photos. It's up to you to find your own tricks!

Relevance

Your unlimited creativity must still serve your brand. Your photo or video must remain linked to your brand universe. This need should not hinder your creativity, but feed it!

Among the brands that operate best products to offer the very visual content, the Pilot pens are a perfect example. Their Instagram account features their different pens with drawings made by them.

# 3 Engaging Your Community

The goal of your presence on Instagram is to build a loyal community around your brand and to gain visibility.

Start by offering content that your community will appreciate. Fortunately, science is there to help us. The far-reaching study of Yahoo Labs and Georgia Tech has focused on the impact of Instagram filters on commitment. As a result, photos published with a screen generate more engagement than filters, especially those with warm hues, which increase exposure and contrast. Equipped with the right filter, your visuals have 21% more chances to be seen and can generate 45% more comments. The study concludes that those to be favored are Mayfair, Rise, Valencia, Hefe, and Nashville, while Lo-Fi and X-Pro II are to be avoided.

Simply Measured analyzed Instagram accounts of the 100 largest brands by Interbrand and drew several conclusions about the commitment that generate these brands. First of all, despite the increase in the publication of videos, photos remain the most engaging content type. Then, 7 of the 10 most used hashtags in 2015 are created by brands with #BMW and #MercedesBenz leading. Finally, the emoji Heart is the one that generates the most commitment, which explains why it is the second most used by brands.

From this study and from our own experience, we have written for you a few best practices to engage your community on Instagram:

Use hashtags: Hashtags (or word-sharp for the pickiest) are an essential factor regarding visibility. Find the right hashtags for your content and audience. Use generals (#fun #mode #selfie #instamood) and hashtags trends related to news, event, and your content will have a much better visibility! But limit yourself to 15 hashtags, or your subscribers will graze the #indigestion.
Create your own hashtags: to give your audience a way to identify themselves as such, generate hashtags in your name. You can create them for your marketing campaigns, events and news. The hashtag is also very useful to launch competitions on Instagram. For example, encourage your subscribers to post a photo of them according to a theme related to your brand, using a hashtag unique to your competition. You will gain in visibility and competitions are always a good way to retain your audience.

Locate your content if you want to target a very particular geographic area, Instagram offers to find your photos and videos, feel free to use it as often as possible!
Also read: How to Build a Branded Instagram Feed

Like, comment, mention: the relationship between you and your subscribers is not one way, show them your interest in them. Love and comment on their content when they are relevant to your brand, and mention them in the comments.
Make your subscribers stars: nothing like a bit of marketing ego to engage your brand ambassadors! If a customer publishes a visually appealing photo of your product, post it on your own page by thanking it directly (after asking permission!) The customer in question will be grateful to you, and it will inspire your community to Identify you in their contents.
Speak directly to your audience: You are interested in the opinion of your customers in your photo captions. Ask them questions, or give them hidden texts ("I never leave without my ___") and let them respond in the comments. In addition to generating comments under your publications, this will allow you to have a direct feedback on the appreciation of your products by your audience.
Use your partner: you work with many suppliers and partners? Do a little cross-promotion and enjoy your visibility! For example, you will sell your brand in a new shop. So make sure your products are available in this shop by mentioning it on Instagram and ask them to do the same. Unity is the strength!
Submit exclusive content: Instagram your audience wants to feel privileged, create the only dedicated to this social network content and do not connect all your photos on your Facebook or Twitter page.
Be regular: the board last but not least. Be constant in your frequency of publication. Find the one that best suits you and settles there. To help you know where you stand, create an editorial calendar dedicated to Instagram and plan your publications ahead of time.

Finally, always keep in mind that your goal is commitment. Submit more content on your community than on your product. Put forward your audience, your vision, your team, and you will gain sympathy and authenticity.

# 4 Watch Instagram

Want to know in real time what your content is about? Understand the impact of your Instagram account? Know the trends of the moment to exploit?

Then, you will have to set up an active watch of the social network. It will not only help you understand the public's feelings, but it is also a good way to always improve your content creation.

By monitoring data such as your subscriber growth, the number of mentions, likes and shares and comparing them to those of your competing brands, you will know where you stand in your market.

To analyze Instagram content according to a specific theme, to identify trends to follow and evaluate your brand, many tools are available, such as the Locowise service.

# 5 Inspire yourself from the biggest

Whether we are a start-up just born or a well established SME, we all have interests to look at what is done elsewhere to be inspired. Large multinationals have managed to create a large community on Instagram, which keeps growing.

Here are some lessons to be learned from these accounts:

Use the emoji as Starbucks

Starbucks can boast one of the most engaging Instagram accounts. And this can be explained in part by their use of emojis. By linking them directly to the content of their photos, Starbucks offers content that seeks to appeal to the emotions of their audience.

Be cool like MTV

MTV is definitely an account to follow if you want to associate a lifestyle with your brand. GIFS, Memes, MTV offers content that fits perfectly with its young audience. Nothing surprising coming from the television channel who knew how to redefine the fresh for years.

Master the cross-channel as Louis Vuitton

The luxury brand has totally integrated Instagram into its communication strategy, to offer its subscribers, not pictures or videos, but user experiences. With the creation of a site dedicated to their Instagram account, where you can learn a little more about each of their posts and the promotion of their other social networks, Louis Vuitton offers content that does not stop Only at Instagram.

Repeat as H & M

If you want to redirect your subscribers to your site, H & M is an example to follow. The brand mentions in all its posts a short link, hm.com/life, which refers to a lifestyle webzine. Keep in mind that the link must be brief and memorable, as it will not be clickable in the description of your photos.

Highlight your teams like IBM

Instagram is the ideal platform to uncover behind the scenes, and IBM understands that. The brand regularly publishes photos of their teams at work, testing new products or developing IT, and its subscribers are delighted to see the back of the decor of this company. It is an exercise that also helps to strengthen cohesion within your business.
Also read: 7 Ways to Improve Your Instagram Marketing

Once your Instagram strategy is defined, find your own examples to follow, to inspire them, and who knows, to surpass them!

Now that you know everything, you have no excuses for not publishing your best photos on Instagram. You can also find us on our account @nashasinc.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to share it. Also try the rest of this section: Advertising on Instagram: Your turn!

Instagram Stories Benefits Your Business Marketing Strategy

Stay Top of Mind

Diversify Your Strategy

Use Real-Time Marketing

Have Fun Marketing

Instagram Stories Benefits Your Instagram Engagement

Preserve a High-Quality Business Profile

Add to Your Business Profile

Connect with Your Target Audience

Enhance Your Content

1) Listen to what your customers are saying –

2) Use Custom Hashtags –

3) Make Your Followers Feel Special –

4) Reviews and Testimonials –

5) Write Great Content –

6) Be more visual –

7) Track Your Competition –

8) Leverage Social Live-Streaming Video Platform –

9) Track Everything –

10) Be Consistent –

Would you be able to Become a Social Media Influencer?

The Benefits of Becoming an Influencer

The Case Against Becoming an Influencer

Is it For You?

Get to know SMO

Optimize your owned media

Optimize your social posts

Analyze your results

What is Social Media Marketing?

Benefits of a Good Social Marketing Strategy

Higher Visibility.

Loyalty.

Natural Positioning.

Consider this.

Greater Interaction with Clients.

Social Marketing is the Marketing of Social Networks?

CONCLUSIONS

Instagram Stories or Snapchat?

Instagram, to reach a larger audience

What uses for businesses?

Show the life of your company:

Share the backstage of your publications

"Instagram Stories Takeover"

Make demo videos:

1 # Create your Instagram account

There are two ways to use this link optimally:

2 # Define your content

Quality:

Creativity

Relevance

# 3 Engaging Your Community

# 4 Watch Instagram

# 5 Inspire yourself from the biggest

Here are some lessons to be learned from these accounts:

Use the emoji as Starbucks

Be cool like MTV

Master the cross-channel as Louis Vuitton

Repeat as H & M

Highlight your teams like IBM

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