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Category Archives: Instagram marketing
How To Deal With Social Media When On Holidays
If you’re a small business owner, you may be going away at some stage over the summer. As wonderful as summer holidays are, they also create a degree of trepidation as regards your business.
Finding the correct balance between escaping work when away and also maintaining some degree of control and ensuring everything is working well can be hard. As you full well know, social media can take hours and needs regular attention. However, you will still want a break of some sort – so how best to partially automate social media when away to ensure things are ticking over – we take a look.
Quality not Quantity
The key to getting some time away from social is down to first deciding on a quality not quantity philosophy. One great piece whether created or shared by you is worth ten average pieces in the social media sphere.
Content
Finding good content for curation and channelling it to one place can be easily achieved with a little organisation prior to you going away. The likes of Feedly and Trap.it among others are great feeds for finding worthy content.
XYDO is also a good app for personal curation and allows you to find personalised content that is relevant to your business and worthy of sharing with your audiences. Set a couple of these apps up before you head for warmer climes and finding content worthy of sharing should be a lot easier.
Automation
There are a number of fantastic tools out there that can make for excellent additions and are fantastic for automation purposes. Our own favourite Bufferapp allows you to line up those sharing prospects for the times that best suit your own specific social media accounts. A few minutes each day or every few days when away topping up your Buffer can work wonders when you’re away. It saves you time, effort and ensure you maintain a good relationship with followers when away from the desk.
Apps such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck also provide you with plenty of benefits too. These are ideal for more generic tweets and shares and allow you to schedule times that suit you. These shares can be prepared for as far in advance as you like, though they will obviously smell of automation to some degree.
However, we find at mysocialagency that apps like Hootsuite allow you the opportunity to monitor other people’s content, check up on analytics and monitor conversations – also beneficial when away.
Discipline
On a lot of levels, the most important thing is discipline. How many of us begin our social media task, whether at work or at home, and then end up being distracted and performing numerous other tasks? Setting a time limit for how long or how much management you’re going to do each day and sticking to it limits the time and stress involved and ensures you don’t feel bad for not spending more time on task.
It’s nice to get away from it all and these apps will help you almost do so completely by increasing efficiency and lowering time spent in front of the screen. What are your tips for keeping your social media ticking over when away?
Martin Sheen is a lover of technology. He also loves getting away from the screen and traveling the world.
How to Measure Social Media Success
Social media is a rapidly growing platform for marketers. Those who don’t embrace it are facing an increasing need to do so or fear being left behind. It has the opportunities for new, start-up brands or services to get the exposure their business needs, and it can equally serve older established brands by allowing more personal interaction with customers and clients.
However, with so much *noise* on many social media platforms, how do you know if your voice is going unheard? How do you know if you efforts are actually paying off? In essence, how do you measure social media success? It is essential to be able to directly trace any business garnered from social media, otherwise all your efforts might be in vain and essentially become one big time sink.
Below are five effective ways at measuring social media success (or failure).
1. Use Analytics
Analytics is essential for all websites and businesses regardless of social media. By being able to see a breakdown of your website’s traffic and interactions, and determining what percentage of that comes from social media, you will start to get a decent insight into the value of your social media efforts.
2. Tracking IDs
Like Analytics, using tracking IDs for any links you include on your social media marketing will give a very clear sign of success. Sites like bit.ly or goo.gl are the easiest way to shorten links and receive stats on how many clicks each link received.
3. Special Offers
If you use a special offer for your business, such as a coupon, a prize give-away or similar, and only promote that via social media, you will be able to directly trace any sign-ups or visits to those offers.
4. Finding Out Your Bottom Line
At the end of the day, social media efforts are usually for one purpose, increasing sales. If your bottom line sales do not alter much despite starting a new social media campaign (or pausing one temporarily), then chances are, your efforts are not necessary.
5. Significance
How significant a part in your business plan is social media? Some businesses rely almost solely on social media to get traffic, sales, and business, while for others, social media represents only a small aspect of business versus a large amount of time needed. If you can work out how well your business functions with or without social media, you will be able to analyse whether or not it is successful.
I find that newer businesses tend to rely more heavily on social media to get themselves heard, whereas the larger, established businesses have social accounts just as token gestures, almost like they are there to keep up appearances.
Conclusion
Depending on the needs of your business, there are different effective ways at measuring social media success.
If you are purely interested in traffic and generating interest, then tracking IDs and Analytics are going to be a simple, clear way of determining success, while large, already established businesses might have to do more testing and tweaking in order to find out the concluding results. In the end, it comes down to testing and tracking.
Our guest blogger: Naomi Vega is a freelance writer with interest in mobile marketing. She has more than five years experience in mobile and text marketing industry. She is currently working as a freelance writer for Trumpia.
How You Can Use Instagram For Marketing
It takes more than just having an Instagram account to market products on the site. There’s a lot more to it than just posting a bunch of photos, too. You need to have a full blown strategy that works and that is effective. So before you start blindly posting pictures of your products and taking over your followers’ feeds, make sure that you have a good grasp of what types of photos are the best for marketing purposes. The following are some great ways to use your photos for marketing your company on Instagram.
Think of the Environment of the Photos
Not everyone has a product that works in every photo or that could really be called interesting. If you find that no matter how you shoot the picture you’re just not putting out photos that have that ‘wow factor’, then you need to rethink the photo shoot.
It may be that the item is boring but your background is boring, too. You can really boost a photo by showing an action shot of the item with interesting people using or wearing it. A great location could also be a way to turn out a more interesting photo. If your office is by the beach, try a setting with waves crashing in the background. If you live in the desert, use some cactus with a beautiful sunset to make the photo phenomenal, for example.
Show the End Result
Many people in the service industry, like beautician, car detailers and other industries do a wonderful thing for their customers. If your company is in this type of industry then you should post photos that show what you started with and how it turned out. Post a photo of the hair before you cut and styled it and then after. You can do the same with the nasty dirty car that you made look brand new. This is a great marketing technique that has been used for years and has been very effective. You might also benefit from paying for instagram followers but remember they won’t give you interaction, only a boost to your numbers.
Don’t Forget Geotags
You may not know this but you can actually geotag your photos so your fans can see your location. Even if you have a website, there will be local people who you want to visit your brick and mortar store. This is a great forum to get more people to your store or physical location by offering discounts for those who say they saw your photo contest on Instagram. You could also offer a discount to the first two or three people who show up and says they saw your ad campaign on the site. Geotagging is a great way to get your physical location out to a wide group of people that live in your physical area.
Instagram is a great marketing tool if you use it effectively. Don’t forget to make your photos interesting to all your followers by showing your products in interesting locations or by showing before and after pictures that highlight your service. Don’t forget to geotag your pictures so you can get more people to your physical location.
What other tips would you add?
Our guest blogger info:
Susan Darling loves Instagram and writing tips and hints to help others learn how to get the most from it when using it for business or for pleasure. She posts photos of nature scenes and flowers and also has an IG account for her business.