#why have the hashtags gone BIG on the dashboard
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Session 7
[[<PREV]] | [[NEXT>]]
Hello! We’re back! I took an accidental week off lmao, I was away up the hills without my laptop
So the patreon (scmalarky.patreon.com) is uhhhh now three sessions ahead! So that’s fun.
Ophi’s player wasn’t feeling great this time so she ducked out, but the others still got some plot in!
##
They tie Aelfswild up with rope, and set off along the road back to the Citadel.
“Do you think there’ll be a reward?” Carric asks, tugging the rope that binds Aelfswild.
He glares at her as he stumbles to catch up.
“I think it’s called clearing our names,” Marask replies. “Well, Ophi and Uriel’s.”
“And Siana’s,” Ophi says. “Wherever she went.”
“Maybe back to the glyph guild or... wherever it was she goes.” Marask shrugs. “But if she’s been caught by other guards, then this should help.”
“Right. And if it doesn’t, we can kill them?” Uriel asks.
As Marask lets out a shocked, exasperated cry of “No!”, Setareh laughs behind them.
Uriel sighs.
#
There’s a steady flow of traffic at the gate of the Citadel, but the group ignore the line of carts and stride straight up to where Rarder is overseeing everything.
He grunts at them as he glances past, and then looks back. “Where did you come from?” He looks back at the guard post. “No one’s logged that you left.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Carric pats his arm. “Oh, and hey-” She sorts through her bag and comes up with a small pouch of mushrooms. “These will help you.” She offers him them.
Rarder doesn’t take them right away. “Help me... with what?”
“With Haucey!” Carric says brightly. “In the bedroom, if you know what I mean.”
Marask snorts with laughter, and he isn’t the only one; some of the other guards have heard Carric and are sniggering quietly.
Rarder shoots the guards a glare. “We don’t take kindly to bribes around here,” he says clearly.
“Then think of it as a gift.” Carric balances the pouch on his arm and pats his shoulder as she walks past. “You’re welcome.”
Setareh tips Rarder a wink and a smirk as he saunters past, and Rarder rolls his eyes, carefully taking the pouch from his arm and stepping back to place it on the ledge beside the guard’s shelter.
“Try not to get involved in anything else illegal,” Rarder says to the group.
“No promises.” Marask shrugs.
“We’ll try not to be unfairly accused, though,” Ophi says.
“Enjoy your mushrooms!” Carric waves back.
Setareh turns on his heel and flicks him a jaunty salute.
They walk through the city with Aelfswild in tow, and all seems like it’s normal.
“Ophibwynn Hunzruae!”
She flinches as someone yells out her name. “... Yes?”
“Aldehrt sent me to find you.” A young human child comes running up. “He, um, he’d like you back home. At the inn. Please. He didn’t say please, but I thought we were supposed to be polite. It’s not a question, though. He seems mad.”
Ophi sighs. “Alright, alright.” She glances at the group. “I... guess I’ve got to go. Catch me up later, ok?”
“I thought you took the night off?” Carric asks.
Ophi laughs and shrugs. “I... may have forgotten to tell Aldehrt that.”
“Oops.”
Ophi shrugs and follows after the kid. “Bye!”
Setareh waves cheerily after her as the rest of the group continue walking.
They make it to Aewyth’s command centre without any more distractions, and Marask boots the door open and all but throws Aelfswild in ahead of him.
“We have the culprit!” he yells, and strides on towards Aewyth’s office.
There aren’t many guards around. Setareh peers into the large room on the right, but there’s only one person lying on a bed in there, and the faint smell of something being cooked in the kitchen beyond.
Carric knocks at the door to Aewyth’s office. “Hey, so we have the person that set us up,” she says, poking her head around the door.
“So I heard. Bring him in.” Aewyth looks up from the file on the desk in front of her.
The group troops in and pushes Aelfswild to stand in front of the desk.
Setareh sidles past them all and boosts himself to sit on the table against the wall, bringing one foot up to tuck under his knee, leaning back.
“So. This is your conspirator?” Aewyth ignores Setareh, looking Aelfswild up and down.
“Sure is.” Marask grins. “We found him out in the woods, at that camp where all the stolen stuff is.”
Aewyth nods slowly. “Who were you stealing it for?”
Aelfswild smirks. “Who said I was stealing it for anyone?”
“Uh, you did,” Carric says. “When you told us that someone had already paid for the item you wanted us to get.”
He tips his head in acknowledgement of her point, but doesn’t say anything more.
“But you admit that you asked this group to steal for you?”
“And you think that will clear their names?” Aelfswild laughs. “I may have asked them to, but they still had the choice. They agreed to steal it.”
“I mean yeah, but-” Carric starts.
Aewyth holds up her hand to halt Carric. “Be that as it may. Are you responsible for the missing Hanging?”
Aelfswild tilts his head to the side, looking down at Aewyth with an amused, dismissive look. “I will not betray my clients.”
“Hm.” Aewyth gets to her feet and strides to the door. “Haucey!”
“Captain.” Haucey steps out of the breakroom, a laughably small plate in her hands. “What can I do for you?”
“Take this man to the prison.” Aewyth gestures for Marask to bring Aelfswild out of her office. “He needs to be questioned.”
“Aye, Captain.” Haucey nods and sets the plate down just inside the breakroom, picking up a large mace and strapping it across her back instead.
She reaches out a large hand for the rope holding Aelfswild.
“Thank you.”
Aelfswild, as he follows Haucey from the building, gives the group a small wave and a knowing smile.
“The cells here don’t really cut it, do they?” Setareh asks, as Aewyth steps back inside her office.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Aewyth asks him, with very little bite to her words.
Setareh laughs and slips to his feet. “I suppose that’s my cue, then.” He turns to the group and sweeps an extravagant bow. “It’s been a pleasure. If you ever have need of my services again, you can find me at the feet of the Stone Giant in the Highlamp District.”
Aewyth, hearing this, nods slightly as if she finally understands something.
“Ok, see you.”
The group let him pass, then turn back to Aewyth.
“I don’t... think I have anything more for you,” she says, sitting down.
“Oh, but about the arrests this morning...?” Carric asks.
“Oh - yes, of course. The charges against Uriel and Ophibwynn have been suspended.”
“And Siana,” Carric prompts. “She was with us, but I don’t know where she’s gone right now.”
Aewyth looks up. “Right. I’ll make sure she isn’t being held anywhere else in the Citadel.”
“Only suspended?” Marask asks. “But we brought you Aelfswild!”
“They were still spotted in the act, as it were,” Aewyth replies. “It relies on Aeneth dropping them.”
“Maybe I should talk with her,” Uriel says, a gleam in her eyes.
“No.”
“No, that’s a bad idea,” Carric says, at the same time as Marask.
Aewyth laughs. “Please don’t plan anything like that in front of me.”
“Right.” Marask tugs them towards the door. “Alright, let’s... go, I guess.”
They leave Aewyth’s office, and the building, and stand in the sunlight just outside as they decide what to do next.
“I suppose we could always-” Carric starts.
“Wait, what is that?” Marask asks, peering across the square.
There’s a small hooded figure huddled into the sides of buildings as they make their cautious way around, seemingly following Haucey as she takes Aelfswild away.
Marask shifts forms and flies across the square to land behind them. “Hey, buddy,” he says, loudly, clapping a hand down on their shoulder.
The figure cries out and stumbles away, and their hood falls down to reveal a kobold.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Nothin’!” The kobold squeals, turning away. “I’m tryna get home-” He tries to run.
Marask catches his hood and yanks him back so he can headbutt him into the sunlight.
The kobold shrieks and slaps his hands over his face, covering his eyes as he curls into a ball. There’s a clatter of knives as he hits the ground.
Marask tugs the kobold’s cloak off to reveal a bandolier of knives strapped across his body, most of them shaped and weighted for throwing.
Carric and Uriel join them, having jogged over.
“Who is this?” Carric asks. “Hey, who are you?” She attempts to cast a spell, and curses when it fails.
“Hey.” Marask crouches beside the kobold, who’s rolling back and forth in seeming agony. “Tell us what you’re doing, or – or I’ll set her on you.” He points at Uriel.
Uriel grins. “Can I cut off his fingers?” She starts to pick up a knife.
“Sure. If!” Marask holds out a hand to stop her starting right there. “If he doesn’t tell us what we want to know.”
Uriel pouts and the knife slips her grasp.
The kobold doesn’t respond to the threats.
Marask tuts and pulls the kobold into the shade. “Now. Tell us what you’re trying to do, pretty please.”
The kobold winces and looks up from between his fingers, blinking rapidly to adjust his eyes. “I have – I have to kill Aelfswild, he can’t let them know.”
“Alright.” Marask stands. “Thank you.”
Carric ties the kobold up and hoists him over her shoulder. “Let’s take him to see Aewyth.”
They troop back into the command post and into Aewyth’s office without bothering to knock.
“We found this kobold being shifty, and he says he’s here to kill Aelfswild,” Marask announces, as Carric drops her captive on the ground.
Aewyth looks up, startled. “What?”
“Yeah, just outside,” Marask says.
Uriel sways on her feet and leans back against the door.
“Oh shit, you don’t look so good.” Marask turns about and passes over two pies. “Here, this’ll help.”
Uriel sits down and starts to eat.
“Do you need one as well?” Marask offers Carric a pie.
She takes it, and puts it in her own bag.
Aewyth stands up and circles the desk, crouching down before the kobold. “What’s your name?”
“Driany,” the kobold mutters, avoiding looking at anyone.
“Wasn’t he – wasn't that the kobold from the Scriptorium?” Carric asks. “The one that disappeared after the Hanging was stolen.”
“Oh yeah!” Marask nods. “Guess he didn’t disappear so well, did he?”
Carric snorts.
“And you’re trying to- woah!” Aewyth jerks backwards as Driany manages to snap the ropes.
He has a knife in his hands, one that they missed before, and he’s plunging it without hesitation towards his own throat.
“Hey!” Marask slams into him, knocking the knife free from his grasp as the kobold hits the floor.
Uriel also kicks out at him, her foot connecting squarely with Driany’s side.
“What?” Marask glances at her.
Uriel shrugs and gets to her feet. “He was there.”
Carric, standing above Driany, splays her hands and closes her eyes. “There’s - there’s a strong spell on him,” she mutters. “A compulsion? He... has to kill Aelfswild.”
Driany hisses and scrabbles for his knife, unable to get anywhere with Marask all but on top of him.
“So give him Aelfswild,” Marask says.
“We can’t, I still need answers.” Aewyth shakes her head, picking up Driany’s knife.
His eyes settle on it and he licks his lips, baring his teeth.
“No - Carric.” Marask gestures at her hands with his head.
“Oh. Oh.” Carric’s eyes widen and she nods. “Hold on.” She presses her hands together and concentrates for a moment.
An image of Aelfswild appears and becomes solid, looking as real as anyone in the room.
Marask gets off Driany, and the kobold launches himself at the facsimile, tearing his way up it to bite straight into the jugular.
Aewyth winces and looks away as she gets to her feet.
As the facsimile drops to the floor, Driany falls free and hits the ground, and groans.
Marask hauls the facsimile out of the room just in time, as it disappears in his grasp. “Love that clean up job.”
“No, don’t lock me in the chair again, I don’t-” Driany shrieks, throwing his hands up in front of his face again, pushing back.
“Hey.” Aewyth nudges him with a foot. “No one’s chaining you anywhere.”
Driany gasps and looks up through the lattice of his fingers. “I don’t... where am I? Who are you?”
“I am Captain Aewyth, of the Citadel’s guards. I understand you work for the Scriptorium.”
“Y-yes. I was – Bondua recommended me for the job, said she knew there was an opening.”
“What happened when you got the job?”
“I was – I was told to pick something up in the black market, and when I was there, someone took me into a room, strapped me into a chair-” Driany cuts off with a whimper.
“Like brainwashed?” Marask asks. “That’s rough.”
“What did you see there?” Aewyth asks.
“Nothing, nothing.” Driany whimpers, covering his eyes again. “But I heard – there was a voice, a distorted voice and then everything went blank until – until the tapestry was gone and I didn’t know what was happening, so I hid! I ran and I hid but they found me, and-” He looks up. “They wanted me to kill someone.”
“Yes.” Aewyth leans back against her desk. “Fuck.”
“Is... everything alright?” Carric asks.
“Yes. I just... can’t be the one to help you with this, so you need to meet Setareh. He’ll take you to an old friend, I think.” She wrinkles her nose. “Don’t let him say ‘I told you so’.”
“Alright?” Marask frowns. “But...”
“I’ll deal with this.” Aewyth nods at Driany, who has curled into a ball and is sobbing quietly. “And the actual prisoners you released this morning.”
Uriel gets to her feet and shrugs. “If they were really bad, they wouldn’t have been so easy to break free.”
“Alright, we’re going.” Marask grabs Uriel and tugs her out the door.
#
They walk across the city, skirting the inner walls, to the Highlamp District. The Stone Giant is easy to spot, looming over the buildings as it does.
“Do you think it’s a real giant?” Carric asks. “I’ve never heard of one in this world.”
“Do you think if we stay in its shadow we stop aging?” Marask asks, eyeing the shadow that falls across the buildings.
“It’s that nothing grows in its shadow,” Setareh says. “It only applies to plants.” He’s standing between the giant’s feet.
“Hey!” Marask grins and leans in to kiss Setareh’s cheeks.
“I didn’t think to see you so soon.” Setareh responds in kind, and ushers the three of them across and down an alley to a small, shacklike building that’s hidden in the garden of one of the houses that faces the square.
He raps out a pattern of knocks on the door and enters, holding it open for the others. “Now here, Aszaccixl, I’ve brought some friends!”
The shack isn't nearly so dilapidated on the inside. There are stools for sitting on, and a table that’s heaped with scrolls, and another that holds bottles and decanters and glasses. The back wall is covered with parchment that’s pinned in place. It’s lit by what looks to be a glim of some kind, a small light that hovers over the centre of the room and casts a warm glow.
There’s a lizardfolk standing by the table of scrolls, tall and imposing, and very clearly lost in thought. He grunts as they enter.
“Aewyth sent them,” Setareh says, and sighs at the stools. “You can’t keep doing this to me.”
Aszaccixl looks up, his gaze sharpening. “Aewyth? What does she want?”
“She... said you would be able to help us with something?” Carric shrugs. “About the tapestry that’s gone missing.”
“They found one of the masterminds,” Setareh says, from where he perches cross-legged on one of the stools.
“Tell me everything.” Aszaccixl grabs for a piece of parchment and a quill.
Between the three of them, they explain about the thefts, the camp, the kobold, and Aelfswild in the middle of it.
Aszaccixl writes everything down, looking more and more pleased with every piece of information. “And he asked you to steal something from Aeneth.”
“Yeah, it was just a small box.” Carric measures it with her hands. “We couldn’t open it.”
“What is all this?” Marask asks, studying the wall.
“There’s corruption deep in the council,” Aszaccixl says, looking up. “I know it, but I can’t prove it definitively yet.”
“And Aeneth-”
“Oh, she’s aware, but the guard are-” Aszaccixl bites a guttural word back, his snout twisting up in a snarl. “She can only do so much.”
“Like sending us to you,” Carric says. “So... what’s next?”
“You’ve caught Aelfswild.” Aszaccixl brushes the quill through his fingers. “Did you see anything more in his office?”
“We’ve never looked properly.” Carric glances at the others. “But we could go do that.”
Marask nods. “Sure. Absolutely.”
“We’re returning to the black market?” Uriel looks positively delighted.
“Shall we tell Ophi, first?”
“Oh, we can pick her up on the way.”
“It’s getting late,” Aszaccixl says.
“What better time to visit the black market?” Uriel starts pushing the others towards the door. “We have an office to ransack, let’s go!”
Setareh smiles and waves his hand at them as they leave.
Aszaccixl watches them go, a bemused look on his face, before he turns back to his wall.
#dnd#homebrew#campaign#fate#FATE CORE RPG#fate rpg#fate roleplay#fate rp#why have the hashtags gone BIG on the dashboard#what's with that#I don't like it
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12 Ways to Use Instagram for Small Business
We all know the power of Instagram. Huge companies like Coca Cola, Starbucks and Nike dominate the space. Companies with established followings seems to have no problems getting engagement and results. But how can you use Instagram for small business?
You don’t have to be an enterprise-sized company to get value from Instagram. In fact, the mobile app allows small businesses to compete with the “big guys.” If you’re not using Instagram for small business yet, you’re missing out on a potential gold mine of opportunities.
Looking for more small business resources?
See our thorough guide to social media for small business or our full guide to all things small business marketing!
Why Instagram for Small Businesses Is Great
Out of all of the newer social networks, Instagram does a lot to set itself apart. With over 500 million monthly active users, Instagram is the fourth-most downloaded app in the US.
Sprout features mentioned in this article
Instagram Management
Instagram Analytics
Social Media Monitoring
But here’s the problem.
Since Instagram marketing is still fairly new, some small businesses struggle to gain traction. You don’t have clickable links in your posts, it’s a mobile-first app, which relies a lot more on visuals than text. As a result, we’re seeing a lot of small businesses sign up, get confused about how to actually use it and then give up.
However, with social media management tools like Sprout that integrate with Instagram, it’s a lot easier to get started, no matter what size your business is.
So how do you cross over from being just another company on the app to achieving the level of success companies like Bon Puf, Simple Green Smoothies?
Here are 12 strategies and tips on how to get the most out of Instagram for small business and build a loyal following:
1. Get Set Up the Right Way
It’s a good idea to connect your company’s social accounts. This is particularly true if you already have social media profiles with a strong following. You can push your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other sites to your new Instagram account.
Instagram lets you connect your other profiles so that your new posts can get published to those accounts automatically.
Don’t forget to add your website and write a bio for your profile that explains what your company is all about without being boring. Fallen Industry’s profile does a great job of letting users know what they do while making it intriguing at the same time.
Another good way to use your bio is to add in additional contact information. By default you can only have one clickable URL in your profile. But what you can do to get around that is include URLs in your bio.
Pro tip: Shorten any URLs you use in your bio using a service like Bitly. It’ll take up less characters and make it easier to track your traffic from Instagram.
Check out our post on how to write Instagram bios for businesses to learn more about crafting your Instagram bio and putting your best foot forward.
2. Start Using Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories have been a controversial feature to say the least. In case you haven’t heard, Instagram Stories lets you string together multiple pictures and videos into a “story” that disappears after 24 hours, similar to Snapchat stories.
Small businesses have been slow to use Instagram Stories while they try to figure out how to best weave the feature into their own strategies. But there’s a lot of potential you shouldn’t pass up. Like with any big change, the companies that adopt and figure it out first tend to reap the biggest benefits.
Follow in the footsteps of brands like Taco Bell that have gone all-in on Instagram Stories. Start experimenting and get creative to see what you can come up with.
3. Monitor What’s Working
Are you paying attention to which Instagram posts get the most engagement? Do you know which hashtags perform the best? Using Instagram reporting tools can help you see all of this information from a single dashboard and track it over time.
By looking through data, you’ll get an idea of what type of content resonates with your audience the best. Whether it’s a certain style of photo, a particular filter or a popular hashtag. The more info you have about the content your audience resonates with, the more you can improve your future posts.
4. Dive Into Your Comments
Do you publish Instagram posts and never look at them again? You’re not alone. A lot of small businesses spend little to no time monitoring their comments, partially because it’s not the easiest thing to do within the Instagram app. It’s also difficult because most brands look for publishing and not Instagram engagement.
In order to make responding to Instagram comments easier, use Sprout Social to reply to comments across multiple Instagram accounts and all your other social media profiles.
5. Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to quickly build up your Instagram following, particularly when you’re starting from scratch. Through influencer marketing, you can connect with people with an established following and get exposed to their audience.
In the past (pre-social media) influencer marketing required huge budgets to get athletes and actors to endorse your products. But social media has changed the game. Now non-celebs can be influencers and have hundreds of thousands or even millions of engaged followers. Not only has this made it easier for brands to connect with influencers, but it also made influencer marketing a lot more affordable.
You may not be able to afford to have a Hollywood A-lister post about your products on Instagram. But you can probably link up with a popular Instagram influencer with a nice-sized following.
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Start by making a list of the top influencers in your industry. Look for them on Instagram to make sure they have an engaged audience. It’s not just about how many followers they have, it’s about how much engagement they get. Check out how many Likes and comments they get on their posts and how often they post.
Then reach out and let them know you’re interested in working together. It’s best to have some ideas for what you’d like to do before approaching them. Two common options are contests and sponsored posts. Also, the influencer might have some ideas on how you can work together as well.
6. Get Familiar With Hashtags
Instagram’s search feature looks for hashtags instead of keywords. On platforms like Twitter or Facebook, you can do a search for “hamburgers” and see all the Tweets and Facebook posts containing that keyword. But with Instagram, you have to search #hamburgers.
If you want your posts to show up in the app’s search, you need to start using hashtags for Instagram. It’s a quick way to increase your visibility and reach people who aren’t already aware of your brand.
The trick is to use the right hashtags. A common mistake some businesses make is using random hashtags they made up. Unfortunately, nobody is searching for those random hashtags so they’re not helping you grow your following.
The real value comes from finding ways to post pictures related to popular or trending hashtags. When you do this, your images have a chance to show up in the Trending Tags section of Instagram.
What’s trending at the moment might not always be relevant to your business or the images you post though. In those cases, you can use Websta to see a huge list of popular hashtags that might not be trending, but are still being used heavily. Websta will show you more generic and broad hashtags that are easier to fit into your non-themed Instagram posts.
Something unique to Instagram that you don’t see on many other social networks is using a lot of hashtags can actually get your images more likes. On Twitter, having 10 hashtags in a Tweet would be crazy. But on Instagram it’s pretty much the norm.
In a case study from Max Woolf, over 120,000 Instagram photos were analyzed and he found that photos with the maximum allowable hashtags (30) received three times the amount of likes as photos with just a few hashtags.
This doesn’t mean every Instagram post needs 30 hashtags. Using hashtags just for the sake of having them isn’t recommended. But the point is photos with hashtags will get a lot more attention than those that don’t.
Once you start using hashtags in your post, you can use Sprout to see which of your hashtags are performing the best through our hashtag performance report.
7. Create More Videos
I’m sure we don’t have to tell you about how important video has become for small businesses. Even though photos currently generate more engagement, video is on the rise. Instead of waiting for other brands to dominate while you play catchup, get started right now.
With Instagram Stories and live videos, the app is making a clear push toward video content. The great thing about using Instagram videos is they don’t require a ton of production. All you really need is your phone and some creativity. Plus the videos are served in bite-size pieces with a time limit of one minute.
Follow in the footsteps of small businesses like Wahl, which generated a 4,307% spike in engagement within a year by focusing on more engagement and building a better Instagram strategy.
View this post on Instagram
Maintenance is 🔑. Follow these simple steps on how to properly clean, disinfect, oil, and store your Finale cutter bars and foils. #wahl #wahlpro #finale #maintenance #foils #cutterbars #shaver #shavermaintenance #barber #video #stylist #🔑
A post shared by Wahl Professional USA (@wahlpro) on Nov 18, 2016 at 10:02am PST
8. Start Regramming
Sharing other people’s content is one of the best ways to start building connections. When you’re just getting started with using Instagram for small business, building up your initial audience should be your top priority. You need to start getting eyes on your profile to get some initial shares and engagement.
Regramming is a quick and easy way to start getting some momentum. Unlike other networks, Instagram doesn’t have a native way to share other people’s content. You can either Like or comment. But there are third party apps that give you the ability to regram. Check out our guide on how to regram for more info and some different apps you can use.
View this post on Instagram
#Repost @happymundane with @repostapp ・・・ #ad Had fun creating a spacey little adventure for @tictacusa Hope your weekend is out of this world! 🌌🚀👽 #littleadventures #golittle
A post shared by Tic Tac USA (@tictacusa) on Sep 9, 2016 at 12:15pm PDT
9. Capitalize on Instagram Ads
One of the biggest obstacles that stops small businesses from trying social media advertising is costs. When you don’t have a big budget, it’s a little more difficult to justify spending money on advertising. But Instagram Ads present a great opportunity for small businesses because it’s extremely affordable.
Getting started is simple, particularly if you already have a Facebook Advertising account because it’s built into the same platform. However, we recommend creating custom image assets specifically for Instagram Ads instead of reusing the same ones you would for Facebook because of how it’s displayed in the feed.
10. Host An Instagram Contest
There’s no denying the fact that people absolutely love free stuff. Instagram contests give your company an interesting way to engage with current and potential fans.
There are certain elements that you’ll want to include in your contest to maximize your results:
Make a theme for your contest instead of the generic “follow us to win a free product” approach.
Create a custom hashtag for your contest.
Make people tag a friend and comment to enter the contest. This will help your contest spread a lot quicker.
Start promoting the contest at least a week before it starts to build anticipation.
Consider collaborating with other companies or influencers to get even more reach.
Before you start, read through Instagram’s promotion guidelines to make sure you’re doing everything above board. Since the goal is to get loyal followers, whatever you’re giving away should be somewhat related to your industry. That way you’re not just attracting freebie seekers, but people that are legitimately interested in your brand.
View this post on Instagram
It’s #GIVEAWAY TIME! THANK YOU Team Quest for making this such an awesome year! FIVE (potentially TEN) winners will receive all in the photo. To enter: 1. LIKE this post. 2. TAG a friend you’re thankful for in the comments. 3. Winners will be selected & contacted in the comments 11/27. If we get 500 or more participants, we’ll select another FIVE winners for a total of TEN! U.S. only. CLICK the link in our bio (then the photo) for official rules or go here: http://quest.to/questgivingday3. #OnaQuest #MyQuest #Questgiving
A post shared by Quest Nutrition (@questnutrition) on Nov 23, 2016 at 10:56am PST
11. Collaborate
One of the quickest ways to get a surge of new followers is to get a shout out or mention from someone that already has a large following. The great thing about Instagram is that a lot of popular accounts aren’t owned by huge corporations. They’re owned by regular people and lifestyle entrepreneurs who have done a lot of the leg work to build their own audience already.
When these people give a brand a shout out, their followers instantly go to check out the account and will more than likely give you a follow. This is one of the techniques Neil Patel used in his infamous $57,000 Instagram case study.
The two most common ways to get mentioned by established accounts are:
Pay for a sponsored post (this can cost you anywhere from $20-$100+ per post)
Establish a relationship or partner up with them
Obviously the second method is ideal, but let’s start out with the first option.
A lot of small businesses aren’t aware that paying for sponsored Instagram posts is even an option, but it’s a very popular way to start get the ball rolling on your account. The male accessory brand Bachelr used sponsored Instagram posts to promote its website when it first launched, and saw great results.
The brand generated over 20,000 new visitors in just two weeks.
Bachelr credits a huge chunk of the success to influencer marketing.
One of our most successful posts was a model holding one of our products in a natural setting, no logo anywhere. This got 10k likes and 100+ comments.
Make a list of the top influencers related to your industry on Instagram. Focus on individuals rather than businesses. Most users who accept sponsored posts will have their contact information in their profile so it’s easy to reach them.
When you’re looking for influencers, choose people who are a good match for your brand. Otherwise the new followers you’ll gain won’t be very likely to engage with your content.
The second technique is simply good old fashion networking. Start following companies who are complementary to your brand and engage with their content. Leave comments, like their photos and even reach out to them via email. As these relationships start to grow, look for opportunities to promote each other on Instagram. Maybe you can team up on a joint venture or host an event together. Post photos on your Instagram pages and tag each other in them. There are plenty of possibilities.
One company putting an interesting twist on both of these techniques is Gym Shark. The active wear company caters to athletes, bodybuilders and people who live all-around active lives. One of Gym Shark’s techniques for growing its following is sponsoring influencers in the fitness niche. Its sponsored athletes post pictures on their own Instagram pages wearing Gym Shark’s products, and Gym Shark posts images of them on its page as well.
View this post on Instagram
All black everything. Tap the link in our bio to shop all the new items added to Blackout now. #GymsharkBlackout
A post shared by Homeshark (@gymshark) on Nov 23, 2016 at 11:09am PST
12. Engage With Your Competitor’s Followers
Two of the most important characteristics of an engaged Instagram follower are:
They’re interested in your niche/industry
They like the content you post
With this strategy, the first part is already taken care of. If a user is following one of your competitors, they’re more than likely already interested in your industry. That makes it easier to win them over and get them to follow you too. From that point, it’s all about keeping them engaged through the content you post.
Make a list of your top competitors who are active on Instagram. You may want to put them all into a spreadsheet to make it easier to track. Start with the first competitor and follow about 50-100 of their followers. This step alone will get you a few new followers. But we’re not just after followers, we want engaged followers who will help spread the word about our brand. In order to attract those users, you’ll need to communicate with them. On Instagram, there are three basic ways to engage with people:
Follow them
Like their photos
Comment on their photos
You’ve already followed them, so now you just have to like some of their photos, comment or both. This will increase the likelihood of people following you back, and also reciprocating your engagement. The more you engage with your audience, the bigger your return will be.
Are You on Instagram Yet?
Growing a dedicated following on Instagram won’t happen overnight. But the bright side is that Instagram users are very active and love to engage. So once you get the ball rolling, you’ll notice that your brand will start to build organically. Start putting these techniques into action and you’ll see how powerful Instagram can be for your business.
Article Continues Below
https://growinsta.xyz/12-ways-to-use-instagram-for-small-business/
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Covid-19: Should we have a fashion rescue fund?
New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/covid-19-should-we-have-a-fashion-rescue-fund/
Covid-19: Should we have a fashion rescue fund?
On his official Instagram account, fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee shared Smriti Irani, Union Minister of Textile’s appeal to the buying industry not to cancel a single order as the world is “engulfed with coronavirus”. Dastkar’s (a society for crafts and craftspeople) chairperson, Laila Tyabji has spoken out on how this community is the most vulnerable during lockdown and will continue to be so after the pandemic subsides.
Globally, Covid-19 is the biggest crisis to date for the apparel and fashion industry. In India, where the textile industry is the second largest employer, its health is critical to the country’s welfare. Will the fashion design industry, important to the sector’s ecosystem, be another casualty? Sandeep Khosla of prominent label Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla (AJSK), known for reviving crafts such as chikankari, agrees with Tyabji’s sentiment but points out, “If we go bust as designers, we lose the ability to be employers and safeguard our workforce.”
Designers and craftspeople are intrinsically linked. “We need our craftsmen as much as we need our blue collar workers in order to sail through these times and in the years to come,” explains Narresh Kukerja, creative director of what many consider the country’s first swimwear label, Shivan and Narresh. A younger label at just 10 years (who delayed this month’s celebrations around this landmark due to the current situation), their store in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda was on the anvil, but will now be put on hold.
Trickle-down effect
Rahul Mishra, India’s first designer to be invited to show at Paris Haute Couture Week, has a workforce of 1,000 people who work with him directly and indirectly. He explains that “the one on top of the hierarchy often finds [themselves] responsible for various people — whose families’ lives depend solely on the salary they are paid. With sales gone down to zero in the past month, the inflow of money is completely on halt”.
Designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla
Fashion designers are trying to do their best for their employees — for example, AJSK are paying full salaries to staff despite the lockdown and hope to be able to do this for as long as they can. “Of course, this will not be possible indefinitely as we are not a corporate with a long-term financial buffer,” says Khosla, adding that it is essential for the government to intervene to support the industry. Even after the virus’s containment period, businesses may go back to normal operations, but consumption patterns are set for a complete disruption.
But what about the ₹1.7 lakh crore Gareeb Kalyan Yojana announced by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on March 26, to help the poor tide over the coronavirus lockdown? Fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani has this to say: “I’ve not seen the entire thing, but [it seems] a series of paltry measures that don’t address industry and job creation. Collateral-free loans mean there is no security and may add to bad debts. And EPF is a minimal thing. Frankly, it sounds better than it is.”
The big Indian wedding no more
While a few labels are encouraging pre-orders to ostensibly help their artisans earn and stay occupied at their homes, the situation is grim. “With no cash inflow in the markets, buying will be hugely hurt, especially in this niche segment,” says Sunil Sethi, president of the industry’s apex body, the Fashion And Design Council of India (FDCI). Weddings, the mainstay of Indian couture, have been postponed indefinitely. “We are in the business of crowds and while there is even the slightest doubt in people’s minds that there could be a second wave of the pandemic, and until there is a vaccination against it, I think people are going to be wary of going out,” continues Tahiliani. The domino effect will be that retail footfall will drop, as will the occasions that designers dress clients for.
Fund for emerging designers
So what can be done to help the fashion designers themselves? According to the industry’s digital trade resource, WWD, The Council of Fashion Designers of America, British Fashion Council, Italy’s Camera della Moda and France’s Chambre Syndicale have also had conversations on how they can be aligned. As the current trending hashtag #inthistogether suggests, collaboration is the need of the hour. In India, the FDCI is planning to take a proposal to the Ministry to help the designers. “There is also a plan to set up a relief fund for greenhorns who most likely will be struggling with production and loss of revenue as they don’t possess a consortium of funds,” says Sethi. The details of this proposal have not yet been disclosed, but the designers themselves have a clear understanding of what the relief packages should be. Like Tahiliani, many feel that, as of now, the government has not made any practical noises.
Rent, GST and loans
For Kukreja, the main concern is rent and he says, “A big chunk of a designer’s revenue is spent on rent to landowners. The government must intervene and come up with a plan for business owners as well. We’re a country of job creators and if you don’t support business owners then you can’t support the bottom of the pyramid much longer.” Khosla feels that a three-month GST freeze period could help. Tahiliani takes it a step further feeling this is an opportune time for the government to re-examine the GST system. He feels there are practical issues with the tax system. “It makes shipping much more difficult and also hard to work as simple employees. So the idea of the craftsperson being self-sufficient and self-sustaining is necessarily skulled by that. Now, for the greater good, perhaps the country needs a completely different system,” he opines.
Khosla also hopes for support from banks on delaying interest or repayment of loans to recover from losses incurred by Covid-19 outbreak. Meanwhile, Mishra is already in touch with a few banks to figure best solutions for any liquidity requirements.
The writer is a former editor, luxury consultant and author.
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Fb Workplace co-founder launches downtime fire alarm Kintaba
“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages, and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem, and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself.
Text messages, Slack channels, task managers, and Google Docs aren’t sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. Finally there’s a more holistic solution to incident response with today’s launch of Kintaba.
The Kintaba team experienced these pains first hand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris’ Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery “which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired” Egan says.
With today’s launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who’s responding and how. Kintaba’s live activity log and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags.
“The ability to turn catastrophes into opportunities is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful and unsuccessful teams and companies” says Egan. That’s why Kintaba doesn’t stop when your outage does.
Kintaba Founders (from left): John Egan Zac Morris Cole Potrocky
As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked, and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.
Kintaba’s well-pedigreed team and their approach to an unsexy but critical software-as-a-service attracted $2.25 million in funding led by New York’s FirstMark Capital.
“All these features add up to Kintaba taking away all the annoying administrative overhead and organization that comes with running a successful modern incident management practice” says Egan, “so you can focus on fixing the big issues and learning from the experience.”
Egan, Morris and Cole Potrocky met while working at Facebook, which is known for spawning other enterprise productivity startups based on its top-notch internal tools. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz built a task management system to reduce how many meetings he had to hold, then left to turn that into Asana which filed to go public this week.
The trio had been working on internal communication and engineering tools as well as the procedures for employing them. “We saw first hand working at companies like Facebook how powerful those practices can be and wanted to make them easier for anyone to implement without having to stitch a bunch of tools together” Egan tells me. He stuck around to co-found Facebook’ enterprise collaboration suite Workplace while Potrocky built engineering architecture there and Morris became a mobile security lead at Uber.
Like many blockchain projects, Kintaba’s predecessor, crypto collectibles wallet Vault, proved an engineering nightmare without clear product market fit. So the team ditched it, pivoted to build out the internal alerting tool they’d been tinkering with. That origin story sounds a lot like Slack’s, which began as a gaming company that pivoted to turn its internal chat tool into a business.
So what’s the difference between Kintaba and just using Slack and email or a monitoring tool like PagerDuty, Splunk’s VictorOps, or Atlassian’s OpsGenie? Here’s how Egan breaks a sit downtime situation handled with Kintaba:
“You’re on call and your pager is blowing up because all your servers have stopped serving data. You’re overwhelmed and the root cause could be any of the multitude of systems sending you alerts. With Kintaba, you aren’t left to fend for yourself. You declare an incident with high severity and the system creates a collaborative space that automatically adds an experienced IMOC (incident manager on call) along with other relevant on calls. Kintaba also posts in a company-wide incident Slack channel. Now you can work together to solve the problem right inside the incident’s collaborative space or in Slack while simultaneously keeping stakeholders updated by directing them to the Kintaba incident page instead of sending out update emails. Interested parties can get quick info from the stickied comments and #tags. Once the incident is resolved, Kintaba helps you write a postmortem of what went wrong, how it was fixed, and what will be done to prevent it from happening. Kintaba then automatically distributes the postmortem and sets up an incident review on your calendar.”
Essentially, instead of having one employee panicking about what to do until the team struggles to coordinate across a bunch of fragmented messaging threads, a smoother incident reporting process and all the discussion happens in Kintaba. And if there’s a security breach that a non-engineer notices, they can launch a Kintaba alert and assemble the legal and PR team to help too.
Alternatively, Egan describes the downtime fiascos he’d experience without Kintaba like this:
The on call has to start waking up their management chain to try and figure out who needs to be involved. The team maybe throws a Slack channel together but since there’s no common high severity incident management system and so many teams are affected by the downtime, other teams are also throwing slack channels together, email threads are happening all over the place, and multiple groups of people are trying to solve the problem at once. Engineers begin stepping all over each other and sales teams start emailing managers demanding to know what’s happening. Once the problem is solved, no one thinks to write up a postmortem and even if they do it only gets distributed to a few people and isn’t saved outside that email chain. Managers blame each other and point fingers at people instead of taking a level headed approach to reviewing the process that led to the failure. In short: panic, thrash, and poor communication.
While monitoring apps like PagerDuty can do a good job of indicating there’s a problem, they’re weaker at the collaborative resolution and post-mortem process, and designed just for engineers rather than everyone like Kintaba. Egan says “It’s kind of like comparing the difference between the warning lights on a piece of machinery and the big red emergency button on a factory floor. We’re the big red button . . . That also means you don’t have to rip out PagerDuty to use Kintaba” since it can be the trigger that starts the Kintaba flow.
Still, Kintaba will have to prove that it’s so much better than a shared Google Doc, an adequate replacement for monitoring solutions, or a necessary add-on that companies should pay $12 per user per month. PagerDuty’s deeper technical focus helped it go public a year ago, though it’s fallen about 60% since to a market cap of $1.75 billion. Still, customers like Dropbox, Zoom, and Vodafone rely on its SMS incident alerts, while Kintaba’s integration with Slack might not be enough to rouse coders from their slumber when something catches fire.
If Kintaba can succeed in incident resolution with today’s launch, the four-person team sees adjacent markets in task prioritization, knowledge sharing, observability, and team collaboration, though those would pit it against some massive rivals. If it can’t, perhaps Slack or Microsoft Teams could be suitable soft landings for Kintaba, bringing more structured systems for dealing with major screwups to their communication platforms.
When asked why he wanted to build a legacy atop software that might seem a bit boring on the surface, Egan concluded that “Companies using Kintaba should be learning faster than their competitors . . . Everyone deserves to work within a culture that grows stronger through failure.”
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New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/fb-workplace-co-founder-launches-downtime-fire-alarm-kintaba/
Fb Workplace co-founder launches downtime fire alarm Kintaba
“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages, and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem, and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself.
Text messages, Slack channels, task managers, and Google Docs aren’t sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. Finally there’s a more holistic solution to incident response with today’s launch of Kintaba.
The Kintaba team experienced these pains first hand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris’ Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery “which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired” Egan says.
With today’s launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who’s responding and how. Kintaba’s live activity log and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags.
“The ability to turn catastrophes into opportunities is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful and unsuccessful teams and companies” says Egan. That’s why Kintaba doesn’t stop when your outage does.
Kintaba Founders (from left): John Egan Zac Morris Cole Potrocky
As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked, and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.
Kintaba’s well-pedigreed team and their approach to an unsexy but critical software-as-a-service attracted $2.25 million in funding led by New York’s FirstMark Capital.
“All these features add up to Kintaba taking away all the annoying administrative overhead and organization that comes with running a successful modern incident management practice” says Egan, “so you can focus on fixing the big issues and learning from the experience.”
Egan, Morris and Cole Potrocky met while working at Facebook, which is known for spawning other enterprise productivity startups based on its top-notch internal tools. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz built a task management system to reduce how many meetings he had to hold, then left to turn that into Asana which filed to go public this week.
The trio had been working on internal communication and engineering tools as well as the procedures for employing them. “We saw first hand working at companies like Facebook how powerful those practices can be and wanted to make them easier for anyone to implement without having to stitch a bunch of tools together” Egan tells me. He stuck around to co-found Facebook’ enterprise collaboration suite Workplace while Potrocky built engineering architecture there and Morris became a mobile security lead at Uber.
Like many blockchain projects, Kintaba’s predecessor, crypto collectibles wallet Vault, proved an engineering nightmare without clear product market fit. So the team ditched it, pivoted to build out the internal alerting tool they’d been tinkering with. That origin story sounds a lot like Slack’s, which began as a gaming company that pivoted to turn its internal chat tool into a business.
So what’s the difference between Kintaba and just using Slack and email or a monitoring tool like PagerDuty, Splunk’s VictorOps, or Atlassian’s OpsGenie? Here’s how Egan breaks a sit downtime situation handled with Kintaba:
“You’re on call and your pager is blowing up because all your servers have stopped serving data. You’re overwhelmed and the root cause could be any of the multitude of systems sending you alerts. With Kintaba, you aren’t left to fend for yourself. You declare an incident with high severity and the system creates a collaborative space that automatically adds an experienced IMOC (incident manager on call) along with other relevant on calls. Kintaba also posts in a company-wide incident Slack channel. Now you can work together to solve the problem right inside the incident’s collaborative space or in Slack while simultaneously keeping stakeholders updated by directing them to the Kintaba incident page instead of sending out update emails. Interested parties can get quick info from the stickied comments and #tags. Once the incident is resolved, Kintaba helps you write a postmortem of what went wrong, how it was fixed, and what will be done to prevent it from happening. Kintaba then automatically distributes the postmortem and sets up an incident review on your calendar.”
Essentially, instead of having one employee panicking about what to do until the team struggles to coordinate across a bunch of fragmented messaging threads, a smoother incident reporting process and all the discussion happens in Kintaba. And if there’s a security breach that a non-engineer notices, they can launch a Kintaba alert and assemble the legal and PR team to help too.
Alternatively, Egan describes the downtime fiascos he’d experience without Kintaba like this:
The on call has to start waking up their management chain to try and figure out who needs to be involved. The team maybe throws a Slack channel together but since there’s no common high severity incident management system and so many teams are affected by the downtime, other teams are also throwing slack channels together, email threads are happening all over the place, and multiple groups of people are trying to solve the problem at once. Engineers begin stepping all over each other and sales teams start emailing managers demanding to know what’s happening. Once the problem is solved, no one thinks to write up a postmortem and even if they do it only gets distributed to a few people and isn’t saved outside that email chain. Managers blame each other and point fingers at people instead of taking a level headed approach to reviewing the process that led to the failure. In short: panic, thrash, and poor communication.
While monitoring apps like PagerDuty can do a good job of indicating there’s a problem, they’re weaker at the collaborative resolution and post-mortem process, and designed just for engineers rather than everyone like Kintaba. Egan says “It’s kind of like comparing the difference between the warning lights on a piece of machinery and the big red emergency button on a factory floor. We’re the big red button . . . That also means you don’t have to rip out PagerDuty to use Kintaba” since it can be the trigger that starts the Kintaba flow.
Still, Kintaba will have to prove that it’s so much better than a shared Google Doc, an adequate replacement for monitoring solutions, or a necessary add-on that companies should pay $12 per user per month. PagerDuty’s deeper technical focus helped it go public a year ago, though it’s fallen about 60% since to a market cap of $1.75 billion. Still, customers like Dropbox, Zoom, and Vodafone rely on its SMS incident alerts, while Kintaba’s integration with Slack might not be enough to rouse coders from their slumber when something catches fire.
If Kintaba can succeed in incident resolution with today’s launch, the four-person team sees adjacent markets in task prioritization, knowledge sharing, observability, and team collaboration, though those would pit it against some massive rivals. If it can’t, perhaps Slack or Microsoft Teams could be suitable soft landings for Kintaba, bringing more structured systems for dealing with major screwups to their communication platforms.
When asked why he wanted to build a legacy atop software that might seem a bit boring on the surface, Egan concluded that “Companies using Kintaba should be learning faster than their competitors . . . Everyone deserves to work within a culture that grows stronger through failure.”
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Why Isn't Anybody Speaking About Reside Video Anymore? [Live Video 2019]
Reside video stays a core function of the highest social networks, however have you ever seen that the dwell video buzz might have cooled?
Why isn’t anybody speaking about dwell video anymore?
How do you have to be eager about dwell video and your social media technique in 2019?
We consider there are nonetheless vital alternatives to make use of dwell video to your benefit. This week on the Science of Social Media, we hope to present you some contemporary views and concepts on what dwell video might appear like for you and your model in 2019.
The State of Reside Video in 2019
When you assume again three years in the past to 2016, dwell video was in every single place.
Fb Reside had simply debuted, and also you had platforms like Periscope and Meerkat making waves as properly. Reside video appeared destined to be an enormous focus for social media and for advertising methods.
An emarketer examine confirmed that one in each three Web customers had watched a dwell video in 2016, and that quantity was double for the much-coveted millennial demographic. Reside video was going to be the way forward for how we interacted on social media.
Reside streaming video in 2016 (through emarketer)
What a distinction a number of years make, proper? Reside video appears to have gone from front-of-mind to back-of-mind for entrepreneurs and for the social networks themselves. Working example …
And the stats appear to level to a shift as properly — or maybe to a sign that dwell video by no means actually took off in the best way we thought it could. In accordance with the annual State of Social Media report that we conduct at Buffer, 25 % of manufacturers had posted a dwell video in 2016, and the quantity solely grew to 30% in 2017. Removed from the rocketship development that folks anticipated.
What’s extra, in our newest State of Social examine, dwell video wasn’t even talked about. As a substitute, manufacturers appear targeted on their total video technique … “dwell” included: 85% of manufacturers posted at the least one video final yr, and the vast majority of manufacturers used Fb, YouTube, and Instagram.
Video stats from the 2019 State of Social Media report
As a substitute of doubling down on dwell video particularly, manufacturers now take into account dwell video as certainly one of many various kinds of video distribution strategies. You will have dwell video alongside Tales and video advertisements and YouTube and a lot extra.
Video stays one of the vital partaking, finest changing forms of content material.
Reside video has turn into certainly one of many instruments in your video toolbox.
Virtually all the main social networks have dwell video in some type. Fb Reside continues to be going sturdy, as is Instagram dwell. Twitter continues to make use of dwell video actually efficiently with its Periscope product.
Plus, you have got locations like YouTube and Twitch, the place livestreaming is big.
Online game streaming alone has turn into a serious attraction with the rise of e-sports, and past video video games there are creators and influencers who’ve amassed large viewership numbers for his or her streams.
There’s even speak of Instagram testing out a co-watching function on the app, which might be a technique to dwell uncover Instagram movies collectively.
So the dwell video expertise continues to be one that’s precious and in-demand for social community customers. It would simply find yourself trying loads completely different than the live-everything world we predicted a number of years again.
Three Strategic Use Circumstances for Reside Video in 2019
It could be the case that fewer individuals are speaking about dwell video — it could have by no means reached the vital mass that everybody predicted, or it could be on the backburner in comparison with newer social community options and methods — however it’s not gone without end, not by any means.
Actually, dwell video is flourishing for specific niches and strategic use instances.
Traditionally, individuals watching movies on social media will follow a dwell video for 3x longer than different movies, so it’s no shock that social networks proceed to maintain this function going.
Listed here are three particular methods you would strive with the intention to benefit from dwell video in 2019.
1. Reside video is a go-to device for influencers.
Reside video is a really private medium, which caters completely to influencers and people who’re rising their private model. This group has an enormous vary: from teenage YouTuber stars to advertising personalities to rising politicians. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lately livestreamed herself constructing IKEA furnishings, as an example.
Screenshot of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streaming dwell on Instagram (screenshot courtesy of Elle)
Many networks are even transferring to make dwell video a profitable alternative for influencers by permitting donations and ideas throughout livestreams of issues like gaming and AMAs.
2. Use dwell video for a Q&A together with your viewers
Due to the private nature of dwell video, there may be some actual energy behind the power to converse immediately with somebody.
This makes for a perfect outlet for a Q&A. Image a hearth chat. There’s an intimacy and an immediacy to these chats which dwell video does an ideal job of replicating: it makes it really feel way more real-time than many different mediums.
Manufacturers can benefit from this by holding Q&A classes with firm leaders or get-to-know-you classes with teammates.
Fast tip: If you’re operating a dwell Q&A we’ve discovered it to be actually useful to have an additional set of fingers on set. We are going to typically have a further teammate trying on the feedback to ensure everybody will get a response and to floor questions for the presenter to deal with on the video.
3. Reside video is nice for anybody who’s simply getting began with rising their presence on social media
One of many easiest options of dwell video is its visibility within the interface of all of the completely different social networks.
Take Instagram, for instance. If you stream a dwell video by your Instagram Tales, your Tales avatar will get moved instantly to the entrance of the road. Sometimes, the order of avatars is set by the Instagram algorithm. However with dwell video, your Story will get speedy entry to the primary spot.
Samples of what Instagram Reside video seems to be like and the way dwell movies get prioritized within the Tales interface
Equally on YouTube, dwell classes obtain further promotion with a noticeable, crimson LIVE badge in the principle feed and in suggestions.
Due to this elevated visibility, dwell video may be nice in case your model is simply getting began on social media. Not solely would you be capable to get precedence placement, however you’d even be harnessing a strong model connection together with your viewers.
Getting began with dwell video: The place to start
Now let’s get into the main points. For entrepreneurs, the principle social networks for dwell video are those you’d anticipate: Instagram, Fb, YouTube, and Twitter.
To get began on Instagram, you may comply with these steps:
Swiping from left to proper within the app, which opens up your digital camera.
On the backside of the digital camera display screen, you’ll see an inventory of choices. Scroll to the left and select “Reside” — its the one proper subsequent to “Regular.” Instagram will inform you what number of of your followers are on-line, which will provide you with a very good sense of the perfect timing in your livestream.
If you’re prepared to begin your steam, hit the massive white button.
You’ll be capable to inform that your stream is operating by the little pink “Reside” icon within the high left nook.
Bonus tip: You’ll want to verify your Instagram settings beforehand, too. As soon as an Instagram Reside video ends, it received’t seem in your feed except you toggle “Save Shared Photographs” on. This protects your content material to the Tales part of the app, the place you may share them together with your viewers.
On Fb,
You possibly can click on or faucet the “Reside” button proper subsequent to the first textual content field in your profile or web page.
This may open a brand new display screen with all of the dwell choices. You possibly can stream from a pc or from the app.
Within the Twitter app,
you may swipe left to proper from the house feed to open your digital camera. Then you definately’ll scroll proper to modify the digital camera from “Seize” to “Reside”. This will provide you with choices to get your livestream began.
And for YouTube,
out of your laptop, you may click on the recording icon on the high proper menu. This may current the choices to add a pre-recorded video or go dwell. The following display screen will enable you get going with the total dashboard of dwell choices for YouTube streaming.
Three Fast Suggestions for Reside Video Streaming
Run your dwell video for at the least 10 minutes. Many dwell movies go for 30 minutes-plus.
Promote your dwell video beforehand. You are able to do this with posts on Twitter or Fb, or use the brand new countdown sticker on Instagram Tales to advertise the time.
Contemplate sneaking in giveaways or unique data into your dwell stream as an incentive for individuals to hitch and hear in. You’ll want to plug these goodies within the promotion you do beforehand.
The way to say hiya to us
We’d all like to say hiya to you on social media – particularly Twitter!
Thanks for listening! Be happy to attach with our crew at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Fb, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.
Benefit from the present? It’d imply the world to us in the event you’d be up for giving us a ranking and overview on iTunes!
—
About The Science of Social Media podcast
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media tales, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Each Monday (and generally extra) we share probably the most cutting-edge social media advertising ways from manufacturers and influencers in each business. When you’re a social media crew of 1, enterprise proprietor, marketer, or somebody merely all in favour of social media advertising, you’re certain to search out one thing helpful in every episode. It’s our hope that you just’ll be a part of our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels consequently!
The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer crew. Be happy to get in contact with us for any ideas, concepts, or suggestions.
Initially written Apr 29, 2019. Final up to date Apr 29, 2019
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Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About Live Video Anymore? The Current State of Live
Live video remains a core feature of the top social networks, but have you noticed that the live video buzz may have cooled?
Why isn’t anyone talking about live video anymore?
How should you be thinking about live video and your social media strategy in 2019?
We believe there are still significant opportunities to use live video to your advantage. This week on the Science of Social Media, we hope to give you some fresh perspectives and ideas on what live video could look like for you and your brand in 2019.
The State of Live Video in 2019
If you think back three years ago to 2016, live video was everywhere.
Facebook Live had just debuted, and you had platforms like Periscope and Meerkat making waves as well. Live video seemed destined to be a huge focus for social media and for marketing strategies.
An emarketer study showed that one in every three Internet users had watched a live video in 2016, and that number was double for the much-coveted millennial demographic. Live video was going to be the future of how we interacted on social media.
Live streaming video in 2016 (via emarketer)
What a difference a few years make, right? Live video seems to have gone from front-of-mind to back-of-mind for marketers and for the social networks themselves. Case in point …
Facebook has de-emphasized live streaming from its platform, and its upcoming pivot toward privacy seems to preclude the abundance of live video for its future.
And Instagram has rolled out IGTV, which seems to run counter to the idea of live. Polished, rather than off-the-cuff.
And the stats seem to point to a shift as well — or perhaps to a signal that live video never really took off in the way we thought it would. According to the annual State of Social Media report that we conduct at Buffer, 25 percent of brands had posted a live video in 2016, and the number only grew to 30% in 2017. Far from the rocketship growth that people expected.
What’s more, in our latest State of Social study, live video wasn’t even mentioned. Instead, brands seem focused on their overall video strategy … “live” included: 85% of brands posted at least one video last year, and the majority of brands used Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Video stats from the 2019 State of Social Media report
Instead of doubling down on live video in particular, brands now consider live video as one of many different types of video distribution methods. You have live video alongside Stories and video ads and YouTube and so much more.
Video remains one of the most engaging, best converting types of content.
Live video has become one of many tools in your video toolbox.
Almost all of the major social networks have live video in some form. Facebook Live is still going strong, as is Instagram live. Twitter continues to use live video really successfully with its Periscope product.
Plus, you have places like YouTube and Twitch, where livestreaming is huge.
Video game streaming alone has become a major attraction with the rise of e-sports, and beyond video games there are creators and influencers who have amassed giant viewership numbers for their streams.
There’s even talk of Instagram testing out a co-watching feature on the app, which would be a way to live discover Instagram videos together.
So the live video experience continues to be one that is valuable and in-demand for social network users. It might just end up looking a lot different than the live-everything world we predicted a few years back.
3 Strategic Use Cases for Live Video in 2019
It may be the case that fewer people are talking about live video — it may have never reached the critical mass that everyone predicted, or it may be on the backburner compared to newer social network features and strategies — but it is not gone forever, not by any means.
In fact, live video is thriving for particular niches and strategic use cases.
Historically, people watching videos on social media will stick with a live video for 3x longer than other videos, so it’s no surprise that social networks continue to keep this feature going.
Here are three specific strategies you could try in order to take advantage of live video in 2019.
1. Live video is a go-to tool for influencers.
Live video is a very personal medium, which caters perfectly to influencers and individuals who are growing their personal brand. This group has a huge range: from teenage YouTuber stars to marketing personalities to rising politicians. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently livestreamed herself building IKEA furniture, for instance.
Screenshot of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streaming live on Instagram (screenshot courtesy of Elle)
Many networks are even moving to make live video a lucrative choice for influencers by allowing donations and tips during livestreams of things like gaming and AMAs.
2. Use live video for a Q&A with your audience
Because of the personal nature of live video, there is some real power behind the ability to converse directly with someone.
This makes for an ideal outlet for a Q&A. Picture a fireside chat. There’s an intimacy and an immediacy to those chats which live video does a great job of replicating: it makes it feel much more real-time than many other mediums.
Brands can take advantage of this by holding Q&A sessions with company leaders or get-to-know-you sessions with teammates.
Quick tip: When you’re running a live Q&A we’ve found it to be really helpful to have an extra set of hands on set. We will often have an additional teammate looking at the comments to make sure everyone gets a response and to surface questions for the presenter to address on the video.
3. Live video is great for anyone who is just getting started with growing their presence on social media
One of the very best features of live video is its visibility in the interface of all the different social networks.
Take Instagram, for example. When you stream a live video through your Instagram Stories, your Stories avatar gets moved immediately to the front of the line. Typically, the order of avatars is determined by the Instagram algorithm. But with live video, your Story gets immediate access to the first spot.
Samples of what Instagram Live video looks like and how live videos get prioritized in the Stories interface
Similarly on YouTube, live sessions receive additional promotion with a noticeable, red LIVE badge in the main feed and in recommendations.
Because of this increased visibility, live video can be great if your brand is just getting started on social media. Not only would you be able to get priority placement, but you’d also be harnessing a powerful brand connection with your audience.
Getting started with live video: Where to begin
Now let’s get into the details. For marketers, the main social networks for live video are the ones you’d expect: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
To get started on Instagram, you can follow these steps:
Swiping from left to right in the app, which opens up your camera.
At the bottom of the camera screen, you’ll see a list of options. Scroll to the left and choose “Live” — its the one right next to “Normal.” Instagram will tell you how many of your followers are online, which will give you a good sense of the ideal timing for your livestream.
When you’re ready to start your steam, hit the big white button.
You’ll be able to tell that your stream is running by the little pink “Live” icon in the top left corner.
Bonus tip: Be sure to check your Instagram settings beforehand, too. Once an Instagram Live video ends, it won’t appear on your feed unless you toggle “Save Shared Photos” on. This saves your content to the Stories section of the app, where you can share them with your audience.
On Facebook,
You can click or tap the “Live” button right next to the primary text box on your profile or page.
This will open a new screen with all the live options. You can stream from a computer or from the app.
In the Twitter app,
you can swipe left to right from the home feed to open your camera. Then you’ll scroll right to switch the camera from “Capture” to “Live”. This will give you options to get your livestream started.
And for YouTube,
from your computer, you can click the recording icon at the top right menu. This will present the options to upload a pre-recorded video or go live. The next screen will help you get going with the full dashboard of live options for YouTube streaming.
3 Quick Tips for Live Video Streaming
Run your live video for at least 10 minutes. Many live videos go for 30 minutes-plus.
Promote your live video beforehand. You can do this with posts on Twitter or Facebook, or use the new countdown sticker on Instagram Stories to promote the time.
Consider sneaking in giveaways or exclusive info into your live stream as an incentive for people to join and listen in. Be sure to plug these goodies in the promotion you do beforehand.
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
Heather-Mae on Twitter
Dave on Twitter
Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.
Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!
—
About The Science of Social Media podcast
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.
Thank Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About Live Video Anymore? The Current State of Live for first publishing this post.
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9 Instagram analytics tools to help you crush it in 2019
Instagram used to be a black hole in terms of third-party marketing tools.
Fast forward to 2019 and times have changed. From social listening to engagement metrics, businesses on Instagram are spoiled for choice when it comes to Instagram analytics.
Zeroing in on the right Instagram analytics tools can be tricky, though.
Why? Tools come and go. The platform’s recent surge in popularity coupled with frequent changes to its API makes it difficult to find a reliable, long-term solution.
Listen: we totally get it. That’s why we put together a comprehensive list of Instagram analytics tools you can use in tandem to master your key marketing metrics.
Use these Instagram analytics tools to transform into a power user
Spoiler alert: there is no “silver bullet” to crushing it on Instagram.
Given the diversity of the platform and its content, it’s oftentimes best to have multiple Instagram analytics tools on deck based on your priorities.
Maybe you’re focused on Stories and user-generated content. Perhaps you’re frequently running ads and influencer campaigns.
Regardless of your goals, the following combination of free and paid Instagram analytics tools can help you step up your data-tracking game ASAP.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a complete social media management solution for businesses and agencies alike.
And since we’re also the fine folks bringing you this list, perhaps our inclusion is a no-brainer.
However, Sprout does boast some seriously awesome Instagram analytics features. Beyond the ability to schedule your Instagram content, our platform includes a comprehensive dashboard breaking down your top-performing content and audience growth.
These features immediately inform your content strategy and support growth on Instagram rather than allowing your follower count to stagnate. For example, Sprout could clue you in on the fact that your videos or user-generated content are totally killin’ it. As a result, you can post more of the same or switch up your content accordingly.
Another key component of Instagram growth is not sucking at hashtags. With Sprout, businesses can see which tags are scoring the most engagement and which might be worth experimenting with.
But perhaps the most notable feature for modern brands is Sprout’s Stories analytics. With over 400 million users publishing Stories daily, brands absolutely need to look into Instagram analytics tools that track their ephemeral content. Alongside regular post metrics, Sprout’s Stories data includes everything from impressions and reach to taps and exits.
In addition to tracking the performance of your Stories, Sprout boasts the added bonus of storing your metrics beyond Instagram’s typical two-week limit for Stories data. Nice, right? This allows you to measure the longer term success of your Stories rather than remain stuck in the short term.
2. Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an Instagram analytics tool that’s tailored for agencies and brands managing multiple accounts. The platform’s features include competitive hashtag and growth-tracking not unlike that of Sprout.
Beyond its full-blown analytics platform, Iconosquare also offers a free Instagram audit for business profiles. This tool ensures that your profile is “complete” and sticking to the platform’s best practices. The audit assesses your 30 most recent posts as well as your general account settings.
Considering how competitive Instagram has become, it never hurts to have a sort of “second opinion” on your presence.
3. Phlanx
Unlike some of the more in-depth Instagram analytics tools on this list, Phlanx is pretty straightforward.
Phlanx’s engagement calculator analyzes the engagement rate of any given Instagram account. Although the tool is marketed as being for influencers, any personal or business account can be plugged in.
Engagement rate is calculated by dividing the number of likes and comments a post receives versus an account’s follower count. There is no magic number in terms of what a brand of influencer’s engagement rate should be, although a ballpark of ~3% is considered good to average.
Tools like Phlanx are invaluable for spotting accounts with fake followers or determining whether an influencer’s posts are receiving legitimate engagement. Phlanx can likewise be used to track competitor engagement in addition to your own account.
4. TapInfluence
Speaking of influencers, Instagram analytics tools can be used to identify social media influencers directly.
And that’s exactly what TapInfluence does.
TapInfluence’s platform analyzes a database of over 50,000 influencers to help brands find the right fit for their influencer campaigns. Businesses can search by industry or specific tags based on what they’re looking for.
The platform then provides a snapshot of various influencers, including their rates and cost per engagement. Having all of this data in one place helps saves a ton of time when vetting influencers.
TapInfluence also provides real-time benchmark reports based on industry data to help brands understand how their own influencer campaigns stack up.
5. Curalate
The boom of social selling via user-generated content signals the need for Instagram analytics tools that keep you informed on your best-selling products.
Case in point, you’ve probably seen a “Like2Buy” bio link, haven’t you?
These links belong to Curalate, a platform which curates user-generated content to help brands sell their products directly from Instagram. The trackable “Like2Buy” link enables brands to track the ROI of their social campaigns. In addition to engagement and sales metrics, Curalate monitors tags and mentions, making it easy to spot UGC in the wild.
Dedicated social selling platforms like Curalate do double duty of determining your most valuable content while also assessing the direct financial returns from your Instagram campaigns.
6. Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a robust marketing intelligence platform that helps brands track their owned media and industry trends.
Aside from Union Metrics’ full suite of features, brands can take advantage of the platform’s Instagram Account Checkup for free. The checkup provides a detailed report including your top hashtag, most dedicated followers and average post engagement.
Anything that makes it easier to audit your social media presence for free is a plus. Like Iconosquare’s free assessment tool, brands can use Union Metrics to gain a better understanding of their account analytics at a glance.
7. Bitly
As illustrated by Curalate, your Instagram bio is incredibly valuable real estate.
Tracking your bio link is a must-do for monitoring the success of your social campaigns. This rings true whether you’re trying to sell products or simply drive traffic to your site.
Bitly is a tried and tested link-tracking tool that’s fair game on Instagram for budding businesses and big brands alike.
Driving traffic to a specific landing page? Bitly breaks down your bio click links and can be used in conjunction with Google URL builder to provide an in-depth performance report of your campaigns. Beyond bio URLs, Bitly can also be used to track links that are included in your paid Instagram campaigns.
8. Keyhole
Instagram analytics tools that measure past performance are the norm, but it’s also helpful to analyze real-time data as well.
Keyhole provides real-time hashtag tracking for Instagram, which is perfect for social media contests, brand campaigns or other marketing efforts involving hashtags.
Besides seeing how many times a hashtag has been used, Keyhole also shows additional data such as the top posts containing your hashtag, the most engaging posts and related hashtags.
It never hurts to have fresh hashtag ideas on deck, especially considering that approximately ten tags are considered “optimal” for Instagram engagement. Below a snapshot from Keyword’s hashtag word cloud to help brands brainstorm ideas.
9. Instagram Insights
Finally, don’t neglect the native analytics provided by Instagram.
Instagram Insights covers impressions, engagement, reach and top posts among other metrics. This data can be broken down from the span of a few months or even years, which is key for historical performance.
Plus, you’ll get access to audience demographics so you can find out what percentage of your followers are male/female, age groups and even where the bulk of your followers are from.
Knowing who you’re speaking to on Instagram is undoubtedly beneficial. You might have a target audience in mind that you want to reach, but the only way to truly know who’s engaging with your posts is by looking through your Instagram analytics.
As a side note, we should also mention Facebooks’s ad manager as another native tool that analyzes paid posts. With more and more brands investing in paid social, such metrics can keep you from sending your ad spend down the drain.
The good news? Facebook has some of the most robust and in-depth social media ad analytics out there. Simply put, brands have plenty of data to determine the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of their Instagram ads.
And with that, we wrap up our list!
Ready to try today’s top Instagram analytics tools?
Long gone are the days of businesses second-guessing their Instagram presence.
With today’s wealth of Instagram tools, businesses of all shapes and sizes are empowered to optimize their posts for engagement.
Want to score more likes and comments? Curious to know which hashtags will help maximize your reach? These data points and then some are all at your fingertips and then some with the help of Instagram analytics tools such as Sprout.
We want to hear from you, though. Anything else you’re looking for in terms of Instagram metrics? If you haven’t made the leap to a third-party analytics tool, what’s holding you back? Let us know in the comments below!
This post 9 Instagram analytics tools to help you crush it in 2019 originally appeared on Sprout Social.
from SM Tips By Minnie https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-analytics-tools/
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Sprout Top Posts
Instagram used to be a black hole in terms of third-party marketing tools.
Fast forward to 2019 and times have changed. From social listening to engagement metrics, businesses on Instagram are spoiled for choice when it comes to Instagram analytics.
Zeroing in on the right Instagram analytics tools can be tricky, though.
Why? Tools come and go. The platform’s recent surge in popularity coupled with frequent changes to its API makes it difficult to find a reliable, long-term solution.
Listen: we totally get it. That’s why we put together a comprehensive list of Instagram analytics tools you can use in tandem to master your key marketing metrics.
Use these Instagram analytics tools to transform into a power user
Spoiler alert: there is no “silver bullet” to crushing it on Instagram.
Given the diversity of the platform and its content, it’s oftentimes best to have multiple Instagram analytics tools on deck based on your priorities.
Maybe you’re focused on Stories and user-generated content. Perhaps you’re frequently running ads and influencer campaigns.
Regardless of your goals, the following combination of free and paid Instagram analytics tools can help you step up your data-tracking game ASAP.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a complete social media management solution for businesses and agencies alike.
And since we’re also the fine folks bringing you this list, perhaps our inclusion is a no-brainer.
However, Sprout does boast some seriously awesome Instagram analytics features. Beyond the ability to schedule your Instagram content, our platform includes a comprehensive dashboard breaking down your top-performing content and audience growth.
These features immediately inform your content strategy and support growth on Instagram rather than allowing your follower count to stagnate. For example, Sprout could clue you in on the fact that your videos or user-generated content are totally killin’ it. As a result, you can post more of the same or switch up your content accordingly.
Another key component of Instagram growth is not sucking at hashtags. With Sprout, businesses can see which tags are scoring the most engagement and which might be worth experimenting with.
But perhaps the most notable feature for modern brands is Sprout’s Stories analytics. With over 400 million users publishing Stories daily, brands absolutely need to look into Instagram analytics tools that track their ephemeral content. Alongside regular post metrics, Sprout’s Stories data includes everything from impressions and reach to taps and exits.
In addition to tracking the performance of your Stories, Sprout boasts the added bonus of storing your metrics beyond Instagram’s typical two-week limit for Stories data. Nice, right? This allows you to measure the longer term success of your Stories rather than remain stuck in the short term.
2. Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an Instagram analytics tool that’s tailored for agencies and brands managing multiple accounts. The platform’s features include competitive hashtag and growth-tracking not unlike that of Sprout.
Beyond its full-blown analytics platform, Iconosquare also offers a free Instagram audit for business profiles. This tool ensures that your profile is “complete” and sticking to the platform’s best practices. The audit assesses your 30 most recent posts as well as your general account settings.
Considering how competitive Instagram has become, it never hurts to have a sort of “second opinion” on your presence.
3. Phlanx
Unlike some of the more in-depth Instagram analytics tools on this list, Phlanx is pretty straightforward.
Phlanx’s engagement calculator analyzes the engagement rate of any given Instagram account. Although the tool is marketed as being for influencers, any personal or business account can be plugged in.
Engagement rate is calculated by dividing the number of likes and comments a post receives versus an account’s follower count. There is no magic number in terms of what a brand of influencer’s engagement rate should be, although a ballpark of ~3% is considered good to average.
Tools like Phlanx are invaluable for spotting accounts with fake followers or determining whether an influencer’s posts are receiving legitimate engagement. Phlanx can likewise be used to track competitor engagement in addition to your own account.
4. TapInfluence
Speaking of influencers, Instagram analytics tools can be used to identify social media influencers directly.
And that’s exactly what TapInfluence does.
TapInfluence’s platform analyzes a database of over 50,000 influencers to help brands find the right fit for their influencer campaigns. Businesses can search by industry or specific tags based on what they’re looking for.
The platform then provides a snapshot of various influencers, including their rates and cost per engagement. Having all of this data in one place helps saves a ton of time when vetting influencers.
TapInfluence also provides real-time benchmark reports based on industry data to help brands understand how their own influencer campaigns stack up.
5. Curalate
The boom of social selling via user-generated content signals the need for Instagram analytics tools that keep you informed on your best-selling products.
Case in point, you’ve probably seen a “Like2Buy” bio link, haven’t you?
These links belong to Curalate, a platform which curates user-generated content to help brands sell their products directly from Instagram. The trackable “Like2Buy” link enables brands to track the ROI of their social campaigns. In addition to engagement and sales metrics, Curalate monitors tags and mentions, making it easy to spot UGC in the wild.
Dedicated social selling platforms like Curalate do double duty of determining your most valuable content while also assessing the direct financial returns from your Instagram campaigns.
6. Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a robust marketing intelligence platform that helps brands track their owned media and industry trends.
Aside from Union Metrics’ full suite of features, brands can take advantage of the platform’s Instagram Account Checkup for free. The checkup provides a detailed report including your top hashtag, most dedicated followers and average post engagement.
Anything that makes it easier to audit your social media presence for free is a plus. Like Iconosquare’s free assessment tool, brands can use Union Metrics to gain a better understanding of their account analytics at a glance.
7. Bitly
As illustrated by Curalate, your Instagram bio is incredibly valuable real estate.
Tracking your bio link is a must-do for monitoring the success of your social campaigns. This rings true whether you’re trying to sell products or simply drive traffic to your site.
Bitly is a tried and tested link-tracking tool that’s fair game on Instagram for budding businesses and big brands alike.
Driving traffic to a specific landing page? Bitly breaks down your bio click links and can be used in conjunction with Google URL builder to provide an in-depth performance report of your campaigns. Beyond bio URLs, Bitly can also be used to track links that are included in your paid Instagram campaigns.
8. Keyhole
Instagram analytics tools that measure past performance are the norm, but it’s also helpful to analyze real-time data as well.
Keyhole provides real-time hashtag tracking for Instagram, which is perfect for social media contests, brand campaigns or other marketing efforts involving hashtags.
Besides seeing how many times a hashtag has been used, Keyhole also shows additional data such as the top posts containing your hashtag, the most engaging posts and related hashtags.
It never hurts to have fresh hashtag ideas on deck, especially considering that approximately ten tags are considered “optimal” for Instagram engagement. Below a snapshot from Keyword’s hashtag word cloud to help brands brainstorm ideas.
9. Instagram Insights
Finally, don’t neglect the native analytics provided by Instagram.
Instagram Insights covers impressions, engagement, reach and top posts among other metrics. This data can be broken down from the span of a few months or even years, which is key for historical performance.
Plus, you’ll get access to audience demographics so you can find out what percentage of your followers are male/female, age groups and even where the bulk of your followers are from.
Knowing who you’re speaking to on Instagram is undoubtedly beneficial. You might have a target audience in mind that you want to reach, but the only way to truly know who’s engaging with your posts is by looking through your Instagram analytics.
As a side note, we should also mention Facebooks’s ad manager as another native tool that analyzes paid posts. With more and more brands investing in paid social, such metrics can keep you from sending your ad spend down the drain.
The good news? Facebook has some of the most robust and in-depth social media ad analytics out there. Simply put, brands have plenty of data to determine the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of their Instagram ads.
And with that, we wrap up our list!
Ready to try today’s top Instagram analytics tools?
Long gone are the days of businesses second-guessing their Instagram presence.
With today’s wealth of Instagram tools, businesses of all shapes and sizes are empowered to optimize their posts for engagement.
Want to score more likes and comments? Curious to know which hashtags will help maximize your reach? These data points and then some are all at your fingertips and then some with the help of Instagram analytics tools such as Sprout.
We want to hear from you, though. Anything else you’re looking for in terms of Instagram metrics? If you haven’t made the leap to a third-party analytics tool, what’s holding you back? Let us know in the comments below!
This post 9 Instagram analytics tools to help you crush it in 2019 originally appeared on Sprout Social.
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Why Yes, We Offer Instagram Direct Publishing
I have tons of space for an elaborate intro, but let me cut to the chase because I’m so unbelievably excited: Instagram direct publishing is now available on Agorapulse.
That means you can hop on your app, upload a photo, and post, schedule, or queue it up — just like you’re used to with publishing your Facebook and Twitter content. Long gone are those pesky notifications and posts in No Man’s Land.
You can now use your favorite social media management tool to post directly to Instagram.
Say hello to time saved.
There’s about a minute of setup to do before you get started scheduling all your content. You need to tell Instagram (and their parent Facebook) that you want to use Agorapulse to post directly on your behalf.
You can enable Instagram direct publishing on the upper right-hand side of your content calendar in your publishing tab.
Or you can click the orange “Publish” button on your dashboard and click or tap the “enable direct publishing” button at the bottom left-hand corner of your publish panel.
Whichever route you take, keep in mind that you can only enable Instagram direct publishing for business accounts. This is a current restriction of the Instagram API that we will follow as a loyal Instagram Partner.
If you already have a business account — like 80 percent of all our Instagram users — all you have to do is let Facebook know that you’d like to enable your account with all the permissions that they ask for.
We’ve created this tutorial to guide you through the whole process.
If you’re like, “Huh? There are business Instagram accounts?” — no worries. Facebook has easy steps to convert your personal Instagram account to a business account.
There are a few restrictions that Instagram has placed on this legit third party posting. It’s like when you got a bike for the first time, and you’re thinking, “I’m ready to go BIG!”
But your mom says you can only ride in front of your house. (In this example, Instagram is your mom.)
First up, the new direct publish feature only supports the publishing of one image per post. You’ll still have to upload your carousel posts natively to Instagram.
Second, it’s one image per post — and zero video per post– for the time being. You might notice that your Instagram photo posts do better than your video posts anyway, so this may not be a big deal for you.
Third, you won’t be able to use Instagram’s filters on your photo. If you really need better lighting or a vintage look, edit your photo in an app like Canva before you post it on Agorapulse.
These should just be small, temporary hiccups in your overall Instagram content strategy. After all, you now have a tool that:
Posts nearly all of your Instagram content (even in Queue Categories!)
Informs you of comments on your organic and paid posts
Tells you when someone uses your branded hashtag or posts from your geolocation
Keeps track of your biggest fans and influencers
Reports on the success of your Instagram posts
Are you ready to celebrate? How will you use this new Instagram direct publishing feature? Let us know in the comments.
The post Why Yes, We Offer Instagram Direct Publishing appeared first on Agorapulse.
Why Yes, We Offer Instagram Direct Publishing posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com
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SpaceX Successfully Launches Tesla Roadster and a Dummy Named Starman into Space [Video]
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SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy rocket has successfully executed its test launch, delivering its whimsical payload to space, including SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, a dummy in a SpaceX-designed spacesuit named Starman, and a few other items.
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More ludicrous than Ludicrous Mode? 27 Merlin engines lighting off like a candle.
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The Falcon Heavy was the actual star of the February 6 launch, but interest in the rocket faded to mainstream viewers relative to the Tesla Roadster, which SpaceX positioned within a capsule in the rocket’s nose. Once in space, the capsule’s walls were jettisoned to enable a few cameras to capture different angles of the space-bound electric sports car and the ultra-chill Starman. A few clever Easter eggs were scattered throughout the Tesla, too, from the touchscreen display reading “Don’t Panic!” (a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) to a tiny Tesla Roadster Hot Wheels model—complete with its own tiny Starman—set atop the dashboard.
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The driver, Starman, appears not to be panicking.
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Also onboard the Tesla? A plaque with the signatures of 6000 SpaceX employees on it, as well as a high-tech 5D glass-disc storage unit with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation book series. The storage setup renders information in three dimensions within a glass disc capable of holding 360 terabytes of information and lasting for 13.8 billion years. The idea is that far-flung life forms might find it somewhere in space and learn about Earth, perhaps long after we’ve gone extinct. Neat.
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If you’re like us, and you’re kind of geeked on the fact that an actual car has been sent into space, you’ll be happy to learn that SpaceX is running an onboard live stream as the Roadster hurtles off into the crushing darkness toward a claimed several-hundred-million-year heliocentric orbit explained in detail here by our pals at Popular Mechanics. You can watch the Starman stream at the bottom of this post.
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As for the Falcon Heavy, which is designed to carry loads more than three times as heavy as those that SpaceX’s smaller (and by comparison long-serving) Falcon 9 rocket does, its mission appears to have been a success. Two of its booster stages successfully landed back on Earth to be reused—and they landed in near perfect sequence alongside each other following dual sonic booms, a freaky and impressive sight to behold—although at publication time the fate of the third stage (called the center core) during its attempted landing on a drone barge in the ocean is an open question. Twitter users currently hoping for news on its fate are using a #prayforcentercore hashtag, because of course they are.
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Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to see you yet again . . .
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Why Is Tesla So Loved by Wall Street?
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Tesla’s 10-Year Pay Scheme Could Make Elon the World’s Richest Man
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Elon Shows Us His Semi: Tesla’s Next Big Thing Is Big Indeed
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Impressed? Have $90 million? You, too, can send 140,660 pounds of your favorite stuff to low orbit aboard a Falcon Heavy. Want to go farther and/or have less junk? SpaceX says it can punt a Falcon Heavy and 37,040 pounds of Teslas, Starmen, and whatever to Mars. Watch a live stream of Starman’s journey below, and we’ve embedded the replay of the launch, too:
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SpaceX Successfully Launches Tesla Roadster and a Dummy Named Starman into Space [Video]
-
SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy rocket has successfully executed its test launch, delivering its whimsical payload to space, including SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, a dummy in a SpaceX-designed spacesuit named Starman, and a few other items.
-
-
More ludicrous than Ludicrous Mode? 27 Merlin engines lighting off like a candle.
-
The Falcon Heavy was the actual star of the February 6 launch, but interest in the rocket faded to mainstream viewers relative to the Tesla Roadster, which SpaceX positioned within a capsule in the rocket’s nose. Once in space, the capsule’s walls were jettisoned to enable a few cameras to capture different angles of the space-bound electric sports car and the ultra-chill Starman. A few clever Easter eggs were scattered throughout the Tesla, too, from the touchscreen display reading “Don’t Panic!” (a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and a tiny Tesla Roadster Hot Wheels model—complete with its own tiny Starman—set atop the dashboard.
-
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The driver, Starman, appears to be not panicking.
-
Also onboard the Tesla? A plaque with the signatures of 6000 SpaceX employees on it, as well as a high-tech 5D glass-disc storage unit with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation book series. The storage setup renders information in three dimensions within a glass disc capable of holding 360 terabytes of information and lasting for 13.8 billion years. The idea is that far-flung lifeforms might find it somewhere in space and learn about Earth, perhaps long after we’ve gone extinct. Neat.
-
-
If you’re like us, and you’re kind of geeked on the fact that an actual car has been sent into space, you’ll be happy to learn that SpaceX is running an onboard livestream as the Roadster hurtles off into the crushing darkness toward a claimed several-hundred-million-year heliocentric orbit explained in detail here by our pals at Popular Mechanics. You can watch the Starman stream at the bottom of this post.
-
As for the Falcon Heavy, which is designed to carry loads more than three times as heavy as those SpaceX’s smaller (and by comparison long-serving) Falcon 9 rocket does, it’s mission appears to have been a success. Two of its booster stages successfully landed back on earth to be reused—and they landed in near perfect sequence alongside one another following dual sonic booms, a freaky and impressive sight to behold—though at publication time the third stage’s (called the center core) fate during its attempted landing on a drone barge in the ocean is an open question. Twitter users currently hoping for news on its fate are using using a #prayforcentercore hashtag, because of course they are.
-
-
Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to see you yet again . . .
-
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Why Is Tesla So Loved By Wall Street?
-
Tesla’s 10-Year Pay Scheme Could Make Elon the World’s Richest Man
-
Elon Shows Us His Semi: Tesla’s Next Big Thing Is Big Indeed
-
-
Impressed? Have $90 million? You, too, can send 140,660 pounds of your favorite stuff to low orbit aboard a Falcon Heavy. Want to go further and/or have less junk? SpaceX says it can punt a Falcon Heavy and 37,040 pounds of Teslas, Starmen, and whatever to Mars. Watch a livestream of Starman’s journey below, and we’ve embedded the replay of the launch, too:
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youtube
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youtube
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from Performance Junk Blogger 6 http://ift.tt/2FQUnxC
via IFTTT
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Text
SpaceX Successfully Launches Tesla Roadster and a Dummy Named Starman into Space [Video]
-
SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy rocket has successfully executed its test launch, delivering its whimsical payload to space, including SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, a dummy in a SpaceX-designed spacesuit named Starman, and a few other items.
-
-
More ludicrous than Ludicrous Mode? 27 Merlin engines lighting off like a candle.
-
The Falcon Heavy was the actual star of the February 6 launch, but interest in the rocket faded to mainstream viewers relative to the Tesla Roadster, which SpaceX positioned within a capsule in the rocket’s nose. Once in space, the capsule’s walls were jettisoned to enable a few cameras to capture different angles of the space-bound electric sports car and the ultra-chill Starman. A few clever Easter eggs were scattered throughout the Tesla, too, from the touchscreen display reading “Don’t Panic!” (a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and a tiny Tesla Roadster Hot Wheels model—complete with its own tiny Starman—set atop the dashboard.
-
-
The driver, Starman, appears to be not panicking.
-
Also onboard the Tesla? A plaque with the signatures of 6000 SpaceX employees on it, as well as a high-tech 5D glass-disc storage unit with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation book series. The storage setup renders information in three dimensions within a glass disc capable of holding 360 terabytes of information and lasting for 13.8 billion years. The idea is that far-flung lifeforms might find it somewhere in space and learn about Earth, perhaps long after we’ve gone extinct. Neat.
-
-
If you’re like us, and you’re kind of geeked on the fact that an actual car has been sent into space, you’ll be happy to learn that SpaceX is running an onboard livestream as the Roadster hurtles off into the crushing darkness toward a claimed several-hundred-million-year heliocentric orbit explained in detail here by our pals at Popular Mechanics. You can watch the Starman stream at the bottom of this post.
-
As for the Falcon Heavy, which is designed to carry loads more than three times as heavy as those SpaceX’s smaller (and by comparison long-serving) Falcon 9 rocket does, it’s mission appears to have been a success. Two of its booster stages successfully landed back on earth to be reused—and they landed in near perfect sequence alongside one another following dual sonic booms, a freaky and impressive sight to behold—though at publication time the third stage’s (called the center core) fate during its attempted landing on a drone barge in the ocean is an open question. Twitter users currently hoping for news on its fate are using using a #prayforcentercore hashtag, because of course they are.
-
-
Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to see you yet again . . .
-
-
Why Is Tesla So Loved By Wall Street?
-
Tesla’s 10-Year Pay Scheme Could Make Elon the World’s Richest Man
-
Elon Shows Us His Semi: Tesla’s Next Big Thing Is Big Indeed
-
-
Impressed? Have $90 million? You, too, can send 140,660 pounds of your favorite stuff to low orbit aboard a Falcon Heavy. Want to go further and/or have less junk? SpaceX says it can punt a Falcon Heavy and 37,040 pounds of Teslas, Starmen, and whatever to Mars. Watch a livestream of Starman’s journey below, and we’ve embedded the replay of the launch, too:
-
youtube
-
youtube
-
from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2FQUnxC
via IFTTT
0 notes
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15 Tips to Building a Better Social Media Presence
If you’re a brand today, there’s a non-zero chance you’re on social media in some way, shape or form.
But many brands have an active, thriving social media presence?
And how much of them are just sort of there?
Reality check: you can’t expect much from social when you post random links, @mention a few folks and call it a day.
You need some structure. You need a strategy.
After all, you don’t reach the level of Wendy’s on Twitter totally by accident.
Remember when you were like 7 and thought changing your name to Thunder BearSword would be super cool?
Like that, but our cheeseburgers are still better.
— Wendy's (@Wendys) June 11, 2018
And likewise, there’s a reason why GoPro’s Instagram posts get “likes” by the tens of thousands.
Photo of the Day: Not knowing where the path leads is what #TravelTuesday is all about. 🗺 @brymza explores the wetlands of Costa Rica while on vacation with his wife. 🛩 Share your #GoProTravel with us at gopro.com/awards. • • • #GoPro #CostaRica #LandscapePhotography #Exploring
A post shared by GoPro (@gopro) on Jun 12, 2018 at 9:50am PDT
And although some of these brands might have blockbuster budgets, the principles they use to create an awesome social presence can be replicated by businesses of all sizes.
Struggling for followers? Stuck on what to do with your social accounts? We’ve all been there.
That’s why we’ve broken the bite-sized tips any brand can follow to get their social media presence off the ground.
Now, let’s dive in!
1. Set SMART Goals
Pop quiz: why are you on social media in the first place?
If your answer is resounding “Uhh…” or “Everyone else is on it,” you might have a problem.
The concept of SMART goals has been around for decades, but they are so important to your social media presence today.
In short, brands should set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
An example of a good SMART goal for social media marketing would be something like “Well increase our Twitter response rate by 25% by the end of the first quarter.”
Specific: “We’ve specifically identified the social channel (Twitter) and a metric (response rate).”
Measurable: “The response rate can be measured from the Sprout Social dashboard.”
Achievable: “We didn’t make an outlandish goal of say, a 100% increase in 10 days.”
Relevant: “Our goal will have an impact on our overall social media presence, making it very relevant.”
Time-bound: “The goal has to be met by the end of the first quarter.”
Assigning your social media efforts a concrete purpose helps you avoid the trap of posting aimlessly.
2. Identify Your Audience
After you’ve outlined your goals, you need to outline your target audience.
Pro-tip: “everyone” is not an audience.
Maybe it’s prospective customers. Perhaps it’s industry players and influencers. Either way, breaking down your audience will help you figure out the following:
Which social media sites you’re active on
Your posting schedule
The type of content you publish
Your brand’s voice
The information in your profiles
Many brands spin their wheels because they don’t post content that speaks to a defined audience. Spend some time looking at your audience personas, understanding what their challenges are and what brands they already love via social. This sort of competitive analysis can help you understand how your own social media presence can stand out from the crowd.
3. Be Human
This is a big one.
One of the worst mistakes to make on social media is coming off as the faceless corporation with zero personality. In the modern age of transparency, people want to get to know your company on a more personal level.
Many brands today crack jokes and aren’t afraid to talk to their followers like they would their friends. Whereas brands were once lambasted for coming off like robots, a human social media presence has become an expectation among many followers.
We got you 👀 https://t.co/Rw1tf3geVr
— Warby Parker (@WarbyParker) June 14, 2018
Similarly, showing off the human side of your brand means showing off the faces behind your social feeds. Whether it’s office photos or snapshots of your team “in the wild,” getting personal with your followers can help you form a much-needed connection.
Yesterday, #TeamModCloth took the day off to give back to Los Angeles Mission @thelamission, PATH West LA @hopeforla, Golden Gate National Parks @goldengatenps, Larkin Street Youth Services @larkinstreetyouth, SF Public Library's #SFPride Programming @sfpubliclibrary, The Garment Project @thegarmentproject, Free Store 15104 @freestore15104, Heritage Community Initiatives @heritageserves, Raphael House SF @raphaelhousesf, Venice Beach cleanup, and #PittsburghPride cleanup. Watch our IG Story for more highlights from the day. #ModClothGiving #ModCloth ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Regram: @shibby_15 So proud to work at a company that takes time to give back. #TeamModCloth went clean the beach today. Also, our design team made us these super cute shirts. ❤️
A post shared by ModCloth (@modcloth) on Jun 13, 2018 at 4:45pm PDT
And hey, that leads us directly to our next point!
4. Seek Relationships, Not Just Followers
We can debate all day whether or not your follower count is a vanity metric.
That said, having 100 followers who regularly engage with you and your content are infinitely more valuable than 10,000 that ignore you.
It might be cliche to say, but don’t leave the “social” out of your social media presence. The beauty of social is that you can form relationships in an instant with followers from just about anywhere.
For example, Sprout Social’s own #SproutChat gives us the opportunity to regularly connect with our lovely followers who are likewise stoked to get in touch with us.
Got my jams going for #sproutchat with sprout-stagram famous @sproutdarryl!! My desk dance isn't as good as his data dance but whatevs… pic.twitter.com/p9Any0zmVZ
— Shannonigans (@mausi_nana) June 13, 2018
If you’re not exactly sure where to start when it comes to relationship-building, here are some quick ideas:
Always @mention people you reference in your social media posts
Answer questions people ask
Reply when people @mention you or share your content
Don’t just Retweet and Like other people’s content; reply with a comment to start a conversation
5. Create an Editorial Calendar
Spoiler alert: sticking to a content schedule isn’t just something “extra” that brands do.
If there’s a common thread between the biggest brands on social, it’s that they post on a consistent basis.
Chances are you’re juggling multiple social channels and are trying to make sure you tick a lot of boxes in terms of descriptions and when to post, right? Consider how a content calendar can make the process much easier by…
Allowing you to fine-tune each of your posts for each platform without having to jump between sites.
Timing your posts to maximize engagement, keeping you from having to constantly post in real-time.
Avoid repeating the same content over and over again, ensuring each of your articles or pictures gets the most love possible.
In short, taking the time to make a schedule does double duty of keeping your social media presence organized while also maximizing your contents’ reach.
6. Automate the Right Way
Automation is all the rage in marketing right now, and for good reason.
However, you can’t expect to successfully put your social presence on autopilot and walk away.
For example, mass auto-replying has gone the way of the dinosaur as it typically comes across as insincere. This now-classic tweet from Bank of America is a good example of how to turn your social followers off via improper automation.
Fast-forward to present day and it’s clear that customer care is a piece of social media that should be personalized, not autmoated.
That said, automation in the form of scheduling or curating content is totally fair game. Just avoid it when you’re dealing with actual customers or followers’ questions.
This is why brands rely on social tools to help curate pieces of content already approved by marketing leaders. Bambu by Sprout Social, is in fact, just that piece of software needed to turn your employees into brand advocates. Tap into your workforce to help build your presence!
7. Focus on Helping Over Selling
Although social selling is indeed on the rise, rarely should your social media presence be about the “hard sell.”
Sure, if you’re in ecommerce it makes sense to push offers and deals to your followers. What’s more important, though, is answering the questions of followers whether through replies or content marketing.
Thanks for reaching out! For information on where savings for Prime members are available, see https://t.co/tx5kV2YYCf
— Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) June 14, 2018
If your followers ask a question, you should respond in a timely manner.
And if your followers seem to be buzzing about a particular problem, you should craft content that speaks directly to it.
By offering solutions to problems instead of just pitching your products all the time, you’re proving your company is an authority and potentially earning a lifelong customer.
8. Optimize Your Accounts for Engagement
First thing’s first: don’t let the word “optimization” freak you out.
Unlike SEO, social media optimization isn’t particularly technical. That said, profiles can be optimized through imagery, keywords and fully filling out your account information.
For example, brands can use their Instagram bio to link to promotions, advertise their hashtag and let their brand’s voice be heard.
Similarly, a well-crafted Twitter profile with the right @mentions and HD imagery can signal your authority, helping you attract more followers.
And as noted in our guide for conducting a Facebook audit, a fully optimized page with complete business info can actually help your page rank better in Google.
Some quick ways to optimize your social media presence across your various accounts include:
Adding relevant keywords in your profile (hint: but not stuffing them)
Sharing content related to your industry—including keywords and hashtags in your posts
Connecting with popular accounts in your industry to additional exposure (hint: don’t be afraid to follow others)
9. When in Doubt, Get Visual
No matter where you’re posting, photo and video content are totally killing it right now.
Instagram’s image-based platform is exploding.
Facebook notes that Live videos get six times the engagement versus any other type of content.
And for those looking for more Twitter followers, graphics and videos get way more shares than text-based posts.
The highest exposure of fake news:https://t.co/9uerk7wZBI pic.twitter.com/QX2ZhoVUzL
— Forbes (@Forbes) June 15, 2018
The good news is that getting visual doesn’t mean you need any sort of insane equipment or a full-blown production budget. Instead, consider imagery such as:
Team photos or videos
Photos of customers
Photos of events
Behind-the-scenes photos and videos
Quote photos
Infographics
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Juantastico: Break the Trend
It's easy to get stuck in a routine, but creativity lives outside the lines. Take it from Juantastico, grab a #Sharpie and Break the Trend! #SharpieSquad
Posted by Sharpie on Friday, December 1, 2017
And with so many tools to create social images and videos already out there, it’s easier than ever to get visual with your audience.
10. Make Your Presence Known
If you’ve gone through the legwork of establishing your social media presence, you need to let the world know.
From homepage feeds to icons on your site footer or email signature, anyone who comes in contact with your brand should only be a click away from becoming a long-term follower.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram feeds can all be easily integrated into your site with little more than a copy-paste code. Check out how ThinkGeek makes their social feeds a must-see on-site.
Cross-promotion on your website and through other social channels is a proactive way to grow your following over time.
11. Stay Active
Inactive social feeds are a bad look for brands, plain and simple. Rather than let your Facebook or Instagram gather cobwebs, you need to “show up” day after day with fresh content.
Some quick tips to help you stay active include:
Incorporating social scheduling and automation to save time and energy.
Picking and prioritizing your social networks based on your audience location.
Finding ways to repurpose content so you’d not always trying to reinvent the wheel.
Staying active on social doesn’t have to be a total time-suck. Through scheduling or simply blocking out 10-15 minute chunks throughout, you can post content and respond to customer concerns without wasting time. Also, you can try to base your activity around best times to post on social media to maximize engagement.
12. Piggyback on What’s Trending
Between breaking news, trending hashtags or whatever the latest meme might be, brands always have room to get topical with their content. This is a great opportunity not only to build off of buzz of an existing trend, but also show off your brand’s personality.
Oreo came through with a jelly donut flavor just in time for #NationalDonutDay. Would you try it? https://t.co/IjPsqB1Uhc pic.twitter.com/xIrvEb8pxQ
— Complex (@Complex) June 2, 2017
For example, understanding the in’s and out’s of hashtags can help you brainstorm time-sensitive topics you can piggyback on. Of course, tread lightly with anything overtly political or controversial that could isolate your audience.
13. Don’t Be Afraid to Pay
Like it or not, social media at large isn’t the totally “free” channel it once was. While there’s still plenty that can be done organically, Facebook’s updated algorithm and new business features being rolled out Instagram signal a clear need for businesses to experiment with ads.
It’s not just ads that deserve your attention, though. Looking at the recent boom of influencer marketing, paid relationships among social movers and shakers is becoming more and more common.
The good news is that both social ads and influencer marketing can have an insane ROI. Between laser-targeting on Facebook or tapping into hyper-engaged influencer audiences, a paid strategy certainly has its time and place depending on your business’ social goals.
14. Use Tools to Monitor Your Activity
When people complain about the lack of ROI they’re seeing from social, there’s a good chance they aren’t taking social seriously.
Just like we’re often knee-deep in Google Analytics data, marketers need to treat social with the same sort of scrutiny. There are tons of analytics tools out there to help you identify your top-performing content, performance trends and essential break down your social media presence by the numbers. These data points can help you treat social media less like a guessing game and more like a science.
15. Create Content People Actually Want to See
If you want to stand out on social media, you can’t just parrot the content everyone else is posting.
In short, you need to create.
Whether you’re trying to build yourself up as a thought leader or want to stand apart from your competitors, original content is exactly how you’re going to make it happen.
Perhaps it’s your original blog posts, research or infographics.
Maybe it’s an eye-popping snapshot you took during your last vacation.
Or hey, it might be an opinionated rant on the state of your industry.
Either way, you should strive to post content that forces your followers to stop in their tracks. There’s a lot of noise out here on social media: make it a goal to break through it.
@ronnaldong takes creativity to new heights 🦒. This month we're sharing images that are out of the ordinary. Share your eye-catching work using #Adobe_Unexpected for a chance to be featured.
A post shared by Adobe (@adobe) on May 1, 2018 at 3:28pm PDT
What Does Your Business’ Social Media Presence Look Like?
Listen: there is no “secret” or turnkey solution for a better social media presence.
Instead, there are small tactics and strategies that can help you build toward social accounts that prime for engagement.
And yeah, fifteen tips might seem like a lot on the surface. That said, these principles are staples of brands killing it on social right now. If you can follow them yourself, you’re already way ahead of the game.
We want to hear from you, though. What’s something you struggle with when it comes to your social media presence? Any tips or tactics that we missed? Let us know in the comments below!
This post 15 Tips to Building a Better Social Media Presence originally appeared on Sprout Social.
from SM Tips By Minnie https://sproutsocial.com/insights/building-social-media-presence/
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