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SHE BLOG 🙀 💻 ‼️

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This makes me think of a famous definition of photography by the prolific 20th-century street photographer Garry Winogrand: 'A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera ‘saw’ a piece of time and space.' Likewise, a Story is the illusion of what your smartphone saw. Or better, of what the hybrid you-and-your-smartphone saw—as if there was a you without a smartphone, anymore.

Why 'Stories' Took Over Your Smartphone

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Instagram video marketing vs. the algorithm and more

Advice for boosting your Instagram video strategy, and more! 🍻

Join us for the next office hours on Instagram and Facebook Live at 2pm PT/4pm CT Thursday, May 17th. 

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I left this important business accessory in a Staples.

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1978.

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Get your social media marketing questions answered in real time on Facebook and Instagram Live. 

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Responding generously to valid complaints will make you look good to consumers, and being gentle and professional in dealing with crazy or unreasonable comments can also be a win. This is an area where you may want to be willing to lose some small battles in order to win the overall war.

10 tactics for handling haters on Facebook

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The 5 metrics you should pay attention to now on Instagram + more! 🤓📊

Catch up on our latest office hours here, then join us for the next session this Thursday 5/3 at 2pm PT/4pm CT to get your social media marketing questions answered in real time. 

(We’ll be Live on Facebook and Instagram.) 

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5 metrics to pay attention to now on Instagram

Hashtag tracking on Instagram as we have always known it is essentially dead. Tracking competitor and influencer profiles the way we’ve know it is definitely dead. So what’s a brand to do in this brave new world of Instagram marketing?

The good news is the new Instagram Graph API is actually more robust than the previous API many analytics options were built on, and includes a lot more useful data. So here are the metrics your brands should focus on now.

Still got questions? Find us on Twitter @UnionMetrics.

1. Track mentions and tags 

We discussed this in our emergency webinar after the Instagram API changes happened; while hashtag tracking as we’ve known it is dead, brands can now truly track mentions and tags of their brands in a way that wasn’t possible before. As our Co-Founder Jenn Deering Davis pointed out, hashtags were almost always a hack for not being able to consistently track mentions. Asking fans and followers to swap using a hashtag for tagging a brand isn’t a huge ask, especially since a lot of brands have typically asked for both anyway.

With the new Graph API, you’ll be able to track all mentions – in comments and captions – and phototags of your brand, which will replace having fans and followers use a hashtag for a contest or other activity on Instagram.

But are hashtags completely dead? No. Let’s get into more of the details.

1.5 Don’t give up on hashtags completely 

You can still keep up with how others use hashtags using the hashtag following feature that’s native to Instagram. This won’t include metrics like reach and impressions for public use of a hashtag, but will let you see what people are posting.

There are a few factors to consider for hashtags your brand follows in this way:

Volume: If you’re following a high-volume industry hashtag to get a general idea of what other industry players are posting, you’ll only see a selection of what’s posted to the tag this way.

Branded hashtags: Unless you have a very high-volume branded hashtag, this is a great way to keep up with what fans and followers are posting using your branded hashtag.

For a complete picture: You’ll still have to visit the hashtag search page. Obviously with extremely high volume hashtags, it will be impossible to keep up with everything posted using that hashtag. But for most use cases, a sample should be fine.

So it makes sense to keep encouraging use of a branded hashtag in order to surface UGC to reshare in your Stories, for example (like Chameleon Cold Brew does) or just watch how your fans, followers and customers are using your products.

The slightly more manual nature of following a hashtag in your feed and going to the search page also gives brands more opportunities for engaging directly with their audience, which is always a win-win.

2. Stories 

The Powers That Be (Facebook) are telling us Stories are the future. So it’s a good thing we now have a way to measure that future!

Our Story metrics allow you to see:

Replies: A great engagement metric. Who’s responding to your Stories? Are they prompted or unprompted responses?

Taps forward: A lot of people watch Stories by tapping through quickly

Taps back: This metric is important; it means someone wanted to be sure they saw or had time to read what you posted in your Story. If you got a lot of taps back on a particular Story post, was it because it was highly engaging or hard to read?

Exits: In general an exit could just mean someone ran out of time to watch Stories and it happened to be during yours. But if you see a large amount of exits on a particular post, you know it either wasn’t engaging or your Story was too long (or maybe both)

Impressions: Learn how many impressions your Story generated, especially useful when compared to the total impressions generated by your account

Reach: Learn the reach of your Story

3. True reach and impressions 

The Graph API now includes the true reach and impressions of your account. Learn how many people are seeing your content – your permanent posts and your Story posts – as well as how many views you’re getting.

4. Follower demographics 

Find out more about who your followers are with demographic reporting on your audience’s gender, age and location. That includes highlights on where your followers are from and what languages they speak, even when they’re online so you can better target when you post your content.

5. Advanced engagement metrics

We now include saves as an advanced engagement metric, alongside comments and likes. Saves tell you someone wants to reference your post later, so if you’re getting a lot of saves on a particular post, it’s definitely the kind of content you should create more of. Saves, likes and comments all represent a different type of engagement, any of which could be important to your brand.

BONUS: A short-term solution to vetting influencers 

Need to vet an influencer you’re considering working with on a campaign or other partnership? For now you can have them run a free Instagram account checkup and send you the results.

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Oh hey that’s today.

We’ll be on Instagram and Facebook Live! 

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April 17,2018 #ChatGramLive - Union Metrics - Instagram API Changes

We made an appearance on ChatGramLive yesterday to talk the recent Instagram API changes, but we gave some advice on Instagram Stories as well. 

Catch the replay above 👆and join us tomorrow for our regular office hours at 2pm PT/4pm CT on Instagram and Facebook Live! 

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NOW WITH EVEN MORE UPDATES! 

April 10: We’ve added two early mentions reports to Instagram Trackers! You can now begin monitoring mentions in post captions, as well as in comments. We’ll be adding to and polishing these new reports over the next few weeks. Have any feedback on how we can make them more useful for you? Please let us know!

April 11: If you haven’t yet, please update your existing Instagram account Trackers to be sure you’re not missing any new data. We’ve created a new migration guide to help you figure out the state of your Instagram Trackers. Click on the gear icon in your account, select Account Settings, the go to the Instagram Migration page. This will list all of your Instagram account Trackers, their current status and help you update the Trackers that need updating.

Ch-ch-ch-chaaaaanges! 

Let us know if you have any questions. 

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Important takeaway: 

“It's time to rethink social listening, especially as it pertains to Instagram and Facebook. The days of being able to monitor public Instagram posts using any hashtag or run a quick analysis of a public user's account are over. If your brand encourages use of Instagram hashtags for campaigns and contests, start thinking about how you can use mentions or phototags instead of hashtags.“ 

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ICYMI | April 9: Get a larger view of tagged media in the new photo tags report. If you click on a post’s thumbnail, you’ll now see a larger version of the photo to help you take a closer look (this is useful because Instagram no longer includes a permalink to the original post itself).

Ch-ch-ch-chaaaaanges! 

Let us know if you have any questions. 

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Don’t panic. We go over what the changes are and how you can deal with them.

Let us know if you have any other questions! 

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Ch-ch-ch-chaaaaanges! 

Let us know if you have any questions. 

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Thursday, April 5th 2018 3:30PM - 4:30PM CDT

Last week, Facebook unexpectedly decided to accelerate plans to deprecate the existing Instagram API. This includes slashing rate limits to a fraction of what they used to be, restricting access, and making the current Instagram API mostly unusable for businesses.

So what does this mean and how will it affect you? We're hosting an emergency webinar to walk through all the changes with Instagram data (and subsequently, Union Metrics analytics). We'll discuss what we're losing with the old API and what we're gaining with the new, better Graph API.

Join us for a live discussion and bring your questions!