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How Instagram Is Transforming Into A Fully Fledged Sales Channel For Ecommerce

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By Valerie Lavskaya

The popularity of Instagram is rapidly growing day by day. According to the Statista 2018 report, this is the 6th most popular social media network in the world with the leading interaction rates. Recently, Instagram reported that they have more than 500+ million worldwide profiles which are active every day, and more than 80% of all users follow at least one business page.

Lately, we notice the tendency of using YouTube instead of Google. It has become clear that Instagram marketers have also decided to extend their network’s functionality and encourage people to use Instagram instead of Google. In particular, by the new e-commerce features which were developed in cooperation with BigCommerce and Shopify. These novelties allow millions of any-scale worldwide retailers to offer their products via Instagram accounts, gather feedback, retain their customers, and draw them directly to their websites for purchasing.

In this article, I will try to show some Instagram e-commerce solutions which could help e-store owners boost traffic to their website and improve their customer loyalty, as well as demonstrate how creativity is vital in the era of visualization, and how this can bring you revenue.

Product Tagging

The latest and the most effective e-commerce profile feature is a shoppable photo tag. Instagram’s shopping service was successfully launched in the United States in October 2017. This March, finally, the feature extended and became available in 44 other countries.

The main Instagram shopping feature lies in the ability of e-commerce businesses to tag item prices and include special offers to the photos they publish on their business profiles, as well as connecting these products with an item page on their website. Retailers can also add a description to every appropriate tagged product which can differ from the main text content in the post; this will appear after a user has tapped on the price.

store.png

A seller can tag up to 5 prices to one photo, and up to 20 prices on a carousel post. In a feed, such posts are pointed with a tiny basket icon. Also, the “Shop” section appears on the home Instagram page automatically.  

To implement this feature into the Instagram account, a retailer has to have a full catalog with the same range of goods on their Facebook page. All products must comply with the Facebook Commerce Product Merchant Agreement and Commerce Policy. Retailers must offer Instagram users only physical products, apart from tobacco products or paraphernalia, alcohol, weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Sellers cannot sell animals, any healthcare products, notably including “before and after” images, downloadable digital products, virtual currency, and, certainly, products and services with overly sexualized positioning.

What about services? Agencies are able to offer services, whether it is cleaning or a promotional service, as well as event tickets, but only with Facebook written permission. Each e-commerce owner who plans to sell their goods via shoppable Instagram posts should also obtain approvement from Facebook moderators.

Managing an Instagram shop is available through Facebook Business, Shopify or BigEcommerce accounts.

Instagram Saved Stories

Instagram has forbidden posting links to a website anywhere apart from the bio section. However, since Instagram accounts which have more than 10,000 subscribers received the opportunity to add direct links to their stories, Instagram became a fruitful sales channel for many retailers. Thanks to the usability, a user can be taken to a website using one swipe.

Along with that, Instagram allowed users to save their stories into different folders. A majority of e-commerce accounts find creative approaches for the new section. One of them duplicated the main website categories, and others – split stories with links “see more” to new folders as “summer must-have,” “best-sellers” or “customers” choice.”

Asos instagam.gif

We studied 30 Instagram accounts of the most-visited UK e-commerce stores and found that 14 of these use categorized saved stories with direct links to their websites as an extra and convenient way for users to find a desirable product. The option is catching on.

saved stories

Tags Which Work as Filters

This solution is useful for sales or special prices. When you offer discounts for a specific group of products, you can create a separate tag below each post which contains any of these offers. This way, a customer will be able to see all products at a discounted price by clicking this hashtag. And a retailer, thanks to the “editability,” can easily remove irrelevant hashtags at any time.

For instance, a store “Berry” offers discounts for all green dresses for St. Patrick’s Day. Announcing this on Instagram, they can create a unique tag #GreenBerrySale in this post and add this to all posts with green dresses.

New e-Commerce Features – Coming Soon to Instagram

Instagram is planning to evolve business profiles, and they have been testing new features which will be launched in the very near future.

Instagram Booking And Native Payment System

According to a Techcrunch report, Instagram stakes on booking. Developers stealthily added a native payments feature into the app for some users. Today, this is available for electives from the US only, but it is conceivable that Instagram users will soon be able to book a cinema ticket, apartments or a restaurant directly via an app in the future — no redirecting to websites required.

instagram-book-service.gif

In the future, Instagram is planning to expand their payment system opportunities to allow users to purchase items at a retailer’s online site inside Instagram, by opening a separate pop-out page and following standard online checkout processes.

It is interesting to note that if Instagram implements their native payment system, for the purposes of e-commerce, they will become a hybrid model of a marketplace. And this can radically change the primary vision of this social media network.

Shoppable Video Ads On Instagram

In February 2018, Instagram started testing “collection” campaigns on Instagram. Brands and companies will be able to post their media campaigns with an attached catalog of products used in the video ad. This option consequently reduces the customers time to purchase.

Instagram collection campaign.gif

Is Instagram a fruitful sales channel for large e-commerce today?

According to research discussed by SmartInsights this year, more than 1 million brands are sharing and promoting their products as well as stories on the social network. Moreover, over 75% of Instagram users take action, such as visiting a website, after looking at an Instagram advertising post.

By expanding shopping features to new countries, Instagram presented high results for businesses that started using price tags in Autumn 2017. For instance, they said that accessories brand Native Union announced that thanks to the new feature, their Instagram traffic has increased by 2.666 percent and their revenue – by 100% MoM.

Examining European Businesses

We decided to check if shopping on Instagram has become effective for European business profiles since its launch in March 2018. We studied Instagram profiles of the 30 most visited UK online stores within the following niches: clothing, сonsumer electronics, furniture, home and garden, children, and jewelry.

We found out that 46.7% of these already use Instagram shopping and 53.3% do not. In the image below we can see that all retailers which sell clothing implemented this novelty into their profiles. As well as more than half of home, garden goods and furniture retailers; they have realized that their target audience is actively following them on Instagram and it is a good place to reach their targeted audience.

instagram-usage.jpg

We also checked how their traffic from Instagram has changed since the shopping feature launch. To find this out, we compared the traffic data of three popular e-commerce websites in February and May.

As we can see below, the traffic has increased in most cases, but generally, this share is insignificant. The majority of traffic from social networks comes from Facebook, followed by YouTube and Reddit. Is this due to marketing strategies or lack of options for users? More examination is needed, but we do know Instagram’s upcoming opportunities for e-commerce should be helpful to businesses with or without added website traffic.

instagram-shop-diagram.jpg

Final Thoughts

Instagram is becoming more e-commerce-friendly, and this is easy-to-see from their new “One Tap Shop” feature, as well as from “Now More” function in stories or promotion posts. And as discussed above, they are also working on the native booking and payment system.

The Instagram interface allows e-commerce owners to adapt their accounts into user-friendly “websites”. In many instances, their profiles look better than the company websites. New solutions are molding Instagram into a level playing field for e-commerce players. A business’s popularity, engagement, and traffic to the website have become directly dependant on their creativity and marketing strategies.

Instagram’s popularity is growing, and thanks to the creativity of marketers and social media specialists today, Instagram can bring any-scale e-commerce business real revenue.

By Valerie Lavskaya

I’m a content specialist at Promodo Digital Agency. I’m always seeking for fresh data and actual facts to bring relevant ideas to the audience. I believe that useful content can enrich the experience of marketers and empower businesses to make the right decisions fast and accurately.

Sourced from SEMRUSH

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Instagram Leads as a Global Platform for Influencer Marketing

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By Jasmine Enberg

But not in every country, and China has its own players

Influencer marketing is a powerful tactic that targets consumers where they already spend much of their time: social media. Globally speaking, Instagram is the primary platform for many influencer-brand campaigns, but it’s hardly the only one.

Take China, for example. Most of the major international social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, are banned by the government. That means that the country’s influencers hold court on local services, of which Weibo and WeChat are the most popular.

And in the DACH region—which includes Austria, Germany and Switzerland—Instagram and YouTube are neck and neck, at least in terms of influencer marketing spending. According to Goldmedia data, sponsored content on the two platforms accounted for 34% and 31% of total influencer revenues in 2017, respectively.

Spending figures don’t always tell the whole story. While Goldmedia took into account both monetary and nonmonetary compensation, such as product gifting, influencers may charge a premium for a post on a certain platform, which could inflate its share of spending.

But those findings make sense when looking at where consumers in the region follow influencers. According to a March 2018 survey by M Science for Wavemaker, social media users in Germany were just as likely to follow an influencer on YouTube as they were Instagram, each cited by 73% of respondents. Roughly half said they followed influencers on Facebook.

That said, the importance of Instagram for influencer campaigns is rising in nearly every market worldwide.

In a February 2018 survey by influencer marketing agency Activate, 88.9% of worldwide influencers said they were using Instagram for influencer marketing campaigns more than they did one year ago. Excluding posts on their feeds, Instagram Stories was the most popular tactic used for sponsored campaigns.

Instagram’s rising popularity for influencer campaigns goes hand in hand with the platform’s strong user growth, as marketers tend to go where their customers are.

India is one example of that. According to our latest forecast, the number of Instagram users in the country grew by an explosive 123% in 2017—the fastest growth rate worldwide. So it’s no surprise that 78% of influencers in India cited Instagram as the platform that would rise in importance for influencer marketing this year, according to a December 2017 survey from influencer marketing agency Buzzoka.

Overall, we expect the number of worldwide Instagram users to rise by 18.4% to 714.4 million in 2018. Sweden will have the highest Instagram user penetration rate in the world, at 68.9% of social network users, followed by Indonesia (62.8%) and Norway (57.7%).

By Jasmine Enberg

Sourced from eMarketer

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Instagram unveils a new video service, challenging YouTube

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Sourced from FLIPBOARD

Facebook Inc.’s Instagram service is loosening its restraints on video in an attempt to pull younger viewers away from YouTube when they’re looking for something to watch on their smartphones.

The expansion announced Wednesday, dubbed IGTV, will increase Instagram’s video time limit from one minute, making it 10 minutes for most users. Accounts with large audiences will be able to go as long as an hour.

Video will be available through Instagram or a new app called IGTV. The video eventually would give Facebook more opportunities to sell advertising.

This is the latest instance in which Instagram has ripped a page from a rival’s playbook in an effort to preserve its status as a cool place for young people to share and view content. In this case, Instagram is mimicking Google’s YouTube. Before, Facebook and Instagram have copied Snapchat — another magnet for teens and young adults.

Instagram, now nearly 8 years old, is moving further from its roots as a photo-sharing service as it dives headlong into longer-form video.

The initiative comes as parent company Facebook struggles to attract teens while also dealing with a scandal that exposed its leaky controls for protecting users’ personal information.

Instagram Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said he hopes IGTV will emerge as a hub of creativity for relative unknowns who turn into internet sensations with fervent followings among teens and young adults.

That is what’s already happening on YouTube, which has become the world’s most popular video outlet since Google bought it for $1.76 billion nearly 12 years ago. YouTube now boasts 1.8 billion users.

Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion six years ago, now has 1 billion users, up from 800 million nine months ago.

More importantly, 72% of U.S. children ages 13 to 17 use Instagram, second to YouTube at 85%, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 51% of kids in that group now use Facebook, down from 71% from a similar Pew survey in 2014-15.

That trend appears to be one of the reasons that Facebook is “hedging its bets” by opening Instagram to the longer-form videos typically found on YouTube, said analyst Paul Verna of the research firm eMarketer.

In addition to giving Instagram another potential drawing card, longer clips are more conducive for video ads lasting from 30 seconds to one minute. Instagram doesn’t currently allow video ads, but Systrom said it eventually will. When the ads come, Instagram intends to share revenue with the videos’ creators — just as YouTube already does.

“We want to make sure they make a living because that is the only way it works in the long run,” Systrom said.

The ads also would help Facebook sustain its revenue growth. Total spending on online video ads in the United States is expected to rise from nearly $18 billion this year to $27 billion in 2021, according to EMarketer.

Lele Pons, a YouTube sensation who also has amassed 25 million followers on Instagram, plans to launch a cooking show on IGTV in hopes of increasing her audience and eventually generating more revenue. “It’s like Coca-Cola and Pepsi,” she said. “You will never know what you like better unless you try both.”

IGTV’s programming format will consist exclusively of vertical video designed to fill the entire screen of a smartphone — the devices are emerging as the main way younger people watch video. By contrast, most YouTube videos fill only part of the screen unless the phone is tilted horizontally.

Snapchat began featuring vertical video before Instagram, making Instagram’s move another example of its penchant for copying rivals.

But Systrom sees it differently. “This is acknowledging vertical video is the future and we want the future to come more quickly, so we built IGTV.”

Sourced from FLIPBOARD

Article originally appeared in Los Angeles Times

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Longer videos are coming to Instagram

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By Kurt Wagner

Plus Messenger’s autoplay video ads, Pinterest’s shopping ambitions and more news from Cannes Lions.

Greetings from Cannes Lions, the annual advertising boondoggle in the South of France where the ad industry gathers to wheel and deal, take advantage of lavish expense reports, and where drinking rosé is acceptable at any time of the day.

Many of the digital media industry’s largest advertising platforms — Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, to name a few — spend the week in Cannes in luxurious beachside cabanas, trying to lock down advertising deals for the back half of the year. But a lot of the hubbub is tailored around social events, like beach parties and fancy dinners at nearby hotels. As one ad tech executive put it to me Monday night, “there’s a fine line between networking and not working.” It’s sometimes tough to tell who’s doing what.

But real business does get done in Cannes [Ed. note: Kurt, you’re protesting too much]. Many companies see it as a mid-year check-in where they can talk to partners about plans for the second half of the year. (Vegas’ CES, held in January each year, is the early-year equivalent to Cannes Lions.)

Here’s what I’m hearing:

Instagram is preparing to launch longform video

Whoops! Scratch thatI This week’s most intriguing product announcement isn’t actually happening in Cannes — it’s happening at Instagram’s new San Francisco office, though media companies here are certainly taking notice and Instagram plans to stream it live to reporters here on the ground. (Another big ad story that people are talking about at Cannes, even though it’s not happening at Cannes: AT&T’s plan to acquire ad tech company AppNexus for $1.6 billion.)

The Facebook-owned app has a press event scheduled for 9 am PT Wednesday morning, and multiple sources say the company is planning to unveil a longform video feature, which would let people share videos up to an hour in length. The last time Instagram did a big press event like this was in 2013 when it unveiled Direct, its private messaging service. This doesn’t happen often.

The longer videos will reside in their own section of the app, these sources say, but it’s unclear if Instagram is going after the kind of original programming that Snapchat offers inside its Discover section. Instead, it seems Instagram is simply hoping that brands and advertisers will see the new section as an alternative to YouTube (and even Facebook) for posting longform shows and videos. Eventually, we imagine Instagram will try and monetize these longer videos with mid-roll or pre-roll ads, similar to what the company is doing now inside Facebook Watch.

We’ll know soon what the product looks like, but one possible benefit of Instagram’s new feature might be its openness. Snapchat Discover has always been exclusive, only available to certain media partners or big-time celebrities. It sounds as though Instagram’s product will be available to everyone, giving more people an opportunity to participate. Then again, there are obvious cons to letting more people participate. Ask YouTube.

The bigger question, though, is whether or not people actually want to watch longer video inside Instagram. One media executive I spoke with in Cannes on Tuesday likened it to McDonald’s selling a salad. That might work for some people, but, “It’s still not a burger.”

Messenger is running autoplay video ads

Facebook’s Messenger service started rolling out autoplay video ads this week, meaning you might soon see a video in your inbox alongside messages from friends and family. The messaging inbox is typically a personal space, and it’s unclear how the addition of video ads will go over with users.

“Top priority for us is user experience,” Stefanos Loukakos, who runs Messenger’s ad business, told me from a beachside cabana. “So we don’t know yet [if these will work]. However, signs until now, when we tested basic ads, didn’t show any changes with how people used the platform or how many messages they send.”

“Video might be a bit different, but we don’t believe so.”

Pinterest wants people shopping more on its service, and is hiring like crazy

Pinterest is in Cannes for the fourth straight year, and rented a nice pier on the beach that the company is using for meetings. A few takeaways from our sit-down interview with Jon Kaplan, the company’s global head of sales:

  • Pinterest wants more people shopping on Pinterest. To do that, Kaplan says the company needs more “shoppable pins,” or photos and videos that identify the products you see in them, and give you a chance to click and buy that product right there. Right now, a “single-digit” percentage of pins on the service are shoppable, Kaplan says. He wouldn’t share a hard goal, but says there are some categories Pinterest plans to focus on. “Home and fashion will be the two big focus areas for us to start,” he said. “We have aspirations for that to be completely shoppable in those categories.”
  • Pinterest is boosting its sales team. Kaplan said the company plans to grow the sales team, which was at “several hundreds” at the beginning of the year, by more than 50 percent.
  • Pinterest is finally starting to sell ads in non-English-speaking countries for the first time. The company started testing ads in France on Monday, and Kaplan says Germany is next on the list. All businesses would love to add more revenue, but Pinterest in particular. Last year, the company missed internal revenue targets, but many believe Pinterest is on an IPO track, anyway. More revenue streams should help with the process.

Snapchat and Instagram have dueling story exhibits

Both Snapchat and Instagram are showing off art installations at Cannes, and both companies are making user Stories a big part of the exhibit.

Snapchat’s exhibit is called Sound Stories, and the company worked with an artist named Christian Marclay who watched thousands of public user stories to find audio clips he then turned into art. In one section of the exhibit, Cannes attendees could play a piano where the keys correspond to sounds pulled from actual user Stories.

Instagram’s exhibit, which was created by artist Es Devlin, was less interactive, but flashier. Attendees could watch a three-minute video that showed the importance of storytelling over time, with some clips from users’ stories littered in. The show ends with the line: “Can one story change history? Does any story really vanish once it’s been told?”

The exhibits were interesting, but even more interesting was that Stories was the format of choice for companies. It’s clear that Stories are not just growing in popularity among users, but they’re growing in importance for these business, too.

Is Cannes Lions shrinking?

Cannes feels less crowded than years past, and attendees are noticing. The obvious explanation is that some major ad agencies, like Publicis, sat out of this year’s conference. We’ve asked Cannes representatives for attendance figures and will update if we hear back, but those figures may not tell the whole story. Many people come to the conference but don’t actually register — a badge isn’t needed to hold meetings or get into nearby hotels where much of the action takes place.

Feature Image Credit: Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergFacebook / Mark Zuckerberg

By Kurt Wagner

Sourced from recode

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Facebook’s Problems Cause Some Instagram Problems

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By Rich Duprey

A heavy-handed approach to the latest privacy breach may damage its fast-growing social media platform.

As Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) reels from its latest privacy scandal, and global government regulators investigate the possibility that it violated privacy laws by allowing personal user data to be collected by third parties, the social media platform is seeking to wall off its sibling apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, from a similar backlash.

A blanket approach

Tech journals reported that Instagram last week abruptly cut off developer access to the site’s API while limiting how often others can use its API to collect data on users. APIs, or application programming interfaces, are programming instructions for accessing a software application by other software; they’re not user interfaces. Sites like Facebook and Instagram open them to developers who use the API to build third-party apps that are able to function with the site.

Image source: Getty Images.

What Facebook did with Instagram was apparently limit the number of times a developer can use the API to ping the site for updated information, reportedly dropping the number of calls per user per hour from 5,000 down to just 200.

Because there was no warning that the limits were being imposed, developers were caught flat-footed from angry users who reported the apps were no longer working properly with the site. Industry site Recode notes that some industries such as customer service or brand marketing need near-constant access to Instagram data if they want to keep up with customer complaints or posts, but the limits are preventing them from doing so.

It seems Facebook took a ham-fisted approach to a problem it had and layered it on top of the rest of the organization to prevent its recurrence, without thinking through the intricacies of what it was doing.

A history of privacy woes

Instagram is Facebook’s billion-dollar baby. Purchased in 2012 for $1 billion, Instagram has quickly become a cash cow for Facebook. It had some 30 million users when it was bought, and no revenue, but it has since grown into one of the premiere social media platforms. Every day, 500 million people log into the site, some 800 million people log in at least once a month, and Instagram is expected to generate $10 billion in revenue by 2019.

User privacy has seemingly long been an afterthought for Facebook, which has weathered numerous criticisms over the years with the way it’s played fast and loose with user privacy. Because it has grudgingly modified its settings at different times as concerns flared up, it may not have realized how serious the current situation was.

Yet in something of an apology tour to media outlets, CEO Mark Zuckerberg now admits that most users have probably had their personal information “scraped” by third parties, and Facebook has since estimated that as many as 87 million people had their information exposed to Cambridge Analytica, the political analysis firm. That is a much greater number than the 50 million that was estimated before.

The risk here is that the company faces a backlash not only from regulators and politicians, but now from users who will be leery about sharing information on social media, whether it be Facebook or Instagram, and also developers who may become leery about developing apps for the platforms.

Trust is hard to regain

Almost all of Facebook’s revenue is derived from third-party advertising on Facebook and Instagram. For the past three years, advertising accounted for 98%, 97%, and 95%, respectively, of its revenue. If users aren’t using the platforms to engage with friends, families, and companies, advertisers may very well shut down their advertising streams.

Warren Buffett once noted, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Having held such a cavalier attitude for so long, Facebook may have damaged its reputation and broken the bonds of trust between it and its users. Yet in trying to rectify the situation all at once, Facebook may also be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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Feature Image Credit: Getty Images.

By Rich Duprey (TMFCop)

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Sourced from The Motley Fool

 

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Asos lauds effect of Instagram Stories as it reduces marketing spend

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By Jennifer Faull

Asos has singled out the performance of Instagram Stories in its marketing mix, saying the number of people viewing its content on the platform has almost doubled in just six months.

The online retailer today (11 April) reported stellar sales for the six months to 28 February, noting a 10% rise in half-year profits to £29.9m as sales jumped 27% to £1.13bn compared with the same period in the previous year.

On a call with analysts, chief executive Nick Beighton praised the Instagram-effect, saying the Facebook-owned platform was now more popular among its core 20-something customer base than Facebook and as such the business had maintained its investment in its “relevant, emerging content formats” including Stories.

The brand’s content on the site was viewed over 30m times while videos were viewed more than 52m times, up from 40m in the previous half of the year.

Asos was one of the first to experiment with Stories ad formats when it launched last January and has become a brand that many benchmark against when it comes to successfully harnessing the Facebook-owned app’s offering, with Instagram itself using the retailer’s strategy as a case study in order to lure other brands to the platform.

“When we recognise technology that can help our business, we fold in pretty quick,” Beighton said.

Now that its convinced on the value of Stories, the current tool under the spotlight is Instagram’s shopping-enabled adverts, which launched widely at the beginning of this year.

“On one level [Instagram Shopping] could turbo charge the experience for 20-somethings but on another level it could be a real threat,” admitted Beighton.

“We do know Instagram is one of the biggest channels for our customers, it’s much bigger than Facebook, so I’d go with the positive and think about how we can make it more intuitive and friction free for our customers.”

Its experiments on the digital channel come amid a wider review of its marketing costs. It didn’t give an exact figure but as a percentage of sales it stood at 5% versus 5.3% in the previous period. The savings were made as a result of “digital marketing efficiencies and a higher return on advertising spend,” said Beighton.

Though admitting the brand is on “every conceivable marketing channel”, Beighton said it is venturing offline, especially in other European markets. In the UK it ran its first out of home campaign to launch its Face and Body and Activewear lines while in France it took to TV and cinema for the first time with promising results.

“The combination of TV and cinema aren’t immediately relevant to the 20-something market in the UK but they are in the French market. But it’s an experiment,” he said.

In the US meanwhile, its PPC ad spend is under scrutiny with Beighton saying the rates “are up pretty dramatically” on various terms, though he didn’t go into detail on how it would mitigate that cost.

Overall, he said continued investments are enabling strong engagement levels across its customer base. Site visits increased by 25% year-on-year; average order frequency improved by 8%; average basket value increased by 2% alongside a 10 base point improvement in conversion.

Active customers are now at 16.5 million, representing a 17% increase since last year.

By Jennifer Faull

Sourced from THE DRUM

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How to Get Payback from Instagram?

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By Walter Moore

Choosing Instagram for business provides huge opportunities to reach 700 million potential followers who can positively impact your business fortune. Yes, the number of Instagram users crossed the 700 million mark almost a year ago. The most positive aspect of Instagram is the outlook of Instagrammers towards business. They are eager and ready to engage with it both within the app and beyond.

The business friendliness of the social media platform becomes evident from the fact that numerous business brands enjoy the interaction with 120 million users on the platform. This is great news for SEO because all Instagram business accounts carry links to the business websites that enjoy the patronage of the Instagram traffic. It thus becomes clear that Instagram can reinforce your SEO campaign and make it more effective. That 80 percent Instagram users track (follow) at least one business is the reason that more and more businesses are turning to Instagram as the chosen social media platform.

Connect with real people

Since followers are at the core of your Instagram performance, it is natural that people often go into overdrive to expand their fan base. While you can buy Instagram views that can prop up your business albeit artificially, garnering the attention of viewers organically would ensure that you interact with real people only. Unless you have meaningful interaction with real people, you can never derive the real gains for business. Only when people take an interest in your niche, build a relationship with you and engage with your content that you can develop a band of loyal followers that no bots can match.

For succeeding with Instagram, you must know your target audience and have the means of connecting with them. You must create powerful content that provides a meaningful way of building followers comprising of real people who can contribute to better business results. What you should do to develop real followers that can pay back to your business would become clear on going through the remaining part of this article.

Have a sound strategy for Instagram

To ensure that you can justify the returns on investment, you must have a good plan for using Instagram as a marketing platform. Be clear about what you want to achieve by using the platform, mostly it could be for boosting SEO so that you can devise suitable strategies for implementing the plan. It would point out the audience that you must target to fulfill your business goals.

Know what competitors are doing

By researching on what your competitors are doing, you could know what kind of realistic following you should expect. It would also help to know what kind of content would work for you, the frequency of posting content, what are the key industry hashtags including branded hashtags and more. You would also gain insight into how other businesses interact and engage with the audience that you are trying to reach.

Set goals

Set goals to achieve because it forms the foundation of the Instagram strategy. Consider your overall business and marketing strategy to get leads about how you must frame your Instagram strategy that aligns with the business goals. Whether you want to drive more traffic to websites, build brands or support the SEO and marketing campaign, the platform can support you well.

Give a purpose to your content

Create a compelling story that you can tell by using images that would give a purpose to the content and make it interesting. When there is a purpose behind the content, it creates engagement among the audience you target and would lead to sharing of content that opens the doors for would-be followers. You can share some inside information about your products, uphold how others perceive the brand or present the brand by showing how it has received the wholehearted acceptance of customers.

Engage in cross promotion

Since the purpose of taking your business on Instagram is to acquire high visibility that leads to increased followers, an easy way of doing it is to propagate your Instagram content and account on other social media channels through cross promotion. As you are likely to have business accounts on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. you must make those fans aware of your Instagram account. By mentioning your Instagram account on other social media platforms and by incentivizing them to visit your Instagram account, you can drive more followers to your account. You can even publish your Instagram posts on other channels.

Hashtags must be relevant

The hashtags have to be relevant to the industry niche or your business so that potential followers who are keen to engage with photos and content relevant to your business would be able to discover you. This would lead to the enrichment of the follower base. When creating hashtags make sure that you infuse enough originality into it that makes it exclusive for your business. Indeed, you must take a cue from popular hashtags by using the search function of Instagram, but you must add your creativity to it. However, you must avoid the lure of going overboard to create hashtags that can be quite weird. Also, avoid using gimmicks in hashtags that might momentarily seem profitable but would keep you away from engaging with real people meaningfully.

Drive people to your Instagram account from all channels of communication

You must not lose any opportunity to showcase your Instagram account and must use all communication tools at your disposal to drive more traffic to Instagram. Spread the Instagram links on all social media platforms and website as well as in online newsletters and e-mail signature so that whenever people visit those places, they know about your Instagram account. Since these people already know you, they would not hesitate to visit your Instagram account. Even providing Instagram links or hashtags in blog posts would further expand the horizon of followers that originate from the blogs.

How much advantage you get from Instagram depends on your capabilities of using the platform correctly.

By Walter Moore

Sourced from iamWIRE

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How to Win at Marketing Using a Hashtag

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A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.

Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.

They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.

Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.

The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.

 

 

The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.

Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”

And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.

 

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Uh-Oh. How Do We Mobile-Advertise to Gen-Z When They Don’t Like Their Phones That Much?

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Gen Z use their phones a lot, but are relieved when they are taken away. So how do marketers reach this age group if they have a love/hate relationship with their smartphones?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Members of Generation Z are relieved when placed in a situation where they are unable to access their smartphones for several weeks. This is according to a new study conducted by Screen Education, a non-profit organisation that addresses smartphone addiction.

The study involved participants aged from 12 to 16, who spent 2-4 weeks at Camp Livingston during the summer of 2017.  Because Camp Livingston does not permit its campers to bring smartphones with them, they are an ideal group for conducting research about refraining from smartphone use.

According to Michael Mercier, President of Screen Education, “Many children said they have become overwhelmed by their smartphones. They no longer can keep up with all their notifications, and they are burdened by the ‘drama’ they encounter through social media via their smartphones. Consequently, they were relieved to be separated from their smartphones because it eliminated that stress.”

This relief was reflected in a survey conducted with the campers after they had returned home.  The campers were asked the extent to which they experienced feelings of gladness and frustration from being without their phones. “A large number − 92% − experienced gladness, while only 41% felt any frustration. We had expected the opposite,” said Mercier.

When asked what their experience would have been like if they had been allowed to bring their phones to camp, campers revealed just how severe smartphone addiction is among their age group. “They almost unanimously admitted they would have spent the entire time on their phones,” recounts Max Yamson, Executive Director of Camp Livingston. “They said they would not have formed deep relationships with the staff and fellow campers, would not have connected with their surroundings and nature on the same level, and would not have engaged as much in recreational activities.”

According to Yamson, “The study shows that the campers were glad to have left their phones behind so that they could experience a deeper level of engagement.”

“The research also revealed a stunning insight,” said Mercier. “Many campers discussed the experience of face-to-face communication as though it were a novel one. They exhibited a sense of discovery at learning that face-to-face communication is far superior to screen communication when it comes to building friendships and getting to know other people.”

Yamson added, “One camper said that in four short weeks she got to know her friends at camp better than she knows some of her friends at home – because she mostly communicates with her friends at home through screens.”

Other key findings include:

  • 92% said it was beneficial to have gone without their phones while at camp
  • 83% considered having gone without their phones for several weeks to be an important life experience
  • 35% were successful at curbing their smartphone use after leaving camp
  • 17% tried to influence a friend to spend less time on their phone after leaving camp

The researchers plan to follow this study up with additional research during the summer of 2018.

 

Marketers trying to catch the attention of this demographic may need to think carefully about how they approach mobile advertising for this generation of digital natives. It’s another day in the life of modern media.

 

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A New App Can Create Facebook Ads Without the Cost

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This handy app can help you create ads with impact but with very little effort.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An app called Plotaverse helps marketers to create great ads without the dreaded and costly content creation process. Quickly bypassing established app giants, the young startup’s iOS app made the list of Facebook’s top 10 mobile apps.

The photo app’s animation features allow businesses of any calibre to create impactful ads fast and on a budget. More or less, you can choose from many artistically appealling gifs and put your message over them. The artwork on the site is truly eye-catching.

But how did Plotaverse’s 8 months old mobile app manage to disrupt visual advertising, going up against 8 billion video views a day on Facebook alone?

Images animated with Plotaverse, formerly known as Plotagraph, are the key to its success. The app ads movement to any single still photo. This creates ads that stand out in saturated media feeds.

 

Brands like Coca Cola, Wella, Chevrolet and Red Bull were seen boosting their brand with captivating Plotagraphs. There is no need for video, multiple photos or video editing skills to turn a photograph into a Plotagraph. Users of any skill level can quickly animate and post uniquely moving images to their business and social page.

On Instagram and Facebook, Plotagraphs have proven to attract up to 5 times the amount of views and engagement than surrounding images.

Every day, 4.5 million business pages on Facebook are trying to cut through 1.32 billion daily active users according to WordStream. As expected, Adobe’s titan apps, Photoshop Express and Spark Post head Facebook’s list of Photo Enhancing apps. But the tiny startup’s photo animation app has unexpectedly spearheaded the looping content industry.

To check it out, click here

 

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

 

 

 

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