Undoubtedly, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most receptive social media platforms for B2B. However, other platforms are also making their space in the field of digital marketing. They are, to name a few, Instagram, Pinterest, Evernote, Tumblr, Viber, YouTube, WeChat, Reddit, WhatsApp, and many others. All these are preferred for various marketing activities. Dig further to get handy tips on Instagram marketing.
Instagram Marketing Tips – a booming social media platform
Instagram (Instant Photo + Telegram) is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. Instagram is a great social media platform for online marketing since it is more popular on mobile. On the other hand, mobile is gaining huge toehold day by day by both users and search engines.
Instagram has a dedicated base of users and it provides better engagement as compared to other platforms. Also, put together a guide you the Instagram algorithm for the most possible followers and post engagement.
Audit term is not just restricted to the finance and accounting domain. It applies in each those sectors where functions have been carried out with the help of strategic decision and dedicated investments. Digital marketing is also not an exception here. As a digital marketer, with the help of social media audit, you need to evaluate each of the digital marketing activities to judge its performance and handle its areas of improvements.
Based on the results, corrective actions need to be taken from time to time to enhance performance and sustain competition. Along with search engine optimisation and pay-per-click, social media marketing is equally important to spread brand awareness and boost online presence. A social media audit evaluates the effectiveness and ROI of social media marketing activities.
What is a Social Media Audit?
Social media audit is a key ingredient of a social media marketing plan. It evaluates how well your current social media performance is, how it works for you, and how better you can explore it for business benefits.
Why you need Social Media Audit?
For any business that has a social media presence on one or multiple networks needs to conduct personal social media audit from time to time.
The fundamental purpose is:
to ensure that each of your social media profiles is on brand and functioning correctly
to make sure that you’re using the right channels for your brand
to identify and eliminate any inactive or abandoned accounts
to analyse how relevant your social media activities are on your marketing goals
A social media audit reflects a complete picture of your activities in the form of metrics such as engagement, impressions, likes, retweets, shares, etc. The contemporary approach also focuses on interactions, sentiments from engaged users, response rates, and response times.
How to Conduct a Social Media Audit?
Have you ever wondered why you are a member of various LinkedIn groups but not getting any engagement? You do share your blogs and posts in different Facebook groups but unable to churn likes on it? You have made your pinned post both aesthetic and valuable in the context of content but failed to earn impressions? Are you consistent with your posts and posts mix across all channels? Well, you can unpack all such answers if you conduct a social media audit with a correct approach.
You need to have analytics in place for all platforms. Make a discipline to maintain monthly post schedule. At the end of the month, when you pull your monthly data from analytics, you will get a list of each of the post along with the posted date, time, permalink, reach, engagement, likes, retweet/repost, share, mention, impression, etc.
As a social media marketer, you should focus on engagement and impression of your tweets. Then analyse top 10 or 20 posts based on the highest reach, engagement, and impression. Once you have your list of top posts ready, it will be easy for you to interpret what type of content is working well for you. You will also come to know the best time to post. Also, it will pave the smooth way to strengthen your A/B testing regarding timing, content, and images.
Focus points while conducting Social Media Audit
1. Analyse the quality of your engagements
How great is it to see so many unread notifications daily morning in each of your social networks? Yes, it gives immense satisfaction to realise that your profile and social presence have come into notice of others and they have preferred to interact with you.
However, have you ever verified those accounts that have liked, shared or ping you in one or other way? If they are from similar industry and have similar interest, keep them engaged and build online rapport with them. Vice-versa, if they have by chance come across your feed and do not relate to your industry, you no need to invest a dedicated time in keeping them active. Because one or other day they will either discontinue following you or stop posting on your feed. The reason is the difference between theirs and your areas of interest and goals of social media.
2. Identify and eliminate branding gaps
Whatever social media audit results you get based on the analysis, divide it into two areas from your social media marketing goals perspective, strong areas and areas of improvements. Have a consistent focus on your strengths and convert your weak points into manageable areas.
Your social media presence should spread your brand awareness. Each of your social profile should speak about your brand and if required, keep making improvements as and when required.
Try to grab the attention of your target audience with the help of posting curated content, tagging them, mentioning them, sharing relevant posts, and keeping the important post as a pinned post.
3. Keep a note of personal messages
Not everyone will post on your feed directly. Some may tag you, or some may send you a private message. Remember not all direct messages are auto-generated. Most of the social media marketers are aware of the annoyance that DM creates.
It is very likely that your DM is knocking the door of opportunities for you. Never ignore them. If found irrelevant, you may delay replying but do read them! Similarly, keep sending personalised messages to thank, congratulate or acknowledge the things which matter to you.
4. Review your posts
This though sounds pretty obvious is of utmost importance. Your social media profile is the face of your business. Neither you can fake anything there, nor can you post anything on your feed that can harm your brand image.
Study your audience and their tastes; accordingly, tailor your content to post. If they like visual content, have a more focus on videos, podcasts, infographics and images with little text.
Keep a note of your most engaged posts and analyse them to figure out what was the high point in it that has benefited you well. Similarly, have a look at all those posts that were right from your point of view but somehow failed to perform well on social networks. Compare the results and draw conclusions.
Social media is a very handy place for communication and brand promotion. So, carefully and enthusiastically keep walking ahead in your journey.
Here are some tips for social media audit for the TWO most popular platforms which we believe: Twitter and Facebook.QL Tech Tip: Make the use of social media automation tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Post Planner, and others to schedule your posts so that you can reach the maximum audience when they are online. It will give you good results in your analytics.
Twitter Audit
Twitter is the most loved platform for users. It’s 140 character limit makes it more interesting. Furthermore, you can add images, links and Infographics to make it more interactive. Consequently, these attempts increase your post reach and network.According to Internet Live Stats, there are some 6,000 tweets sent per second on average, which translates to over 350,000 tweets per minute or about 500 million tweets per day.
Your social media audit for the Twitter platform should focus on:
Likes on your posts
Shares of your posts that can drive traffic to your website
Comments and interactions on your posts
Clicks and opens of your links and images
Video views
Number of followers
are they increasing, decreasing, or fluctuating consistency
are they relevant or fake
are they active on their feed
Number of followings – how many relevant people are you following
are you following the people that belong to your industry
are you following your dedicated followers
how many of your following falls under fake identities
what is the social authority of your following
what is the engagement level with and from following
Post reach
Number of mentions
Social authority
Twitteraudit.com tool is a handy tool that finds out your fake followers on Twitter
Twitter Analytics is the very first place to get an analysis of your monthly performance. You can also make use of various FREE and paid tools available. To name a few, they are:
Sprout social
Twitonomy
Twitter Counter
Moz Followerwonk
Tweepi
Fanpage Karma will analyse your and your competitors’ accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest.
Facebook Audit
According to the recent article of dreamgrow.com, Facebook has retained its dominant position among all social networking sites.
Considering the traffic Facebook can bring to your website, one should make the most use of it as a social media marketing platform. However, it is a crowded place, so you need to be active with your marketing skills. Paid advertisements work very well in case of Facebook. The Facebook audit will reveal how good your posts and ads are performing and what content suits best in front of what demography.
Facebook page audit is aimed to ensure that you are optimising your marketing efforts on Facebook. Like Twitter, Facebook also provides analytics on the same lines i.e. engagement, reach, impression, and others. Your social media audit for the Facebook Page should focus on:
Audience
are we posting in front of the right audience
are we posting the content which our audience wants
are we replying to each of our message and comments on our posts
Content
are we enough flexible in posting our content with respect to taste and timings of our target audience
what type of content is working well and why
what is the content mix we are posting and is it suffice based on competition and industry standards
Brand promotion
does our Facebook page, profile picture, and cover image provides all information which a user needs to know
are you reviewing your thumbnails which are in display for your audience
are we presenting our brand consistently
are we confusing our readers and users with brand identity since we have multiple Facebook pages for multiple goals
Facebook Analytics is the very first place to get an analysis of your monthly performance. Furthermore, there are various FREE and paid tools available, like:
QL Tech Tip: To boost engagement on Facebook, maximise the use of tab apps.
Closing thoughts
Here, we have tried to facilitate our readers by providing the most popular tools for Twitter Audit and Facebook Audit which every social media marketer wants. The importance of Social Media is undeniable, and so as social media marketing. And what’s the use of such marketing activities which we don’t measure to analyse the importance and effectiveness. Hence, social media audit is crucial. The topic of social media audit has very broad coverage. One blog is not enough to conclude on any results. Keep checking our resources section, there are many FREE resources lined up for you which will aid you in conducting your social media audit in line with your marketing goals.
Social media – who doesn’t know about it? In this digital tech savvy world, social media has gained a massive toehold. Various social media platforms are explored in-depth for digital marketing. No doubt, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most receptive social platforms for business; however, various platforms, including Instagram, are preferred for various marketing activities; they are:
Facebook dominates among all social media marketing platforms as a source of social traffic and sales.
Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. The name Instagram is derived from a combination of “Instant Photo” and “Telegram.” Instagram, an incredible social media platform for sharing pictures, was launched in the Spring Season of 2010. In a less than a decade, this platform has grown into a powerful social media force, not to be overlooked.
Since 2012, Instagram is owned by Facebook. This acquisition of Instagram by Facebook shows where digital marketing trends are heading. Since both social media platforms are owned by the same owner, you can easily connect these two to boost your digital marketing strategies.
In the recent past, Instagram has literally competed extremely well with the dominant top four platforms viz. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Instagram has more than 500 million users.
Instagram is a great platform for online marketing since it is more popular on mobile; moreover, mobile is gaining huge traction day by day by both users and search engines.
People are prioritizing visual content over plain, and hence, Instagram is considered as one of the most effective social media marketing platforms for the coming days. As a business owner, you should use Instagram to market your products and services. Apart from product images, you can also share videos. Its ‘LIVE recording and sharing’ feature are getting way popular bit by bit.
Explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform
Social media management starts with the base of your followers and followings. To boost your Instagram marketing, first of all, you need to boost your followers on a constant and stable basis. The more people are aware of your brand, the greater your chances are to potentially reach your target audience.
Let’s run through the tips and tactics on how to explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform to make your brand more popular.
1. Hashtags – use unique, crisp, meaningful, and attractive
Hashtags are not only important for Twitter; they also play a prominent role on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and google plus.
According to Dominique Jackson, the beauty of hashtags for Instagram is they make your content discoverable and increase your chances of engagement.
It’s a big way of how users can find you through their mobile Instagram searches. As compared to Twitter, where you’re not restricted by character count. You can include a few tags in your posts to get connected. While deciding on the hashtag for branding, it is advisable to create brand-specific hashtags. Try to keep it as unique and crisp as possible.
Make usage of both sorts of hashtags; brand-specific hashtags and community-specific hashtags. Brand hashtags help you to popularize your brand and community hashtags help you to become more discoverable.
Try multiple variants of hashtags such as brand-specific hashtags, general hashtags, and trending hashtags, to get noticed in searches.
Examples of brand specific hashtags are:
#PutACanOnIt—Red Bull
#ShareaCoke—Coca Cola
#SpeakBeautiful – Dove
#TweetFromTheSeat—Charmin
#OreoHorrorStories—Oreo
#WantAnR8—Audi
An ideal general hashtag should be prepared with two words over a single word to make it meaningful e.g. rather than #QL, #AskQL is a better hashtag.
2. Emojis – use the right Emojis to keep your audience engaged
In any sort of online communication, Emojis is the best substitute for the absence of facial expression, tonal inflection, and body language.
Nearly 50 per cent of all captions and comments on Instagram now have an emoji or two.
The same source has mentioned that posts with Emojis bring 17% higher interaction rates on Instagram.
Based on the fact that 80% of smartphone users regularly use Emojis in their daily communication, their use has been quoted as the highest growing ‘language’ in some of the countries across the globe. Worldwide brands are obviously energized and enthusiastic to cash on this new form of communication.
3. Interaction – consistently interact with your followers
Once you get follower/s, do not shy away to stay engaged. Constantly post impressive content which your followers find relevant to their interest and business. Avoid throwing random posts, i.e. once in a week or ten in a go, as far as possible. At least, twice a day posting is requisite. Once your followers start increasing, you can start posting three to four times a day. Consistency matters most!
According to Anthony Carbone, “If you stick to a niche and show authenticity and passion in your posts, you will find a strong following”
The more people you can dynamically involve and persuade to comment on your content (images/videos), the better for you. Since it will inculcate the interest for others who want to contribute or comment on your content as well.
A good example of how to stay engaged with your customers is well set by Starbucks. It is considered as one of the top brands on Instagram. Starbucks often appreciates their followers/customers by giving a shout-out with cool images. This is how they had updated their Facebook cover image using Instagram post.
4. Networking – create a positive community
Once you will have an active profile, you will surely start getting followers of your niche. But the main question here is retention! You need to retain them as your dedicated followers.
This is, in fact, the most important, most tricky, and most significant matter for any social media account. You need to build a network of your domain and keep them engaged. Interact with them, share their posts, give opinion/comments on their posts, ask them relevant questions, reply to their questions, and keep having all such sort of communication. In addition, stay away from controversial posts. It can badly impact your brand value. Build a vast network of your industry and create a positive community through your posts and engagement.
Follow your followers and work hard to turn your following into followers.
5. Amount of information – do not bore your audience with information overload
No doubt consistency is inevitable, but if it lacks harmony and relevancy of content, it results in either spamming or information overload. Keep your frequency correct and consistent. Rather than preaching them, engage with them. It’s better to ask sometimes, they should feel being valued. Dig out meaningful interaction from them.
The ideal proportion of posts based on followers suggested by industry experts are:
6. Free tools – make the most use of Instagram marketing tools that are free
Instagram also provides free analytics tools for business profiles; prudently and sensibly make the most use of them to market your products and services.
For example, “insights”, an analytical tool, provides you access to engagement data. If your account is initially signed up as a personal account for your business, do get switched to a business profile. That’s how you can cash advantage of the free tools that businesses use to track the shape of their brand on Instagram. ‘Insights’ assists you understand your audience, provides you data on posts with most impressions, engagements, and shares. Ultimately, you will conclude which posts are effective and which ones are not working well with your audience.
With SocialBakers, you can get a FREE report on the most engaged Instagram posts. If your Instagram followers are below 25,000, you can use Simply Measured to check your highly popularized posts.
Alternatively, there are many other scheduling tools available. With the help of tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Autogrammer, and others post your content when your audiences are online and earn more engagement.
7. Promotion – utilize cross-posting function
As a business, one normally stays active and present on all possible platforms. Now, practically speaking, not all your Twitter followers are your LinkedIn buddies and not all your Instagram followers know about your presence on Google Plus.
Here, to expand your relevant reach and knock your target audience from all possible angles, you need to do cross-promotion of your own posts.
A research conducted by Harvard Business School reported that retailers using cross-media marketing are more profitable than those that use only one channel for promotion.
Invite your followers from other networks to visit your Instagram profile and build your network. Whatever posts get better engagement on Twitter or Facebook, repost them on Instagram too and vice-versa.
8. Content – repurpose content from other related sources
As stated in earlier paragraphs, effective and successful Instagram marketing
needs consistent posts related to your products and services. It is well obvious that every time coming up with creative and engaging posts is not as easy as it seems. That’s where repurposing content or curating content offers a hand of help.
As per Amanda DiSilvestro, Content repurposing is your hidden online marketing gem.
It’s absolutely fine to use other content which is relevant to your products and services provided you either have tagged or mentioned the original poster. Tagging is the best way, you need to give the credit to the original creator, and that’s how it becomes a completely ethical marketing practice and does not fall under the black clouds of plagiarism.
Tagging provides you with another major benefit of engagement. You may receive like or report from the person whom you have tagged and your post can easily reach to their audience. You need to ensure that the posts which you wither repurpose or curate are relevant to your followers.
9. Engage with influencers – you need them!!
According to KISSmetrics, 70% of Instagram users have already looked up various brands on the platform and actually want to consume their content
Here comes the power of Instagram influencers in the picture. Instagram beats all other massive social networks like Facebook and Twitter when it comes to influencer marketing. This is because the other platforms share information whereas Instagram is about sharing experiences with the help of visual content.
Your content shared, acknowledged, or praised by any influencer can embark a real positive image on your followers.
To reach on the peak in no time, we suggest you make use of the tool, Revfluence. The Revfluence platform enables you to create original content with influential content creators that can drive new customers and followers for your brand.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
If you have an online business, why can’t you have a strong social media presence too? Social media marketing via Instagram can assist you to achieve your targeted business goals with much of the ease.
Instagram has very dedicated users, who often use it daily. It provides a great social media marketing platform to reach potential customers across the world. Use Instagram extensively and appropriately, and grow bigger!
Automation – keeping things simple, and making them faster
We are now in 2017, and the era of Social Media automation is truly upon us. Today, we witness a number of scheduling tools for various automation tasks. Such tasks include automation of e-mail responses, automation in industries, automation in banking services – in a nutshell, and many others. A pretty big chunk of the average person’s day is dependent on automation and automated processes. Automation, in itself, is an invaluable tool to boost productivity.
Social media – Killer Shark or a Marketing Runway?
Ask anyone born post the ’90s where the real dynamism is. A great majority of them will tell you it is social media. However, over two-thirds of marketing executives cringe at the very mention of social media. This is because of the overload of social media. Its intrinsic ease of access is, strangely enough, killing marketing. However, on the other hand, it is also enabling a rebirth for marketing, in the form of social media marketing.
Let us move towards what exactly social media marketing is. Today we see many small businesses, libraries, and stores purely run based on their social media presence. Moreover, nowadays, we see companies use various channels of social networking to create a self-sustained marketing model for themselves. The more the employees post on social media, the more potential gains the business stands to receive.
The use of social media is not quite universal—but it is getting close. 70% of the U.S. population now has at least one social networking profile, while more than half use two or more social networks. According to CMO survey, the number of global social media users is projected to grow from 2.1 billion in 2015 to 2.5 billion by 2018.
The following pie describes the impact of Social Media Marketing on businesses
A dose of insight:
Social media marketing now plays almost as large a role in purchasing decisions as does TV, and 57% of consumers say they’re influenced to think more highly of business after seeing positive comments or praise online.“
Still, some fascinating contradictions remain. Even though businesses today use social media for marketing and those efforts are expected to increase, many marketers and top executives alike find the business value difficult to quantify through this process. Today, as social media is speeding along at a lightning pace, marketing executives are huffing and puffing along in its wake. Now, it is time for marketers to catch up.
That is where the brainchild of the two – social media marketing and marketing automation – comes in. Say hello to ‘social media automation’!
When the worlds of social media and marketing automation hit into one, a union of convenience and connectivity is achieved. A broad bandwidth of experts in this domain does seem to concur with this fact. According to a recent study by Marketo, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing efforts across channels.
Five rules for social media automation
Today, a major amount of our time is mostly spent staring at screens. It seems that this trend is here to stay for long. The devices and their screens are getting more and more sophisticated as well. Keeping that in mind, here is the nitty-gritty of social media automation.
1)Post When Your Audience is up and surfing
The chances of getting higher traffic to your posts are obviously higher when your audience is online. Each business (and social network) is unique. The only way to know the best time to post is to dig into analytics. Once you are well versed with the knowledge of perfect posting times, it becomes easier for you to make data-driven decisions. Rather than throwing posts out hoping for an outcome, better you predict it. Based on our research, we highly recommend a tool called True Social Metrics if you need to understand when and how your audience is spending their time on the web.
Once you know your best time to post, you can then use a tool like Post Planner or Sprout Social – both are excellent social media management tools. Usage of these tools can help you plan or schedule your posts at specific intervals.
When content is added to a unique plan, it is then scheduled based on the pre-determined times. It can also help you sort out the best posting times depending on the type of content you are creating. No huffing, no puffing anymore! Just let your system do all the hard work, while you get some downtime!
The buffer is another important social media tool used to optimize social updates. which conveniently helps in scheduling posts on various other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and others. It also helps in spreading scheduled posts out to publish throughout the day and engagement time.
There you go, an easy way to save a whole lot of time and effort! What are you waiting for, then?
2)Automate to drive it home: Evergreen Content
Your evergreen content is your bread and butter. This aspect of your website never gets old. In simple words, evergreen content is material that is considered fresh and exciting to your readers. It adds value to your audiences, no matter when it is posted. A tool we found to be very nifty when it comes to posting evergreen content is Tailwind. Pin your freshly churned content – be it a blog, a page, an article or a quote. Let it keep showing up on your social media pages.
3) Set up automation meetings between your heroes: multiple social networks
Perhaps another fundamental feature of automation in general, extending even to social media automation is inter-connectivity. As a marketer, you can set up a linked list of operations based on triggers. By combining one social media network with another, you can achieve greater returns and attention to your posts or websites. With a tool like IFTTT (If This Then That) you can share your Instagram post over Twitter for a wider band of users to see.
4) Set up notifications -to keep you up to speed!
Do you know that annoying pop-up which keeps appearing on your smartphone? Well, a similar feature can be implemented here as well! Except, who has the time to interact, respond, and stay engaged all the time? Timing is essence here. To stay up to speed, you need to initiate automated notifications. One such useful tool we came across is Twitonomy. Twitonomy helps you manage your mentions over Twitter, but more than that – you can see your most influential, engaged, and active users (provided you shell out the bucks for a paid version). The beauty is in its ease of use. Find a mention, click on the tweet, respond, follow, or even add to a list. Within a matter of seconds, you can interact with your audience and stay in the conversation.
This graph depicts that an average of 68% of social media fan posts is ignored. Here is where you can get ahead of the rest. Just by being responsive and responsible, all without your own precious time being wasted!
TweetDeck is a successful and totally free desktop web app. It is the best fit for those who need to manage varied accounts, follow specific hashtags, respond to lots of distinct users, and see precisely what’s being tweeted in real-time.
On the other hand, Followerwonk is used to explore and grow your social network. It does deep digging into Twitter analytics and let you know who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet? Which tweet gets more fame?
5) Don’t let it do all your work!
It is easy to get carried away these days, isn’t it? Well, automation is a time-saver, perhaps a lifesaver for so many of you marketers! However, having a portion of your work automated doesn’t mean you kick back and grab a breather. Indeed, social media management tools are surely here to stay, but only because they free up your schedule from monotonous work. Use this time wisely to interact with your customers, to spread your content, and to build relationships!
Finally, since you do spend most of your time on social media anyway, why not utilize that to improve your productivity – as funny as that sounds? That is why, for growing businesses, developing a social presence through automation is perhaps a leap of faith they can afford.
