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Boost Your Social Media Marketing With This Discounted Automation Software

October 27, 2020 No Comments

Postoplan allows you to automate posting across multiple platforms from one central hub.

There are unlimited ways for business owners to reach out: Keeping customers updated on Instagram, appealing to new users on Facebook, or recruiting potential talent via LinkedIn. However, all those tasks require a huge amount of time investment that could be better spent elsewhere.

It’s essential for companies to have a multi-faceted marketing plan uniquely suited to the strengths of each platform and the speed at which things can change on the internet. No one manager can do it effectively, and it’s difficult even for dedicated marketing professionals. That’s where Postoplan comes in.

The social media automation tool can have a profound impact on local brands while also easily meeting the scale of any large corporation. In fact, it already has: Reps from companies and entrepreneurs in 140 countries have given Postoplan top reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra. The key is in the functionality. With Postoplan, you can control daily posts from a central hub that lets you see what’s going out and when. Schedule posts on social media sites, messaging apps, even WhatsApp, and automate replies, redirects, and a whole range of interactions with your followers.

Having trouble with content? Postoplan provides daily idea hooks to make sure there’s constant variety. Users can get suggestions on hashtags and other relevant tagging, edit photos quickly directly in the tool, and even add multiple photos on a single post. Best of all, you can do all these tasks ad-free, an unlimited number of times on an unlimited number of accounts. It’s a hub that brings your messaging together under one umbrella.

PCMag readers can try out the service now with a special discount: Take half off the retail price of a lifetime subscription to Postoplan Social Media Automation, now available for $99.99.

By StackCommerce Team

Sourced from PC

In News

12 Instagram Marketing Tips for Business

October 14, 2020 No Comments

By Marisa Sanfilippo,

Check out these tips to help drive your Instagram marketing strategy toward better engagement and higher ROI.

If you’re looking for a way to grow your business, you may want to consider Instagram marketing. Instagram is an essential part of many business owners’ social media marketing strategies. This guide covers the benefits of using Instagram for business and top Instagram marketing tips to follow.

Business benefits of using Instagram

Instagram is a smart marketing tool if your business has products and services that can be presented visually and your audience is active on the channel. If your business checks those boxes and you carefully plan and execute your Instagram social media marketing strategy, this social media channel can have these big benefits:

Increased brand awareness
Followers’ trust
Brand loyalty
A boost in website traffic
New leads
New customers
Repeat business

Instagram marketing tips and best practices

Instagram marketing strategies vary from business to business. Although the following Instagram marketing tips have been effective for select brands, you should cater each tip to your unique audience and sales offerings.

Know your audience.

If you don’t know your audience, you are essentially creating content blindly. Many small businesses think their audience is everyone, which is almost never the case.

To help pinpoint your target audience, HubSpot suggests creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. You can have more than one buyer persona, but limit them to five to ensure they are manageable. Include important details about your target audience, such as their demographics and how they think and act. For example, consider the following characteristics:

Age range (keep it within 10 years)
Specific location (city and state)
Job title
Gender
What motivates them at their job
What motivates them at home
Three main problems they have
Where they go for information (e.g., business.com, Facebook or a local radio station)
Any additional information you can identify (e.g., if they have pets and/or children, their salary range, their hobbies)

When developing buyer personas, make them as clear and as detailed as possible. The more specific your buyer personas are, the better you’ll succeed in creating content that appeals to your audience. If you’re unsure where to get this information, start by surveying your current customers. Email them a survey, letting them know how long it will take to fill out. Keep your questions brief, and offer multiple-choice and open-ended options.

To further entice your current customer base to take your survey, you could offer a promo code to be applied to their next purchase, and you might even get some extra business from it. If your business is brand-new and you really don’t have any idea where to begin with surveying your customers, reach out to your personal social media networks for assistance. There has to be an audience you had in mind when you started your company. Find those people, even if you have to go through your personal Facebook friends list and phone contacts.

Another option is to use a paid digital tool to survey a group of people. If you choose this route, start with an audience of 100 or fewer people, and increase it as needed. Sometimes, a small sample is helpful and saves you money.

Optimize your bio.

Your bio is an important part of your Instagram page, and it needs to be optimized. Include the following elements:

A clear and engaging Instagram profile picture that’s sized appropriately
A bio that tells a story of what your brand or Instagram influencer page is about
A link that visitors can access for more information
Hashtags (when applicable)

Your bio is an important part of your Instagram page, and it needs to be optimized. Include the following elements:

A clear and engaging Instagram profile picture that’s sized appropriately
A bio that tells a story of what your brand or Instagram influencer page is about
A link that visitors can access for more information
Hashtags (when applicable)

Example: Just for fun – micro-influencer Instagram bio Zoey the Maltichon

Incorporate relevant hashtags.

Hashtags, including those that are trending, can help people find your page on Instagram and Twitter and are essential to grow your audience and sales. Josh Stutt, founder of ABCD E-Commerce, said to make sure to research hashtags before you start using them. If you’re not a widely known brand or celebrity, using generic hashtags won’t get you anywhere. For example, if you’re a new vintage T-shirt brand, don’t waste your time with broad hashtags such as #fashion or #tshirt.

“You need to find hashtags that are typically on point [and] have a good following but aren’t being used by everyone else in your space,” Stutt said. “By using the Instagram search function, you can see the popularity of any given tag (#tshirt has 38.5M posts, but #vintagetees only has 388K). Dig around and find 50 or so tags that are applicable to you.”

Once you’ve done this, use about 15 hashtags in various combinations on your posts, and keep track of where you use each one, Stutt suggested. After that, he said, review the results, looking at which posts resonated, which hashtags brought people in and what people talked about in your posts.

“As you learn which ones work for you, use them continuously while slowly adding in other ones and trying to scale up as you gain popularity,” Stutt said. “Once you start connecting on certain tags, that’s when you can hit the Discover section, and that’s how you get Instagram working for you instead of the other way around.”

Interact with other users in your target audience.

Building relationships is an age-old sales tactic that is effective in social media as well. It is also the best organic way to increase your audience and get new business. The key to building relationships is to be genuine. Here are a few ways to build relationships on Instagram:

Follow people in your target audience who interest you.
Like and comment on their posts.
Sometimes, share their posts to your stories.

It can take time to build these relationships, but doing so can generate some of the hottest leads.

Team up with other brands to host giveaways.

Jenna Labiak, owner of The Silk Labs, said hosting giveaways with other small businesses that have the same values, location and target audience has been beneficial to her business on Instagram.

“This way, we can have a mutually beneficial relationship within this giveaway and share both of our audiences with one another,” she said. “On average, I would say for each giveaway with another small business, The Silk Labs gains 200 new customers.”

Use a link tool to drive traffic to your website and other important links.

There are quite a few link tools available, but one of the most effective and widely used is Linktree. When you set up and add Linktree to your Instagram profile, users who click the link are directed to the Linktree page that shows all of the links you have added. You can customize the Linktree page with a profile image, such as your company logo, and edit the links at any time. The Linktree tool has a “forever free” plan that is ideal for small businesses. Additional plans start at $6 per month.

Capitalize on affordable influencer marketing.

You may know that partnering with Instagram influencers, or people with large followings for a particular interest or category, can be an effective marketing strategy. However, it often comes with a hefty price tag.

As a more affordable alternative, “Strike a win-win deal with other companies that have affiliations with influencers, and do a collaboration,” said Amy McWaters, CEO of The Hamper Emporium.

As an example, McWaters’ Australia-based company collaborated with Ponting Wines, which is promoted by Ricky Ponting, a cricket legend. As part of the collaboration, her team created stories featuring him and, in return, he promoted his wines in The Hamper Emporium’s e-commerce store.

McWaters said her company received a lot of direct messages asking about the products, and the campaign resulted in an overall sales increase of 43% that quarter.

Humanize your brand.

This is a strategy that works well across all social media channels. Think about the content that resonates with you on the pages you follow. Most likely, it’s the stuff that you can connect with personally, not corporate business posts. That’s why it’s so important to show your human side.

For example, payment processing company Priority Payments Local created a “Meet the Team” series and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, got its team together to convey the message “We’re all in this together.” The photo of the company’s business development manager, Vincent Napoli, shows him in a different light than his clients are used to seeing him in: with his son.

Leverage Instagram analytics (also called Instagram Insights).

Instagram Insights, Instagram’s analytics tool, is available to use for free on the Instagram app and is available on business accounts and contributor accounts (sometimes called influencer accounts). The tool provides the following metrics:

The number of accounts reached (with increase or decrease percentages)
Content interactions (with increase or decrease percentages)
Total followers (with increase or decrease percentages)
Content your page shared
Instagram story content
IGTV video content
Promoted post data

This information is available for the previous seven-day period. Unfortunately, unlike Facebook’s analytics tool, it does not show the best times to post different types of content. If you have a Facebook business page, experiment with the best posting times (as determined by when your audience is online).

Post awesome content.

You and your audience may not have the same idea of what constitutes impressive content. Research what types of content get the most engagement on your competitors’ pages.

Fill your followers’ Instagram feeds with engaging content. Note the type of content that gets the most engagement, so you can keep giving your audience what it wants. For example, some brands do better with Instagram Live posts than they do with Instagram Stories. Ultimately, you can define “awesome content” by how well it performs. Your posts should be carefully planned, crafted and distributed.

Grow your page and your business with Instagram advertising.

Instagram advertising can be beneficial for expanding your brand’s reach across the social media platform, thereby growing your following and increasing sales. Depending on your industry, for Instagram to be effective, you may need to run your ads through a sales funnel, like Credit Repair Kings did. The company’s strategy was to target consumers within a specific age group in the local area who had an interest in the credit services and financial categories. When someone clicked on the ad, Credit Repair Kings used ClickFunnels to capture the lead to schedule a call with them using Calendly.

Test and try again.

The social media landscape is always changing, so it’s important to test new tactics. Don’t be afraid to create Instagram content that gets zero or little engagement. Learn something from every post, and keep trying. With time and practice, you could find yourself with a flood of new sales straight from Instagram.

By Marisa Sanfilippo,

Sourced from business.com

In News

An Instagram account is exposing influencer inequality

September 25, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from MarketPlace

Black influencers tend to be paid less than white influencers, and it has nothing to do with follower counts.

Talking about how much you’re paid can make for an awkward conversation, but Adesuwa Ajayi is asking just that of social media influencers. They can have followings of tens or hundreds of thousands and companies will pay them for promotions. Ajayi started the Influencer Pay Gap account on Instagram to highlight the fact that Black influencers are routinely paid less than white influencers, even when they have similar numbers of followers or the same reach. The account lets people share stories anonymously and learn from other people’s experiences about what a fair payment is for a particular job or endorsement.

I spoke with Ajayi, whose day job is managing influencers at the talent agency AGM. She said she’s been collecting hundreds of stories. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Adesuwa Ajayi: One of the most interesting ones actually was a campaign an influencer was participating in. This was a white influencer. And she was approached last-minute by a beauty brand with the expectation that she was going to replace a celebrity. She was pitched £5,000 to be paid for that campaign. She turned up, but then realized that the celebrity that apparently wasn’t going to turn up actually did turn up. So, there was no need for her to be there. And she was still paid that £5,000. Whereas a Black influencer, who actually participated in the campaign, was paid around £1,700. And it had nothing to do with their influence and following.

Jack Stewart: It is one thing in a job where people get paid a salary and you can be fairly transparent about it or at least force that transparency. But with influencers, where there’s kind of just not that overall body, there’s not a union, there’s really no way, is there, to dig in and figure out what these differences are? It really lets you hide things quite easily.

Ajayi: One hundred percent, especially as there are different parties involved. You have the brands, but you also have the agencies, and agencies are often given big budgets from brands. And there’s no level of transparency, whereby if a brand gives an agency around £10,000, who’s to say the agency doesn’t cut off £5,000 for themselves and intentionally lowball influencers? I think there are so many things at play here. There are so many people involved in different ways, and each industry, each niche, there are different behaviours that are a lot more common within certain niches than others. So it’s a bit of a mess, to a degree.

Stewart: You work at a talent agency. Is there anything you can think of that would help fix this problem? Is there a way to structure pay? Is there a way for influencers to work together or form a union?

Ajayi: I am working hand in hand with a union that has actually been set up. They are working towards opportunities for advocacy when it comes to influencers in this space and creators in general, where people feel OK to discuss the ways in which they have been treated. I think reinvigorating influencers in the sense that where they feel a lot more confident, and a lot more, almost, heard, in the grand scheme of things is really important.

Stewart: Have you heard anything from brands either talking to you personally or speaking out publicly about the inequality issue?

Ajayi: There are some Black influencers who kind of feel a way about some of the posts that have been made by certain brands. Especially brands that have a habit of picking and choosing what they like from Black culture, but completely ostracizing Black influencers from their campaigns. And I think there is constantly, right now, a conversation around seeing Black influencers and Black creators as worthy of a level of respect. It shouldn’t be anything somewhat shallow because you’re scared of any repercussions.

Stewart: What do you hope changes as a result of this page and the work that you’re doing?

Ajayi: I would really love for it to create a space whereby people feel like they can be truly honest and they feel that they’ll be heard. And not only heard, but, based upon the feedback, brands will take steps to do what they know they should do. So that’s one thing. I would also say, just the sense of community has been amazing and just seeing influencers help one another. An influencer with a million [followers] can seem so far-fetched to an influencer who has 5,000. But on the page, it sort of brings people together and gives them an understanding of what different spaces are like and the things that other people go through. And so I’d love for a kind of close-knit way of people kind of advocating for one another. It also required people to use their privilege and also use their insight to help one another. And I think that is what has been really, really amazing about the page, and I think it will only continue to get even bigger and better in that sense.

Sourced from MarketPlace

In News

Influencers Are Plugging More Songs. Now Their Engagement Is Suffering

September 10, 2020 No Comments

By ELIAS LEIGHT .

Popular creators on YouTube and Instagram can make money promoting music, but if they promote too many duds, their popularity can take a hit.

Back in 2018, it was possible to break a single via an Instagram meme. It happened with Rich the Kid’s “New Freezer:” Omid Noori, co-founder of the digital marketing and management company ATG, stumbled on a meme featuring several kids whipsawing their heads to the track; he then paid a popular hip-hop channel on Instagram to re-post it. The meme morphed into the “New Freezer challenge;” the rapper, his label Interscope, and ATG spread it across the digital universe; and the single eventually earned a double-platinum certification.

But as the music industry became increasingly interested in using memes to raise awareness for songs, naturally their impact diminished. “Memes were a novelty, but then it became, if you have enough money, ‘what’s the song — I’ll find a clip that kind of matches it and run it,’” Noori explains. “Now people don’t discover music as much that way, because it’s such a common thing when songs get dubbed over memes.”

This illustrates one of the central challenges of digital marketing and promotion in music. As soon the music industry recognizes that one technique on one social media platform is particularly effective for bringing attention to a track, record companies try to turn it into a standard marketing strategy, which backfires by making the tactic less potent. Memes and dance challenges initially became popular because they seemed fun and spontaneous; when they are rote and forced, advertisements rather than ways to engage with others online, their energy quickly starts to dissipate.

Several marketers say they’ve noticed significant drops in influencer engagement across multiple social media platforms lately, which they believe is a cost of trying to force-feed songs without regard for listeners’ preferences. “I’ve seen some YouTube influencers’ engagement fall 30 or 40 percent because they’re just saying yes to [every paid opportunity to place a song in their channel],” says Dillon Druz, who manages the rapper Bankrol Hayden and runs marketing campaigns for multiple labels.

“Every day there are hundreds of songs that don’t make sense for TikTok” — the app tends to reward songs that elicit simple, replicable movements — “and people are like, ‘well this other one went viral on there, so let’s put $20,000 behind it,’” Druz continues. “It all comes back to not having a proper influencer marketing strategy and spending money in the wrong places.”

“I see a lot of influencers only posting promos” — paid posts — “and their engagement is lowering,” adds Leilani, who has been on TikTok since it was Musical.ly and has more than seven million followers and half a billion likes on the app. As a result, “I try to keep the promos low.”

Digital marketing is a key component of the modern music industry. In the old days, an artist could reach potential fans in just a few ways: radio, print, television, physical advertising like billboards and flyers, and live shows. Those are still around, but their relevance is declining; now, attention has splintered into a myriad of digital pockets. An artist can perk ears through subcultures on TikTok, gaming channels on YouTube, and filters on Snapchat, not to mention Instagram, Fortnite, Facebook, Triller, Twitter, Dubsmash, directly through Spotify, and elsewhere.

“You can climb in a hole where you keep posting bad content and you can’t really get out of it.”

Popular users emerge on each of these platforms and gain followers, often by providing a unique personal perspective — a special brand of humor or a knack for finding hits early. Artists and labels then pay these influencers to disseminate music to their followers. (The pandemic caused labels to shift even more money to their digital efforts.) On average, marketers say Instagram influencers are more expensive than TikTok influencers, but top TikTok creators can still charge $25,000 or more for a post. Once labels and artists start paying for content, though, this can sometimes weaken the personal connection between an influencer and his or her followers by transforming a quirky individual into a walking billboard.

That’s not to say this approach to marketing doesn’t work — it’s easy to find the success stories, from labels fanning the flames of a challenge that materialized on TikTok to artists coordinating flashy activations on Fortnite. While it’s much harder to find stories about all the songs that don’t connect despite having plenty of marketing money behind them, in truth, the tracks that flop outnumber the ones that connect by a wide margin. Marketers are engaged in a complicated dance, trying to deliver effective ads and promotions while at the same time convincing their audience that they are not being spammed.

Marketers say that dedicated followers are often savvy enough to discern between posts that an influencer makes because they love a song and posts that are just about padding the bottom line. “It’s very obvious when people’s pages just become a paid platform, whereas before it was actually uploading clips in tune with them,” Druz says. “Their followers know it’s not authentic, and that’s why engagement is dropping.”

It’s possible that influencers are less susceptible to plummeting engagement on TikTok because of the sheer volume of posts common on the app — creators will often put up five or six clips a day on TikTok, far more than they would post on Instagram or YouTube. When an influencer is spewing out so many clips, each one has less weight.

“We have to post normally before we take on any more [paid] campaigns.”

Still, Leilani knows that her followers will not respond to some types of paid content. “Something they don’t like is if I do songs with dances that aren’t already popular,” she says. “They would always get the lowest engagement” in terms of views and likes, so she steers clear.

Since influencers post less frequently on Instagram and YouTube, the repercussions for a series of misfires on those platforms can be more serious. “You can climb in a hole where you keep posting bad content and you can’t really get out of it,” Druz says. “People care what goes on their Instagram and YouTube — they are more professional platforms” relative to TikTok, which prizes goofy spontaneity.

ATG’s Noori works with a network of influencers to help labels market songs, and he says that they sometimes decline to do promotions due to fears about alienating their audience. “A lot of influencers at one point in the last two months were like, ‘we can’t do as many [paid] campaigns this week, we need to get our engagement back,’” he notes. “People would say, ‘we have to post normally before we take on any more [paid] campaigns.’”

That’s part of the reason why Druz is changing the way he promotes music. Now “I’m very cautious,” he says. “I’m going to creators and saying, ‘is this a good fit for your channel?’ I have to make sure everyone actually believes in the song.”

Feature Image Credit: Photos in illustration by Adobe Stock/Kurkalukas, Adobe Stock/Endstern

By ELIAS LEIGHT

Sourced from RollingStone

In News

7 Things to Consider Before Scheduling Instagram Posts

September 7, 2020 No Comments

By Chris Makara.

It’s been a while now since Instagram updated its API to allow for third party tools to be used to help schedule Instagram posts.

Depending on how you use social media for business, you may or may not have explored this option.

If you have, great! Share your experience in the comments below.

If you haven’t, the big question for today is… why not?

Every month, 1 billion people use Instagram. Companies that aren’t on social media, or those that rarely post, are missing out on a free or pay-as-you-go marketing opportunity.

And in this world, companies with a purpose and the ability to connect to consumers as people are the ones in business for the long haul.

Why Businesses Should Use Instagram In Scheduling Instagram Posts

Image Source

So what do you stand to gain by boosting your Instagram strategy? What does Instagram scheduling offer that manual posting is lacking? Is there room for advanced social media content automation?

Here are 7 things to ask yourself before you get down to business scheduling Instagram posts.

1. How much time are you wasting every day manually posting Instagram updates?

When you add up the time it takes to stop, think about a post, capture the image, make your image Insta-worthy, consider and craft the copy, and post to Instagram, you’re looking at a couple of decent chunks of time taken out of your day. Not to mention the time wasted getting back into your workflow once that’s been interrupted.

Advance scheduling of Instagram posts allows you to set aside a block of time at your convenience to do all this at once. No interrupting other work and no time spent refocusing, which means you’re actively increasing your productivity to get more done in a shorter amount of time. You can set it all up and then move on to the next thing, knowing posting for the day/week/month is taken care of.

Bulk.ly Advance Scheduling Of Instagram Posts

2. What could you be doing with the time you get back in efficiency gains?

Do you have other social media sites that could use some attention? How about engaging with your audience? Or even exploring new business opportunities?

Consider what you “never” have time for and have always wanted to do. If this list is compelling enough, then the hours saved by scheduling Instagram posts in advance may be worth more than you originally considered.

3. Do your updates often contain copy or fact mistakes?

Rushing to manually post in real-time can lead to oversights when it comes to proper spelling or fact-checking. If you’re catching yourself making mistakes on a regular basis, it may be because of a lack of focus or the pressure to hurry and get a post out between meetings or before lunch.

When you take time to build out a calendar of posts and schedule content in advance, you can double-check copy for spelling and grammar mistakes and identify pieces of information you need to research further… before posting. All without the pressure of daily responsibilities calling on you every step of the way.

4. Do you forget to post some days? Then overdo it on others?

Inconsistency in posting not only confuses your audience, but also erodes their trust. When will they get new information? Can they expect to see images of that new product you’re offering on sale today?

If they get something different every time, are constantly waiting for an update, or feel like your posts are so frequent it’s overwhelming, they’re going to stop following and engaging.

There are countless social media marketing tools that allow you to build out a schedule that’s balanced and that delivers when you say you will. Scheduling posts allows you to do that, no matter what your day brings because it’s all taken care of in advance.

Buffer Social Media Marketing Took for Scheduling Instagram Posts

5. Do you have a strategy when it comes to hashtag use?

Some businesses have abandoned any hashtag strategy altogether in favor of flooding updates with them. This strategy seems to be the go-to for businesses with a lack of time and forethought. They’re essentially throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

When you plan what you’re going to post and schedule everything out in advance, you can more readily identify common themes and research the most popular hashtags related to your topic, product, industry, customer base, etc.

Posting with a handful of smart, well-researched hashtags can ensure your updates end up in the right feeds, in front of your target audience.

6. Would highlighting relevant events or holidays on social media benefit your business?

It seems like there’s some kind of holiday trending every day on social media. Days celebrating pancakes, dogs, boyfriends, movies… depending on your industry, leveraging these “holidays”, as well as national holidays, for use in a social media marketing campaign could be a smart way to reach current and potential customers.

But in the frenzy of other priorities, we tend to lose track of dates or miss out on proper lead time to execute on a formerly brainstormed campaign idea. Building out calendars in advance and scheduling posts helps with awareness of planning windows and makes it more likely that there will be ample execution time.

7. Have you considered automation?

If you’re looking to grow your business with Instagram and take advanced scheduling to the next level, automation may be right for you.

Automation only maximizes the litany of benefits mentioned above, in that you can let go of regularly coming up with new content to schedule and having to update your queued content lists as they run dry.

With automation, the posts keep posting – all you need to do is add one-off updates (breaking news, product promotions, etc.) into the mix as they arise.

Of course, you’ll need to first identify enough evergreen content to share so that your updates will remain relevant, and so you’ll have enough content to populate your queues so followers aren’t seeing the same posts all the time.

Tools like Bulk.ly can be synced directly to Buffer and often feature product blogs full of helpful articles to help you learn how to use automation to advance your business and social media goals.

Instagram Autimations for Scheduling Instagram Posts

Instant doesn’t translate well from personal to business

The “insta” nature of Instagram suggests that this platform is made for instant posting, instant engagement – capturing an instant and getting it out to your followers in real-time.

That makes sense for personal accounts and social media celebrities. But for businesses, such a strategy is less effective and wrought with risks, from missed opportunities to reputation-damaging mistakes.

Scheduling Instagram posts merges both worlds, with automation taking it to the next level.

One last thing to consider: Can you really afford NOT to schedule your Instagram updates?

Guest author: Since 2003, Chris Makara has developed a broad digital marketing background with a focus on SEO, Social Media, Automation and Analytics. He is the founder of Bulkly, a social media automation tool for individuals and small businesses.

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By Chris Makara

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

In News

How to Tag and Manage Instagram Branded Content

August 19, 2020 No Comments

By JENN HERMAN

Want to partner with influencers and brands to create content on Instagram? Wondering how to best manage and assess your influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram?

In this article, you’ll learn the difference between branded content and sponsored posts, how to manage and analyze the partnerships with brands or creators you work with, and how to tag a business partner in an Instagram post and Instagram Stories post. You’ll also discover a tool to help you find potential creators to partner with.

To learn how to tag and manage Instagram branded content, read the article below for an easy-to-follow walkthrough or watch this video:

What Is Instagram Branded Content?

Branded content is when a creator or publisher posts content and discloses that they’ve received compensation for that post. This disclosure in branded content isn’t optional. FTC regulations require you to disclose if you’re promoting content that you’ve been compensated for in some way.

Instagram branded content isn’t an ad, though; sponsored posts are what you see when it’s ad content. Branded content or a paid partnership just means that the person creating the content received some sort of financial support.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

By JENN HERMAN

Sourced from Social Media Examiner

In Uncategorized

Instagram is Making it Easier to Kickstart your Small Business

August 13, 2020 No Comments

By Erica Perry,

Instagram Shops, IGTV, and Pinned Comments are just a few recent updates to help small businesses market their products and services.

With eCommerce sales rising amid the COVID-19 lockdown, platforms are working every angle to make their interface friendly to brands and businesses looking to build a digital presence in the absence of a traditional brick-and-mortar experience. Leading in the space is Instagram and its parent company Facebook.

Specifically, Instagram has recently introduced a number of ways it’s committing to achieve this underlined by themes of discovery, monetization, and driving conversations around specific products and services.

MAKING CONTENT DISCOVERABLE VIA THE “SHOPS TAB”

Originally introduced in May as part of a larger announcement of Facebook and Instagram Shops, more users can now expect to see the new “Shop” tab within their bottom navigation bar. At a high-level, users who use the tab will be driven to the current shopping experience in the app which consists of a list of postings with Shopping Tags attached. They can filter by specific categories, including Beauty, Clothing & Accessories, Home, and Travel, much the same way they’re able to via Instagram Explore. Ultimately, additional purchase options will be added as parent company Facebook onboards more companies and introduces more selling options.

Per TechCrunch, the new tab will be indicated with a “Shop” icon that will replace the heart icon (Activity) in the app’s main navigation though the Activity feed will still be available either by toggling to an icon in the top right corner, beside the icon of a ‘Direct’ paper plane, or by going to their profile and tapping the heart icon. For more general insights into set up a Facebook shop, check out this new Blueprint education course the platform recently unveiled.

MAXIMIZING YOUR IGTV EFFORTS

Earlier this Spring Instagram shared several key changes to its IGTV app including an important cross-promotional update whereby the first 15 seconds of the video will play with the rest of the content available via a ‘swipe up’ link, as opposed to a freeze-frame from the clip. In addition to this, the platform introduced a broader overhaul of the IGTV display options within the Discover tab. The intent was primarily to highlight top creators but, more importantly, allow users to have more specific control over what they see as opposed to limiting search options solely based on content they’ve already engaged with.

In this vein of ‘control,’ more recently Instagram introduced additional options allowing creators and brands to edit the preview images and thumbnails of their IGTV videos that are displayed in the feed. The app is also unveiling capability for IGTV creators to cross-post to Facebook Watch, serving to increase the exposure of their uploads. With the roll-out of IGTV monetization including ads and Badges through which users can donate to their favorite broadcasters, this is a significant incentivizing factor for companies looking to double down on e-commerce efforts amidst the global pandemic and boost their digital presence.

Put differently, marketers want a reason to put resources against yet another digital app. With further options to generate income from IGTV, they’ll naturally find more reasons to make it a consistent focus. For context into just how much live-stream viewership has increased in recent months, Instagram reported a 70 percent uptick between February and March alone.

PINNING POST COMMENTS

Following a test in May, Instagram is announcing that users can now pin up to three comments within a comment thread. To do this, swipe to the left and tap on the icon resembling a thumbtack. Each of the three posts you designate to pin will appear underneath your photo with a “Pinned” label beneath.

Per Instagram’s VP of Product Vishal Shah, the option is designed to enable brands and users to control the tone of conversations. “By highlighting positive comments, you can better manage the tone of the conversation,” he shared on Twitter. From an e-commerce standpoint, this stands to be a useful way for those building their e-commerce presence to promote great reviews of their product and learn more about new purchasing behaviors by boosting relevant questions and feedback.

Though still up for debate, many experts in space anticipate that such trends will hold beyond the pandemic. Why? As more consumers experiment with online buying options and recognize the convenience and efficiencies of shopping from the comfort of their home, they won’t go back. This will ultimately exacerbate the current growth in e-commerce. Pivoting, in this case, is not necessarily only about a change in direction, but much more directly correlated with moving the needle of a business.

By Erica Perry

Editorial and Programming Manager, Crowdcentric

Sourced from Social Media Week

In News

8 of the Most Important Instagram Trends to Watch Right Now

July 23, 2020 No Comments

By Katie Sehl,

Like most social media trends, Instagram trends move quickly. And in 2020, change has been fast and furious, with a global pandemic, social uprising, and competitors, shaking things up.

Trends make the difference between looking out of touch or ahead of the curve. That doesn’t mean you should throw your social media content calendar out the window. It means you should stay informed and stay flexible.

There’s a lot to stay on top of at Instagram. From Instagram Story trends to Live Shopping, and Instagram Shops, we break down the biggest trends on the app.

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps a lifestyle photographer used to grow from 0 to 600,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

9 of the most important Instagram trends in 2020

These are the top trends on Instagram to watch right now.

1. Brands and influencers reckon with racial inequality

On June 2, Instagram feeds were checkered with black squares in support of Blackout Tuesday. The original concept, The Show Must Be Paused, was created by music executives Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas, as a day for the industry to “take a beat for an honest, reflective, and productive conversation about what actions we need to collectively take to support the Black community.”

But the black squares swiftly became symbols of performative allyship. The posts inadvertently drowned out the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, a channel activists use to relay vital information. Many brands and influencers who participated were called out for virtue marketing or hypocrisy, spurring calls for transparency and action.

Designer Aurora James’s #15PercentPledge initiative calls on big retailers to pledge %15 of shelf space to Black-owned businesses. Brands including Sephora, Rent the Runway, Cupcakes and Cashmere have since made the pledge. UOMA Beauty founder Sharon Chuter launched #PullUpOrShutUp to challenge brands to back their marketing with employee diversity statistics.

Instagram plans to reexamine how its policies, tools, and processes impact Black and other underrepresented communities on Instagram. The company will focus on addressing harassment, account verification, content distribution, and algorithmic bias.

Black creators and professionals have also been speaking out about tokenization, pay disparities, and being sidelined. Several celebs, public figures, and influencers have responded to this disparity by sharing Black influencers and businesses or hosting account takeovers. As a result, many Black creators have seen their followings double overnight.

The social momentum behind Black Lives Matter is stronger than ever. But as initiatives like #PullUpOrShutUp demonstrate, brands need to know the difference between social trends and social movements. As eTalk CTV reporter Tyrone Rex Edwards said, “My trauma is not a trend.”

Anti-racism, inclusive marketing, equal pay and opportunity are not trends. They’re the new norm and the bare minimum of what consumers expect from brands going forward.

2. Instagram goes Live

Stay-at-home orders and event cancellations have helped propel Instagram Live viewership figures to new heights. Between February and March, the number of people tuning in for live broadcasts rose by 70%. More than 800 million people now watch live video daily across Instagram and Facebook.

Live lineups have been packed with star power. DJ D-Nice’s #ClubQuarantine sets have featured shoutouts to Rihanna, Zuckerberg, and Joe Biden as the viewership count soared above 100,000. Former U.S. President Barack Obama and Justin Bieber were among the 50,000 viewers punctuating a live convo between NBA star Stephen Curry and Dr. Anthony Fauci with emoji.

As people look for ways to replace in-person activities, brands and creators have jumped on live, too. In fact, 80% of live broadcasters have fewer than 1,000 followers.

Instagram Live sessions include everything from cocktail and comedy hours to virtual protests, yoga classes, and drawing tutorials. Desktop functionality, added in April, has made tuning in a lot more practical.

Like Instagram Stories, live videos tend to be more intimate and spontaneous than posts in the feed. Hosts can also respond to questions and comments in real-time, which is why Live videos tend to average six times more interactions on Facebook.

It’s too soon to know what staying power Instagram Live may have in a post-COVID world. For now, Instagram is rolling out enhancements, such as the option to save videos to IGTV and run fundraisers. Live Shopping and Badges allow creators to monetize livestreams.

Instagram is also testing showing two-rows of Stories in the feed, with live videos up top.

Until in-person activities resume, expect to see more memes and innovation on the Instagram Live front.

3. Creators can now make money directly on Instagram

Since its inception in 2010, Instagram creators have mostly monetized their audiences through affiliate marketing and brand partnerships. New features introduced in May now allow creators to make money directly.

Instagram is now testing Badges with a small group of creators and businesses. During a live broadcast, viewers can spend 99 cents to $4.99 for heart badges to stand out in the comment stream and unlock features. During the test phase, creators will receive 100% of revenue earned from these badges.

Source: Instagram

Tests for IGTV ads are underway as well. These ads can last up to 15 seconds and appear after someone clicks to watch the full IGTV video. On par with YouTube, 55% of ad revenue is shared with the creator. In addition to ads, Live Shopping tools now let creators and brands tag products during live videos.

Source: Instagram

These changes come as competition to retain creators heats up between platforms. They also cater to a cohort of “specialized” creators who monetize their audiences by offering valuable content, rather than featuring valuable products and experiences in their content. It’s why many are shying away from the label influencer in favor of the term creator, or even ambassador.

Brand partnerships will still remain an important source of revenue, but they’ve already become a lot less transactional. Expect to see some fine-tuning in the Brand Collabs Manager from Instagram (and Facebook).

4. Instagram Shops set brands up to cash in on conversions

Instagram Shops promise to make it easier for brands to make money, too. Shops let businesses create a storefront directly in the app, so people can buy without the need to visit a website. By eliminating this friction, brands should be able to drive significantly higher conversions and sales.

In May, Instagram and Facebook launched a phased rollout to businesses globally. The plan is for the shopping experience to eventually be integrated across all of Facebook’s apps. Once complete, it will mean that when someone puts something in their cart on Facebook, they can check out later on Instagram using stored credit card info or Facebook Pay (which will likely be integrated, too).

Source: Facebook

To improve discoverability, Instagram will soon have a dedicated Shopping tab, like the Explore tab, which already features a shopping section. Accounts with shops have a View Shop button on their profiles, as well as a shop tab. Businesses can customize how collections appear, connect loyalty programs, and benefit from the platform’s built-in AI to create personalized experiences.

There are now more ways to spend money in Stories, too. In addition to product tags, companies can share gift card, food order and donation Stickers.

Set up Instagram Shopping so you can sell your products.

5. Shopping and advertising get AI-powered upgrades

More people shopping across Instagram and Facebook means more data. And more data brings the company closer to its vision of “making anything shoppable while personalizing to individual taste.”

To make anything shoppable, the Facebook engineers have developed an A.I called GrokNet that can automatically tag the products in a business’s catalog in seconds. The A.I., which is already used on Facebook Marketplace, can scan photos, identify attributes such as colour and style, cross-reference with catalogs, and suggest descriptions. On the flip side, this data is used to deliver better search results and targeted ads to users.

Rotating View is another A.I. project that aims to enhance social shopping. The feature, which allows people to create 3D-like images, is currently being tested on Marketplace. Maybe it will crop up on Instagram, too.

Instagram may soon introduce ads that use augmented reality to let people “try on” beauty products or preview furniture in their homes. Facebook already offers an AR ad format, and Zuckerberg recently announced more developments are on the horizon.

Read our complete guide on how to advertise on Instagram.

6. Instagram Guides accompany the rise of “info-social”

Brands and influencers often get asked for recommendations, from “where should we eat in Marrakech?” to “how do you talk to your kids about climate change?”. In the past, these requests have been handled by referring followers to highlights or blog posts. Now guides can be created directly on Instagram.

Source: Instagram

According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, guides were initially developed for travel, but that idea was curtailed by the coronavirus outbreak. Instead, they launched under the theme of wellbeing, with more themes coming up. Instagram recently assembled a racial justice resource guide, too.

Guides have their own devoted tab on profiles, and can be shared to Stories or appear in the Explore tab. They can include curated posts and videos with added notes and tips.

There’s a growing appetite for informative social content. On TikTok, educational videos are surging in popularity, especially in China, with a reported 14 million “knowledge-based” posts created last year. In the United States, career coaches, personal finance experts, and fitness experts are finding success on the app.

On Instagram, everything from “practice accounts” to doctor and nurse micro- and nano-influencers are popular, proving that engaged communities are much more valuable than high follower counts.

7. Values take center stage

Authenticity is a big buzzword in the influencer industry. But it’s not just an influencer trend. Consumers increasingly demand authenticity from brands, too, especially in the form of transparency.

As brands and influencers use their platforms to take a stand, promote values, and support causes, transparency will be more necessary to retain authenticity. For example, sustainable beauty brand Elate Cosmetics goes into great detail to explain the eco-attributes of its products and practices.

Influencers will share more about their decision making in general, and be more upfront about why they partner with specific brands. To maintain trust, disclaimers and clear labelling between spon-con and regular posts will be necessary, particularly in Stories.

With social advocacy on the rise, Instagram has added several fundraising tools, including live fundraisers and donation stickers. The company is also reportedly testing the option to add fundraisers to profiles. Nonprofits already have access to account Donate buttons.

Instagram is also adding context to posts from high-reach accounts. In April, the company started piloting a feature that shows location and where followers are based on posts from these accounts.

Source: Facebook

8. TikTok, Twitter, and Giphy invade Instagram

The days when Instagram was only a place for filtered images are long gone. Instagram’s feed now features everything from memes and Twitter takes to TikTok challenges, special effects, music, and more.

To keep up with competition from TikTok and Snapchat, Instagram’s been on a feature-adding bonanza—especially in Stories. The recent acquisition of Giphy, which already sourced 25% of its traffic from Instagram, will add to a collection of interactive features that already includes stickers, filters, and other special effects.

Despite more content variety in the feed, the Instagram aesthetic still creeps in. As Arimeta Diop points on in Vanity Fair: “It’s the end of the iPhone-Notes-App-Apology Era.” Bold typefaces, templates, and hand-drawn sketches have proven more popular, thanks in part to Instagram’s strong design community. Infographics and visual storytelling have taken off, too.

Most cross-platform sharing is up to the users, except when it comes to Facebook’s family of apps. Further integration between Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger—on the front and back end—is looming. Beyond a fully integrated shopping experience, Facebook is developing an option for users to view and reply to Instagram Stories from Facebook.

Facebook is also planning to merge messaging across its apps by the end of this year. Once complete, Instagram users would be able to message friends on WhatsApp and Messenger, even if those friends don’t have Instagram accounts. This level of integration would make the app family comparable with the WeChat, the super app that dominates in China.

Manage your Instagram presence alongside your other social channels and save time using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can schedule and publish posts, engage the audience, and measure performance. Try it free today.

By Katie Sehl

Sourced from Hootsuite

In News

The Top 7 Instagram Automation Tools For Smart Marketers

July 21, 2020 No Comments

By Anna Medina

All entrepreneurs and marketers know how valuable time is.

The more time you spend engaging in activities that don’t directly bring any return on investment (ROI), the slower your growth.

You should choose your marketing approaches taking into account efficiency and available amounts of time.

Lack of time and the need to increase efficiency are the two main reasons why you should consider automation as a part of your Instagram marketing strategy.

Managing an Instagram account and promoting your products or services on this social network is a difficult task. You should not only provide your followers with fresh high-quality content on a regular basis but also reply to comments, monitor posts where users mention your brand and deal with many other time-consuming tasks.

Instagram is the fastest-growing social media platform with more than 1 billion active monthly users. There are thousands of influencers from different niches, along with thousands of businesses that put a lot of effort into building a strong presence on Instagram. All these businesses have to compete for a greater audience and to make sure that their posts will satisfy Instagram’s algorithm.

If you use the right Instagram automation tools, you’ll be able to improve the efficiency of many processes significantly. For instance, you can schedule your posts so that your target audience can always see your content when they are most active. There are also many tools that can help you analyze engagement and provide the exact content your followers are looking for.

Now let’s take a look at the best Instagram automation tools that can help you improve your Instagram presence.

1. Hashtagsforlikes

Hashtags For Likes Instagram Automation Reference Guide

Sorting hashtags is a time-consuming task. Many businesses even decide to outsource it. To use the right hashtags, you should analyze hashtags that are trending in your niche and determine which hashtags can be associated with your brand.

Even though developing an effective hashtag strategy is difficult, it’s still very important for the visibility of your posts in your followers’ feed.

Hashtagsforlikes is an organic tool that will help you use the best hashtags for your products, services, promotions, and other types of content. This is a search engine that also provides analytics on each hashtag so that you can choose the right ones.

2. Kicksta

Kicksta Organic Automation Growth Tool Reference Guide

Kicksta is one of the best organic automation growth tools that has proven to deliver great results, enabling users to get real followers.

Some solutions imitate success by using fake followers, but this is not the case with Kicksta. You can be sure that your brand gets genuine engagement and that all your followers are actual people.

Kicksta will help you promote your products or services to the right audience so that you will have more time to create authentic content.

3. Ingramer

Instagram Automation Tools Statistics General Auditory Reference Guide

One of the main advantages of Ingramer is that it combines effectiveness with simplicity.

This software comes with a variety of automation tasks, including a hashtag generator, automated likes and follows, and data analysis.

Ingramer is based on an algorithm that simulates the activity of real people and only considers information on customers or active followers. If you’ve never used such services before, you can contact the support service and get answers to any of your questions.

In addition, this solution can help you analyze the performance of your account so that you can promote it more effectively.

4. SocialCaptain

Social Captain Instagram Automation Software Reference Guide

SocialCaptain is one of the best solutions for Instagram automation. This Instagram automation software focuses on attracting real audiences and increasing engagement rates.

It comes with several tools for targeting and real-time analytics. It also includes an AI-powered module that boosts its performance.

The best thing about this solution is how fast it works. For instance, if you opt for the Turbo plan, this software will deliver the desired results 10 times faster than the majority of other automation solutions. If you need to grow your follower base quickly, you will certainly appreciate this tool.

5. Upleap

Upleap Reliable and Effective Instagram Automation Tool Reference Guide

Upleap has proven to be reliable and effective. Before you decide whether or not you want to use this solution, you can try a free 3-day trial to familiarize yourself with its main features.

Every client gets a personalized account manager so you can always ask real people about any issues and get timely help.

Another reason why Upleap is more popular than many of its competitors is that it offers good pricing options. The prices start at $39 per month, and when you choose this solution, you know what you’re paying for.

6. Instavast

InstaVast Multipurpose Instagram Automation Tool Reference Guide

Instavast is a complex solution that includes a variety of features. For example, you can use an Instagram bot that deals with comments, likes, and follows. There is also an automated direct message sending tool and a post scheduler that you can customize according to your needs.

All the tools are priced separately, and the company offers a 100% money-back guarantee.

You might also want to check out the free Instagram automation tools on Instavast’s website. For instance, there is a media downloader, a hashtag generator, and a list of banned hashtags.

7. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a full-suite social media management software.

It allows you to pre-load Instagram posts and schedule them to go at the exact time you need. You can also schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. It’s a huge time-saver.

Agorapulse also provides detailed reports on all of your social media activity.

Common mistakes

To achieve good results on Instagram, you should not only use automation tools but also know how to use them properly. For example, you should make sure that your comments are personalized so that your followers won’t have to read generic comments that have obviously been written by a bot.

Keep in mind that the main purpose of automation tools is to help you with repetitive tasks so that you can focus on tasks that require well-developed creative skills. Bots won’t be able to produce high-quality content.

Another common mistake is setting impossible goals so that your account will get unnatural numbers of followers too quickly. Solutions that enable you to promote your account in such an aggressive way can often create problems. Sometimes, accounts that are promoted too aggressively may even get banned. We recommend that you focus on stable growth and manage your expectations.

Wrapping up

Instagram marketing is extremely time-consuming so there’s no surprise that more and more businesses and influencers choose various automation tools that can help them automate repetitive tasks and focus on other important things.

I hope that this list of the best Instagram automation tools will help you get more followers and achieve your business goals.

By Anna Medina

Anna is a specialist in different types of writing. She graduated from the Interpreters Department, but creative writing became her favorite type of work. Now she improves her skills while working as a freelance writer for Pick The Writer, Writing Judge to assist a lot of students all over the world and has free time for another work, as well. Always she does her best in the posts and articles.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

In News

A Complete Overview of Social Media Advertising for Small Business

June 30, 2020 No Comments

By Anders Hjorth

Social media advertising allows businesses to reach users during their prime time and in pleasant, entertaining and engaging ways. Find out which platform suits your needs.

Social media has become a mass media, but a personalized one. Remember that scene from the film Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks through a shopping mall and the interactive ad displays address him as a different person, because they scanned his new eyes and took him for someone else?

Social advertising is moving in that direction: No user experience is ever identical to another on social media.

Each screen a user sees comprises numerous elements, that are all optimized by algorithms, which in turn feed on data the user has declared, and on behavior the social network has detected. Some of these elements are advertising. Personalized to the user’s profile, and designed to be a part of the experience.

Overview: What is social advertising?

Social media provides a useful and entertaining experience to its members for free. In return, social media platforms monetize user data by providing powerful digital advertising solutions to advertisers.

Advertising through social media takes the form of banners, posts or videos. Social media ads, many very creative, blend in with the context and appeal to the user.

In a Snapchat campaign for Bacardi, branded filters were used to enable users to send branded postcard-like snaps to their friends from the music festival they were attending. Source:

Snapchat

Benefits of advertising on social media

One of the great benefits social media provides to businesses is the establishment of a direct relationship between you and the user. Advertising through social media creates, extends and activates these relationships. Let’s look at social advertising benefits for businesses.

1. Audiences can be precisely targeted

Users enter their data into social platforms: names, photos, job titles, location, marital status, friends, and much more. Social platforms monitor behavior and interest.

This data enables advertisers to reach the right audience and create targeted ads for it. If an advertiser has a well-defined target market, they can deliver it via social media advertising. Advertisers no longer target media channels, they target audiences via media platforms.

2. Social ads address “awareness”

The “hierarchy of effects” model, often used in marketing and advertising to describe the mental stages a user moves through before purchasing a product, contains three stages:

Cognitive (awareness and knowledge)
Affective (liking and preference)
Conative (conviction and purchase)

Social media advertising is good at addressing the cognitive and affective stages. This makes advertising on social media complementary to direct mail, search marketing, or retail media, which have their strengths at the conative stage.

3. Everything is measurable

Every social media ad impression leaves a digital trace. Every click can be tracked. User characteristics and user behavior can be related to each instance of advertising within a social platform.

So much data exists that it becomes challenging to figure out what is significant and what isn’t. Once advertisers choose the right social media metrics, however, this data will be easy to track and optimize via the social platforms.

4. Social advertising is scalable

Social media advertising costs for a campaign can start as low as $10, and the advertiser has control over timespan, targeting and creative. It can also cost $10 million and cover the globe. Between the two, advertisers have ample room to test, learn and adjust.

Marketers, mainly using social media advertising to boost and enhance their content strategy, can monitor and manage it directly through their favorite social media management tool.

5. Social ads can trigger actions

Whereas social media advertising is often used for building awareness, it can also trigger actions. It generates likes and follows, and can also generate clicks to your website and create leads for your sales and marketing teams.

There is even a rising social commerce trend, where social media advertising feeds directly into the conative stage: users can buy products directly on social media.

The 5 best social media platforms to advertise your small business

The Facebook Ads platform is dedicated to social media advertising, and the Google Ads platform also spans other forms of digital advertising. We will focus on the social media advertising aspects of seven digital advertising platforms.

Platform 1: Facebook Ads: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger

Facebook controls the most powerful advertising platform in the world, as it combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger together on the same infrastructure.

Most advertisers, however, will consider Facebook and Instagram to be two advertising platforms, and WhatsApp and Messenger to be additional features.

Characteristics of the Facebook ads platform:

Massive reach
Very powerful targeting
Innovative and adaptive ad formats
Machine learning used to improve performance
Most controversial use of user data

Facebook Ads by, itself, is probably the strongest social ads platform and is now also the backbone for advertising on Instagram. Depending on your campaign objective, the platform can activate one or more of its advertising channels.

Platform 2: LinkedIn Ads

The LinkedIn advertising platform stands out for its strong business focus. It’s increasingly integrating with the Microsoft Advertising platform and has access to a powerful technological backbone in its mother company, Microsoft.

Characteristics of LinkedIn Ads:

Clear business focus
Strong targeting of professional audiences
Maturing platform
Reputation for high cost

Platform 3: Twitter Ads

The Twitter advertising platform is not as powerful as the two above platforms, but Twitter has an interesting positioning as a great add-on for other social networks. The quality of its user data is not as good as the other platforms, but it is strong on topical and thematic targeting and for events.

Characteristics of the Twitter ad platform:

Lower volumes
Strong topical targeting
Specific communities and events
Reputation for low costs
Complementary to business activity on Twitter

Platform 4: Google Ads: YouTube and Google My Business

Google never created its own social network despite the efforts put into Google Plus and other initiatives. However, many consider YouTube to be a social media platform and the more recent Google My Business platform also has some social media resemblance.

Characteristics of the social media dimension of Google Ads (YouTube and Google My Business):

Massive video reach on YouTube
Low cost per view on YouTube and innovative ad formats
Strong integration with the Google advertising technology stack
Effective social-local advertising on Google My Business

Emerging platforms: Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat

The social media landscape is constantly changing. Recently the video-driven social media platform TikTok has entered the scene in a significant way. Its closest competitor, Snapchat, had experienced spectacular growth.

The emergence of new players like TikTok and Snapchat makes it hard for existing players like Pinterest or Twitter to keep growing because they are all fighting for the attention (and dollars) of the same audience.

Emerging social advertising platforms:

Pinterest: The creator of pin boards where users can gather images from around the web thematically and share with others, is still going strong. It’s finding itself a positioning on social commerce, as it has the power to inspire users for their purchases. If the platform can generate sales and connect to its advertising, it has strong arguments for attracting more advertisement.
TikTok is reaching a young audience massively and strongly influences this group. Its recent advertising offering is creative, including formats like stickers, filters, and overlays.
Snapchat has also seduced a large young audience which can be difficult for advertisers to reach. Its creative, innovative, and fun use of digital media shines through in its advertising formats.

In a campaign on TikTok in Thailand, Colgate used an innovative ad format. They designed a clickable “branded effect” triggering a visual effect of exploding hearts when users made a “kissy face”. Source: TikTok

Social ads are a world of opportunity

Social media advertising is a mass media that can entertain, influence and seduce its audiences. Social media platforms provide powerful targeting capabilities and innovative ad formats.

Advertisers can start small and scale infinitely, but need to be very clear about their objectives, to reap the benefits of social ads. Finding the right social network and reaching the right audience can be challenging, but the opportunity is huge and the benefits can be significant.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

Instagram

Postoplan allows you to automate posting across multiple platforms from one central hub.

By StackCommerce Team

Sourced from PC

Check out these tips to help drive your Instagram marketing strategy toward better engagement and higher ROI.

Business benefits of using Instagram

Instagram marketing tips and best practices

Know your audience.

Optimize your bio.

Incorporate relevant hashtags.

Interact with other users in your target audience.

Team up with other brands to host giveaways.

Use a link tool to drive traffic to your website and other important links.

Capitalize on affordable influencer marketing.

Humanize your brand.

Leverage Instagram analytics (also called Instagram Insights).

Post awesome content.

Grow your page and your business with Instagram advertising.

Test and try again.

By Marisa Sanfilippo,

Sourced from business.com

Related links: More insight from Jack Stewart

Sourced from MarketPlace

Popular creators on YouTube and Instagram can make money promoting music, but if they promote too many duds, their popularity can take a hit.

By ELIAS LEIGHT

Sourced from RollingStone

1. How much time are you wasting every day manually posting Instagram updates?

2. What could you be doing with the time you get back in efficiency gains?

3. Do your updates often contain copy or fact mistakes?

4. Do you forget to post some days? Then overdo it on others?

5. Do you have a strategy when it comes to hashtag use?

6. Would highlighting relevant events or holidays on social media benefit your business?

7. Have you considered automation?

Instant doesn’t translate well from personal to business

Top Trending Social Media Tools (August 2020)

Top Time-Saving Tools

Top Instagram Growth Tools

Top Twitter Growth Tools

Top TikTok Growth Tools

By Chris Makara

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

What Is Instagram Branded Content?

By JENN HERMAN

Sourced from Social Media Examiner

Instagram Shops, IGTV, and Pinned Comments are just a few recent updates to help small businesses market their products and services.

MAKING CONTENT DISCOVERABLE VIA THE “SHOPS TAB”

MAXIMIZING YOUR IGTV EFFORTS

PINNING POST COMMENTS

By Erica Perry

Editorial and Programming Manager, Crowdcentric

Sourced from Social Media Week

9 of the most important Instagram trends in 2020

1. Brands and influencers reckon with racial inequality

2. Instagram goes Live

3. Creators can now make money directly on Instagram

4. Instagram Shops set brands up to cash in on conversions

5. Shopping and advertising get AI-powered upgrades

6. Instagram Guides accompany the rise of “info-social”

7. Values take center stage

8. TikTok, Twitter, and Giphy invade Instagram

By Katie Sehl

Sourced from Hootsuite

1. Hashtagsforlikes

2. Kicksta

3. Ingramer

4. SocialCaptain

5. Upleap

6. Instavast

7. Agorapulse

Common mistakes

Wrapping up

By Anna Medina

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

Social media advertising allows businesses to reach users during their prime time and in pleasant, entertaining and engaging ways. Find out which platform suits your needs.

Overview: What is social advertising?

Benefits of advertising on social media

1. Audiences can be precisely targeted

2. Social ads address “awareness”

3. Everything is measurable

4. Social advertising is scalable