For most entrepreneurs and business leaders, social media marketing is an important tool. You need to be forward thinking and have a forward-looking approach towards it. However, having worked with many small businesses, we notice that many of them don’t take enough advantage of this amazing marketing channel. This is why, we have developed an easy social media strategy for startups, which everyone can implement.
Why should my business have a social media strategy?
The first and most obvious reason to do social media marketing is to avoid your startup to fail. You might have heard that, in the 3rd quarter of 2017, Facebook has reached 2+ billion monthly active users while Instagram reached 700 million, Snapchat 350 million, Twitter320 million, LinkedIn 500 million and Pinterest 150 million average monthly active users. Most marketers will tell you that a social media strategy is crucial for your business. The issue is that many entrepreneurs do not have a technical background and don’t see marketing or growth hacking as a serious tool. Social Media Marketing is the top channel to get your business discovered. Whether you are building a business from scratch or you have a more advanced business, social media needs to be part of your marketing strategy. Don’t miss out this opportunity. Luce Media can help with all your Social Media Marketing needs in McKinney.
Which social media channels should your startup use?
Each social media platform has its particularities, and your target might be using Facebook but not Instagram, Twitter or SnapChat. It is fundamental for you to know your target to choose which social media channel you should be using. To know more about social media, you can check social media demographics.
Social media marketing in McKinney has a huge potential to drive traffic, get new leads and increase sales. There are many ways to promote your content on social media. But, with a lack of understanding and without effective tools and tactics, you’ll struggle to get results.
Using social media marketing in McKinney, TX will improve your brand recognition, make your voice heard and connect you with your potential users. Word-of-mouth is known as being the most effective channel to get new customers. You have to picture social media as word-of-mouth on steroids.
Having a social media strategy for your business will make you connect with potential and current users in a more personal way. If you do it right, you will build brand loyalty and create more leads and sales.
Define your message and identity
To reach the right audience, you should have a relevant identity. If you are in the banking industry, have a professional profile picture and post about FinTech, BlockChain or funding; if you are in the sports industry, talk about sports. This might seem obvious to most, but a lot of people use social media in the wrong way and don’t deliver the right message, image or branding.
If you want a successful Instagram marketing strategy, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or else, it’s key that you define your identity.
Engage and interact with your potential or existing users
You need to interact by following potential users on social media, posting interesting and relevant content, sending discounts, reposting content from others, answering your followers or commenting on their posts. Social Media Marketing is all about creating a relationship with the user. You should also be interacting and joining conversations on social media with people who may need your products or services. Staying active on social media will allow you to get direct answers and feedbacks about your startup, idea or concept. Luce Media provides Digital Media Consulting in McKinney, TX.
Create unique content for your startup
This takes time, but content creation should be part of your social media strategy. It could be blog posts, visuals or infographics. By creating your own content, you will deliver a message and build your startup branding. The goal is to interact with your audience and see their reactions about your content. You can apply growth hacking to your social media strategy in order to A/B test what you post and according to the data or feedback you get, you can optimize your content. The content itself should be relevant to your business industry but it could also be informative, funny, shocking depending on what your goal is. There are many content marketing tactics you can get inspiration from to create perfect content. Remember that you should find the right spot between what you want to tell and what your readers are looking for.
Should your business pay for social media ads?
It really depends on what stage your business is at. However, we love A/B Testing and I believe that you should A/B test social media ads for your business, even if it is as little as $ 1 / day. This will help you understand how social media ads work, as well as train you to understanding data and even give you some insights about your users that you wouldn’t have known without testing. Testing, tracking, and measuring is key for your business’s social media strategy.
What you learned about implementing a social media strategy for your startup
Having a social media strategy is essential. If you want to outperform your competitors, you need to create better content than they do, engage with your community, etc. You learned that social media is a must for your business to get your first users’ feedback and also to get traction. There are top social media marketing tips out there, don’t hesitate to apply what you learn. On social media, you need to curate great content, create and share compelling content as well as being personal and talking directly to potential users or customers.
Social media is a great marketing channel and needs to be A/B tested in order to take the best from it. You have to know that social media is only 1 marketing channel your business can use and you can define a marketing strategy around it. Social media should be part of a bigger picture and is an essential element of inbound marketing. At Luce Media, we are experts in the area of Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing. We are kind of social media hackers if you want. We will A/B test different social media, grow your community with our growth hacking methods, improve your business’s brand image, interact with your users, analyze the data, get users feedback; all this in order to accompany your product development growth and success.
If your business needs help with social media marketing in McKinney, TX., please call us at (469) 907-1057. Luce Media has deep expertise in Digital Marketing, B2B Marketing, Internet Marketing and is a well-established Digital Media Consultant in McKinney, TX.
http://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-1-300x73.png00Mark Toneyhttp://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-1-300x73.pngMark Toney2018-07-17 03:39:482018-08-17 17:47:25Social Media Marketing for New Businesses
Have you checked out your competitor on Instagram recently and noticed how well their posts are performing? Almost every post is flooded with engagement. They’re getting hundreds of likes and comments, while you struggle to get even a handful of people to leave a comment. And when you do get comments, they rarely go beyond generic “This looks great” or a random smiley face emoji.
What magical formula are they using to get Instagram engagement? Is there a secret code you’re missing out on? Are they really that much better at Instagram marketing than you? You want to crack their Instagram strategy and make it work for you, but you’re not sure where to start.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here are 12 things your competitors do to increase Instagram engagement, that you might be overlooking.
1. Actually Engage
We’re starting this list off easy. To drive more engagement from your followers, you need to interact with them. Social media isn’t a one-way street. If you want to build an engaged audience, you need to acknowledge your followers. Remember, every comment you get means someone took the time to stop, look at your post and share their thoughts. After all that, why wouldn’t you respond?
If you want to build up engagement, know that it takes time and you need to start conversations on posts other than your own. Asking questions, responding to comments and replying to Stories are some of the few ways you can engage more with your audience.
As your account starts to grow and you get more comments, you might not be able to respond to everyone. But that doesn’t mean you should give up entirely.
You can still Like comments or try to reply to as many as you can. Ted Chin creates captivating edited images and videos. Despite having hundreds of comments on each post, he still takes the time to engage with his followers as much as possible through quick replies and plenty of emojis.
The takeaway is whether you get three comments per post or 300, take the time to reply, and you’ll have a much easier time getting Instagram engagement.
2. Duplicate Your Best-Performing Posts
What works for you might not work for someone else. Take a look at your past months’ best-performing posts. Is there a common theme among your top performers? Perhaps the photos are bright and have blue tones. Or maybe the camera angle is from the side instead of above.
Here’s an example of a brand that found what works with their audience and integrated it into their strategy.
Camber Coffee is a coffee roaster. But every few posts, they share something unrelated to coffee such as landscape shots or nature-related photos. This might seem like an odd strategy for a food and drink company, but they’ve consistently posted like this long enough that it’s become part of their brand.
3. Post Instagram Stories With Call-to-Action
With verified Instagram accounts, you might have the opportunity to add links in your Instagram Stories. If you don’t have the option yet, you can always refer to the link in your bio or a different CTA.
Creating CTAs in your Stories prompts your fans to take notice of the product and gives them the opportunity to learn more. It increases engagement on your Stories and potentially increases clicks to your website.
Anthropologie uploaded images designed explicitly for the Stories format and themed it around pants. Each product had a See More link at the bottom that people could instantly go to for purchase.
More laid back in their approach, Framebridge used Stories to promote a blog post. It was linked for each part of the Story.
Furthermore, the Stories were timed with an Instagram post that also featured Pepper.
4. Promote Across Networks
It goes without saying that the audience for your Facebook Page might not be the same as the audience on your Instagram account. Chances are that some of your Facebook audience is on Instagram, but they don’t know that you exist there yet. Don’t be afraid to sprinkle some cross-network promotional posts to encourage more followers.
Dwell used a Facebook post to not just promote a home tour, but also to mention that more details could be found in their Instagram Stories. Instead of the usual “Follow our Instagram account!”, they offered something more enticing for their audience. For their existing Instagram fans, the live tour was still exciting content.
5. Be Strategic With Instagram Ads
When Facebook added Instagram to their Ads Manager, new targeting possibilities opened up. Sure, you can boost a post or promote your account, but you could also be more nuanced and strategic about it.
Take advantage of the customization by using retargeting. For instance, if you visit a shoe company like Toms and begin to interact with their posts, it’s possible that you’ll start to see other shoe companies being advertised to you.
After clicking on a few shoe ads, we found the above being advertised to us without ever engaging directly with the company.
Custom audiences can come from many sources. But to start, you can use:
Your newsletter lists
People who have visited your store
Those who purchased from your website
People who’ve engaged with your Facebook or Instagram accounts
From there, utilizing the lookalike audience feature, you can find even more people similar to any of the above audiences.
Getting familiar with all the Instagram advertising options can put you ahead of your competitors. And with retargeting, you can improve conversions and lower your ad costs.
6. Incorporate Videos
Grab someone’s attention with auto-playing videos and boost the post with ad dollars. Mediakix found that sponsored videos received three times more engagement than photos. So if you’re not using Instagram videos yet, it’s time to get started.
Instead of using a photo of someone texting, SFMOMA used a fun video to show off a new project. The video prompted over 24k views and 98 comments, most of which were people tagging friends.
Salt & Straw used a video to give a behind-the-scenes look at a new ice cream flavor. With over 262k views and 88 comments, it was a successful way to promote a new product and build engagement.
7. Partner with Creatives
Much like an influencer marketing program, partnering with creatives for your product or services lineup can give both parties a larger audience. It can be something as small as swag or as large as a mural in your cafe.
Away partnered with photographer Gray Malin for a limited-edition set of luggage colors. The luggage lining used is one of his photographs. Naturally, the product promotion involved Instagram posts, dedicated hashtags, and in-store signage.
When you partner up with a person or brand that has an active audience, some of their Instagram engagement tends to rub off on your own company. Their audience will visit your page to comment and like the posts that feature the influencer.
8. Give Sneak Peeks & Hints
Followers love being let in on a secret. Even if they’re public posts, giving sneak peeks and hints of new releases makes the audience think they’re part of a special group. It entices them to guess at what’s going on and encourages them to revisit the profile to see if something has been announced.
Elle-May gave her followers a preview of a new women’s section in the 1924us store. The previews resulted in dozens of comments from her followers and less than a week later, multiple items were already sold out.
9. Write Witty Captions
Along with an eye-catching photo, creating a witty or uniquely branded voice on Instagram can help you stand out from everyone else. Create a company voice that people want to hear from and you’ll find that they can’t help but strike up conversations with you.
Here’s an example of how Max Milla used the caption to play on the location name. It’s fun, short and engaging.
10. Time Your Posts
Find out when the best time to post is for you. You want to post when most of your followers are online and engaging on the app. Even with the best photo and wittiest caption, you could still miss out on engagement if you’re posting at the wrong hour.
We did some research into the best times to post on social media, and here’s what we found for Instagram.
Instagram business accounts offer analytics that tells you when your followers are most active.
Use this information to schedule out your posts so you can spend your time engaging.
11. Encourage Customer & Employee Posts
Utilize branded hashtags to help you organize user-generated content. If you engage on these hashtags and incorporate a UGC strategy, more people will take notice and begin using the hashtags, too.
Your employees can also be your strongest advocates. Their accounts give a more personal, unfiltered perspective of the company. Remember, people like feeling as if they’re in a secret club. If you reshare from your employees, you’re offering perspectives that your brand normally wouldn’t offer.
Bon Appetit frequently reposts from their readers and their staffers. Each has their own hashtags: #BAstaff and #bareaders. The hashtags give their audience a quick guide on who originally posted the content and encourages a community vibe in their page.
12. Analyze Your Competitors
Here’s something you might not have thought about. But there’s a good chance your competitors are analyzing your brand and others in your industry. So why not do the same? Don’t feel like manually gathering up a bunch of data about your competitors one by one?
If they’re doing something interesting on their page, perhaps you could try it out on yours if it fits within your brand.
Should You Buy Instagram Engagement?
When you’re at a point of desperation and just can’t seem to get anything going, you might get tempted to buy Instagram engagement to give the appearance that you have an active following. You probably already know our response to this, but you should never buy Instagram likes or engagement of any kind.
On the surface, they probably seem like helpful engagement tools, but the reality is they do more harm than good. For one, you’re deceiving your real audience which is never a good idea. On top of that, Instagram has been cracking down on accounts that rely on bots and automation. For instance, your posts might not show up for the hashtags you use or worse case scenario, you could get banned altogether.
Leave the fake engagement alone and focus on building a real audience if you want long-term success.
Which Instagram Engagement Metrics Should You Measure?
By liking posts and leaving thoughtful comments—not self-promotional, but substantive—brands can use Instagram to cultivate a stronger community and drive brand awareness. Users can quantify and qualify their engagement efforts using Instagram’s data.
Give Your Instagram Engagement a Boost
Getting Instagram engagement is more important than ever. Engagement is one of the metrics Instagram uses to determine where your content shows up in your followers’ feeds. When your followers consistently comment and like your posts, Instagram sees it as a sign that they want to see more of your content. As a result, your posts will become prioritized in their feed.
So if you want to get more eyes on your content and build your audience, use the tips above to get more engagement on Instagram.
Luce Media has extensive experience in all things related to Instagram – creative posts, Instagram Stories, Instagram Ads, and analytics. Contact us today for a Free analysis on your Instagram efforts and how they may be improved.
This post first appeared on Sprout Social at this location – https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-engagement/
https://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Instagram-pic.jpg22183328Mark Toneyhttp://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-1-300x73.pngMark Toney2018-03-23 19:48:062018-07-17 03:22:41Things Your Competitors Do to Increase Instagram Engagement
Each social media platform has its particularities, and your target might be using Facebook but not Instagram, Twitter or SnapChat. It is fundamental for you to know your target to choose which social media channel you should be using. To know more about social media, you can check social media demographics.
Having a social media strategy is essential. If you want to outperform your competitors, you need to create better content than they do, engage with your community, etc. You learned that social media is a must for your business to get your first users’ feedback and also to get traction. There are top social media marketing tips out there, don’t hesitate to apply what you learn. On social media, you need to curate great content, create and share compelling content as well as being personal and talking directly to potential users or customers.
