Category: Social Media

I have been reading a number of articles lately focusing on Instagram. It is no surprise to me. Brands looking to branch out to younger audiences know they can find them there. A blog post on SproutSocial broke down several social platforms by their demographics. According to the March 2017 post, 59% of people between the ages 18-29 can be found on Instagram.

Instagram continues to roll out features that make it more conducive to conducting business and getting those followers to turn into conversions. Can you make the most of their features?

I will list some of my favorite Instagram features and some that I just learned about and why I think they are important to your Instagram brand. I will number them as they appeared in Hootsuite’s list so that you can more easily find directions on how to execute these features.

Profile and Post Aesthetic 

#13 and #18 Sometimes you need a line break to make the text look more organized. Whether you are in your Instagram bio section, or if you are captioning a post, you can use line breaks to make it look more pleasing to the eye.

$15 Are you trying to grow a brand on Instagram? Perhaps the “likes” and “followers” aren’t quite enough information to measure your strategy’s success. Switch your account to a business profile to get better insights.

#29 Even though hashtags are useful for brands and joining in on conversations, some people don’t like them. It is especially frowned upon to do the hashtag overload, even though using the many applicable hashtags helps your posts get out there to people searching for those key words or phrases. This hack suggested that you “hide” your hashtags by posting your content with its plain caption, and by commenting those hashtags immediately on your post.

Use

#3 You can rearrange the order of the Instagram filters and apparently hide the ones you never use. I think this is helpful because I usually go through each and every filter to see which best suits my photograph. However, there are definitely filters I do not use. It would save me time and make posting photos much more efficient.

#6 If you have a personal account and you also operate the Instagram account for a business or a brand you can add multiple accounts on Instagram without having to log in and out of the different profiles. I think this is especially useful for small business owners because they are likely to have that much control over multiple accounts. I think this feature allows for an ease of use that does not inhibit the platform’s use.

#10 Did you see a post that gave you inspiration? Did you see a post that you think could help inform your strategy but don’t have time to utilize it when you see it? You can save posts on Instagram for later, and for your eyes only.

#37 You can use the Live Photos feature from your phone and turn it into a boomerang. I repeat, you can turn Live Photos into boomerangs. These seems to be a favorite among Instagram users so get in on the fun. Forget to take a boomerang? Take your photos in live mode and they can be transformed later.

Brand Listening and Community

#5 When you click on the heart icon in Instagram, it shows you your notifications. This is because it defaults to the “You” option. If you click on the “Following” option, you can see the content your followers are liking and the users they are following. As a brand this can be very useful in seeing what posts are getting engagement within your followers. This can help your social team figure out how your own content fits into your followers “likes.”

#8 and #9 As a brand maybe you feel strongly about certain issues and your content begins to attract a lot of negative comments. You may not want to allow your comment section to foster such a vulgar discourse. You can delete comments as well as filter out specific words you’d like and essentially filter out the trolls. Some brands have had much success by facilitating a strong sense of community on their platforms and you don’t want to let internet trolls interfere with your community’s bond.

For a full list of Hootsuite’s “Instagram Hacks” with the directions of how to execute these hacks click here: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-hacks/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=owned_social&utm_campaign=hs_corp-bau-glo-en—owned_media-social_hootsuite-&hootPostID=f661229adcba1d3cab8957527257e7bb

For more social media platform statistics click here: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics/#instagram

The best place for a brand or company to begin their social media quest is to sit down and write out exactly who your audience is. For established companies this may be taking a look at the people that actually already use your product but also looking at the potential of other consumers. A new company has to decide which demographic it makes sense to target first. The answers to these considerations will guide your choices in regards to which social media platforms it is necessary for you to be on. A company that sells wedding dresses should probably be putting more effort into Pinterest than a company that publishes news.

Once you have decided which networks to join, the content you post should also be largely based on your audience. Will it make more sense to use videos to get your content to your followers or will text posts suffice? Maybe infographics are the best way to inform your audience. When you consider how many young people and adults are using their digital devices and how much time they spend on them, it is baffling that people don’t see the value in a social media presence.

Not only should your company or brand be present in some manner but it needs to be active and engaging. Here is where the investment comes in. Let’s say your brand is on social media and you have tailored your content to your audience but your analytics show that you are getting low impressions. Or maybe you have a small reach to begin with. You are set up with your social listening tools. You actively have people on your team following people who are discussing products similar to yours. It is time for paid content.

Why on Earth, after all the effort of creating content and paying people to manage these accounts would you turn around and pay to promote your content? Wasn’t social media supposed to be a great free tool for you to use to advertise yourself to consumers directly? Well sure to some degree. However, most of the social sites that brands and businesses will be using are using algorithms to optimize a user’s feed. Alex York wrote about  this in an article called “6 Social Media Trends Taking Over 2017.” York stated that “The majority of these algorithms have one simple purpose–to make its users happy with the content they see in their feeds. But this is making it difficult for brands to be seen if they strictly publish organic social content.”

To combat the algorithms, decide on a budget for promoting your social content. As a small experiment, I myself used the promote tweet feature from my personal Twitter account. I will show images of my analytics of a normal tweet, a more popular tweet and then a tweet that I paid to promote. The process was simple and fast. You have the power to decide exactly how much you’d like to spend. I see this as especially great for small businesses that want to give features like paid content a try.

I suggest dipping your toes in the water first. Let the results determine your paid content budget. It may not be necessary to promote every post. Start with posts that have clear, specific and measurable calls to action and that way you can compare your impressions with your conversions. Even though its not always quantitative, people seeing your activity will slowly build a sense of your brand. I know that despite not being a fan of fast food, the next time I am in a time crunch and hungry I will be looking for a Wendy’s because I love their Twitter account. Their content is funny and it makes their account relatable and memorable.

Now, I am no Twitter extraordinaire. Below are some screen shots of tweet analytics. The first tweet is one of my lowest ranked tweets. The middle tweet is one of my highest ranked tweets. The last tweet is the highest ranked tweet I have thanks to paying to promote it. I will let the data speak for itself.