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5 Tips that Will Help You Get Noticed on Instagram

by Imani Rodriguez
written by Imani Rodriguez

In this social media frenzy world, it has become increasingly important for users to gain recognition. Whether the purpose lies in boosting individual self-esteem, earning a profit or simply showcasing your life with family and friends, you want to get noticed. The default mode of human nature is to be socially active and accept others. The age of digitization has credited Instagram as the second most popular application, making it the perfect social media platform for global engagement.

With a focus on content marketing and audience building, Instagram is flooded with self-made icons, celebrities, professionals, entrepreneur, etc. Worldwide brands are gaining infinite interaction rates per follower, 25 million active business users and 2 million advertisers utilize the Instagram Strategy. If you want the billions of monthly active users to become aware of you browse through our comprehensive guide. So, without further ado, let’s dig in: 

Create your Own Unique Aesthetic

The Insta-Aesthetic is the most crucial component of your entire profile and social media success. One cannot overlook the core of Instagram as it demands captivating audio, video, and image-sharing content. To tantalize visual sensibilities you need to embrace an eye-catching and loyalty-retaining approach.

Firstly, a general brand or personal aesthetic needs to be established on your account. Consistency is the key to victory. For those more fashion or trend oriented, you should opt for clean, sleek and eclectic imagery. Those looking to promote a type of lifestyle or showcase a specific account type, then, brighter, wholesome and target appropriate content should be posted regularly to satisfy onlookers.

High-quality photography and high-standard online concepts will entice an audience and force them to stay tuned. The type of aesthetic you choose must be authentic, directly relevant to you and difficult to imitate. To do so you need to avoid fluctuating between the type of template you follow, pick uniform filters that don’t break the flow of your newsfeed and make your profile public so that people surf your page and get hooked.

Exploit Instagram Tools

You can develop a one-of-a-kind identifier by strategically adopting the effective hashtagging technique. Capturing a huge demographic revolves around intelligent captions and hashtags. Witty, sharp, humorous, relatable and relevant descriptions. The best way to demonstrate your personality and feel connected to others is to adopt a utilitarian method. IGTV, Live Sessions, slogans, tags, location tags, etc.

Staying on point with descriptive and informative quotes that aren’t too wordy or complicated embodies the spirit of a fast-paced virtual life. This methodology accelerates recognition, share, views, and likes. Unfortunately, Instagram has placed an upper limit of 30 hashtags so you need to be smart and creative for your final post. Make your own personalized identifier, address trending topics and try not to be too controversial.

Get Technical

There’s a science behind Instagram Triumph and it involves a bit of brainpower. To make your profiles noticeable you need to consistently upload genuine posts and avoid posting spam. Moreover, your posts need to be cleverly timed. That means the greatest quantity of initial engagement should be coordinated when the target audience is most active. A lot of free applications and websites can help you get this equation just right. Cultural, Social and Political triggers directed at segmented audiences can be highly appealing.

To enhance our Social Media presence, use Calls-to-Action (CTA) that is encouraging, motivating and inspiring. Finally, the Instagram algorithm can detect automated services. You will get penalized as you violate the Instagram policy, you will get “shadow-banned” that’ll hurt your reputation, the content will be less discoverable and paid, illegitimate engagement is easily caught by potential followers.

Cultivating social presence requires augmenting your overall promotion performance. It requires dedicated time and effort, but you’ll see it pay off in the form of increasing followers, likes and appreciation.

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Bar Marketing Ideas in 2019

by Brandon Lee
written by Brandon Lee

If you think that your bar can rely on foot traffic and local prominence to stay in business, then you best think again. According to Wordstream, 75% of consumers prefer to use search engines to find local businesses. This means that your prospects won’t likely drive around or consult a phonebook if they want to find a bar in their area.

They’ll open up their laptop (or use their smartphone) to type in local bars in their area, and then they’ll most likely visit one of the top bars on Google Maps. What happens if your bar isn’t even on Google Maps? What happens if you don’t have an online presence at all.

You could lose your customers to your competitors who already have an established digital presence, so you should be mindful to employ effective marketing tactics to keep your bar afloat in 2019. This post will highlight a few bar marketing ideas you can try in 2019.

1.) Pin Yourself on Google Maps

Consumers use Google Maps more than ever to locate local businesses in their area, but often times getting your business featured on this platform isn’t enough. If you have just claimed your Google My Business profile, it can be difficult to woo your prospects from bars that may be at the top of Google Maps.

Fortunately, Google’s new promoted pins allow any local business to promote themselves with an eye-catching purple pin on Google Maps. With a promoted pin, you can even advertise a special deal that can drive foot traffic and increase your sales just from your online presence.

2.) Post Instagram Stories

If you’re running a modern-day bar, chances are that you already have an Instagram profile. However, if you’re just posting pictures, then you’re missing out on all of the benefits Instagram has to offer. Try posting Instagram stories to interact with and engage your followers. Instagram stories are fun and informal and will give your business a chance to take a break from mundane and corporate messaging.

3.) Use Chatbots

With new innovations, people become more accustomed to simplicity. That’s just a fancy way of saying that consumers are pretty lazy. Even if your website possesses all of your business’ information, many of your prospects won’t even take the time to read it. That’s because they want the answers to their questions immediately. Use chatbots to interact with your prospects immediately so they can receive vital information about your bar. This will help to drive foot traffic and increase the user experience of your website.

4.) Partner Up!

A strategic partnership is an age-old business tactic, but it’s still wildly effective today. By establishing a complementary (not a competitive) partnership with another local business, you can receive a free promotion in exchange for the same. For example, if you run a sports bar in a ski town, you can promote a ski life discount on your digital menu in exchange for a few Facebook posts advertising your happy hour cocktails.

Again, it’s important to partner with businesses that won’t compromise your own business in any way. Nonetheless, this sort of partnership won’t cost you a dime, and you’ll receive attention from a new audience.

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Instagram

2019 Top 3 Instagram Growth Tips To Boost Your Business

by Edward Kost
written by Edward Kost

With over 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram is one of the most popular social network applications available today.

Sadly, many business owners are unaware of how to leverage its colossal marketing potential to their advantage.

We’ve broken down a highly effective 2019 Instagram growth strategy into 3 easy to follow methods you can start implementing today to boost your customer base.

And the best part?

It’s 100% free!

1.) Correctly set up your business profile for success

Solidify your foundation, and your structure will stand the test of time. Start by ensuring your Instagram profile is set up correctly.

Switch to Instagram for business.

Switching to a business profile not only provides your customers with more options to contact you but it will also offer you detailed post engagement analytics.

Switching to a business profile is super simple.

Step 1: Click on settings in your Instagram profile

Step 2: Under “Account settings” Select “Switch to Business Profile”

 

f1 182x300 - 2019 Top 3 Instagram Growth Tips To Boost Your Business

Image Credit: Animatron

Write a stellar bio

The bio is the short description on your Instagram account page beneath your Instagram tag.

You are only limited to 150 characters so it’s important you make the most of it.

Your bio should:

  • Convey your brand’s personality
  • Provide a clear call to action
  • Clearly inform your customers of your products and services.

After reading your bio, your potential customers should have no questions about who you are and what you are offering.

Emoticons work really well to provide visual appeal and structure your information:

F2 195x300 - 2019 Top 3 Instagram Growth Tips To Boost Your Business

Image Credit: @ohjoyco

From the bio above we can effortlessly gather the following information:

  • Oh Joy + co is a home décor shop
  • The brand has a very positive and cheerful personality – “a shop full of happy and beautiful things…”
  • The email of the shop is shop@ohjoy.com
  • The web address of the shop is ohjoy.com

The information above isn’t presented as an ugly paragraph, but rather, neatly segregated with relevant emoticons.

2.) Use effective Instagram hashtags

Hashtags, though difficult to read at times #areimportanttoimplementcorrectly.

Think of hashtags as a means for Instagram to correctly identify and categorize your posts. The correct implementation of hashtags will ensure your posts are discovered by your potential customers.

But how many hashtags should you use for each post?

The max you can use is 30. There are some Instagram users that suggest only 7 hashtags and others that suggest to keep it In the low 20’s.

The number of hashtags you use is up to you and depends on the level of engagement you are capable of achieving with your chosen number.

We’ll talk more about tracking engagement in point 3 of this post.

Try to keep your hashtags as close to your business offering as possible and avoid using overly popular and broad hashtags such as #love or #joy.

For example, if you are a web design company and you are publishing a web design tip post, the hashtag #webdesigntip would be more relevant than #marketing

Searchers of the hashtag #webdesigntip are searching for just that – tips on web design, whereas it is difficult to gauge the intent of the searchers of the hashtag #marketing.

Satisfying searcher intent should always be the motivation behind your choice of hashtags

3.) Write Engaging captions

It is important to remember that Instagram is an application centered around user interaction. The Instagram algorithm therefore highly regards content that promotes user engagement (likes, comments, shares and friend tags).

Any business has the capability of creating content that generates user interaction, it just takes a little creativity.

Identify a pain point. Ask questions, Be Human.

Your caption should resonate with your potential customer’s pain points and stimulate positive human emotion – humor is a great choice, but for some businesses, (like counselors) empathy may be a better option.

The fingerprint of human authorship in your captions will make your business more appealing over the robotic emotionless captions your competitors may be implementing.

Finally, always aim to end your captions with a relevant question, to get your customers talking to you.

Here is a great example:

Let’s say you are an accountant and you have taken a photo of the mountain of receipts your client has given you.

In your caption, you could mention how funny it was seeing your client enter your office with a cereal box full of receipts and that you are transitioning them to a clean cloud-based paperless receipting system.

You could then conclude by asking readers to share the funny places they keep their receipts in.

Do you see how such a caption would make your business much more appealing over a competing accountant that simply writes “Switching client to a paperless system. No more stress of paper”?

The level of engagement you achieve through your posts can easily be tracked. You can then use this information to help tweak your marketing efforts (change the number or choices of hashtags used etc).

To see your engagement analytics, follow the following process:

Insights > Content > Posts > See All

This will filter your posts by the number of engagements.

Final thoughts

There are currently hundreds of thousands, if not millions of your potential customers currently using Instagram. Getting your business page in front of them is just a simple matter of mixing a little effort, with a little creativity, and a little human touch.

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Instagram Will Now Show You When Your Friends are Online

by Rolando Herrera
written by Rolando Herrera

When using any chat apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, the ability to see whether your friends are online at that point of time is important; it helps you determine whether or not the person will reply immediately. However, until now, Instagram didn’t offer their users this functionality.

All of this changed on Thursday, and Instagram will now begin showing users exactly when their friends are online, or when they were last active on the platform, in the DM (Direct Messages) option. This function is available to all Android and iOS users.

In the Instagram Direct section, app users will now be able to see a green dot right next to their friend’s profile picture indicating that the person is online. This green dot indicator will also show up when users are sharing posts via DM. It is similar to the one that shows up on Messenger which, like Instagram, is a social media platform owned by Facebook.

The Background

The Direct Messages feature gained a significant amount of popularity on the app after Instagram Stories was introduced. Whenever users share a Daily Story and friends post their replies, it’s shared as a Direct Message. With the latest update, the company hopes to make Instagram messaging a seamless experience for users.

Instagram’s Update– Salient Features

Let’s take a closer look at what this update includes:

  • Not all of your followers would be able to see when you are online on the Instagram platform.
  • When a user is active on Instagram, only friends and followers that they have shared Direct Messages with will see the green dot listed next to their name, and vice-versa.
  • Aside from the green dot that shows up when a user is online, the platform will also show time stamps and another recent activity statuses such as ‘Active Yesterday’ and ‘Active 25m ago’.
  • The good news is that users aren’t compelled to use the new feature. They have the option to hide their online status. All they have to do is go into the app settings and uncheck the ‘Show Activity Status’ option.

Connecting over the content that has been posted and DMing friends and followers are far more interesting when users have visibility of whether they are online or not. This new function allows this visibility and gives Instagram users the opportunity to have more real-time conversations. As mentioned earlier, the system also provides users the control to hide their active status if required.

What Else is New?

Just last week with its updated 55.0.0.0.33 alpha Android version, Instagram had introduced new mobile optimization support for adaptive icons which allow the app to make adjustments to the icon size based on the device it’s being viewed on.

In addition, the grapevine has it that Instagram is looking to make it much easier for general users on the platform to apply for a blue tick against their profiles. The objective is to help ease the overall verification process for users.

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What’s Up with WhatsApp?

by Nishad Jiwa
written by Nishad Jiwa

WhatsApp recently expanded its capabilities with a myriad of new features. In fact, the popular audio – video – chat platform now offers group calling for up to four people. With WhatsApp joining Instagram under the Facebook umbrella, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new features at the recent F8 Developer Conference in May. This is an annual event that highlights the current and burgeoning trends in the social media universe.

Starting a Group Call

Android and iOS app users can download the new updates for WhatsApp. In fact, here are the essentials of taking advantage of this new multi-person call platform:

  • To start a group call, simply start a usual one-on-one video call.
  • Tap the “add participant” button in the top right of the screen.
  • This allows you to add up to 4 contacts for a social, business or personal A/V conference call.
  • Group calls are encrypted with end-to-end encryption for optimal and secure communications.

While video calling is already available on WhatsApp, the newest feature eliminates the need of having multiple windows open for individual calls. Similarly, it rivals existing video chat apps like Facetime, while creating new ways for people to connect privately with close friends and business associates. With group calling, you can even create video-call groups for your clubs, sports teams, and social rosters.

WhatsApp Continues to Expand

Like Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp has morphed into one of the largest social media networks in the world. With the recent announcement about the group calling feature, Mark Zuckerberg stated that people had already used about 2 billion minutes of video calling on the app alone. This is an indication that WhatsApp is rapidly becoming the go-to-video calling source for millions of users across the world. However, the main reason why people prefer the app is due to is privacy and encryption protocols. The app also continues to challenge Facebook, which has seen its share of recent privacy scandals.

Here are some more reasons why WhatsApp is slated to become the premier online and mobile communications platform in the months and years ahead:

  • WhatsApp is now the world’s largest fully-encrypted communications network.
  • The app features a convenient online version for users that prefer desktop and laptop access.
  • WhatsApp has enhanced its support for Instagram and Facebook video playback.
  • The app continues to allow YouTube videos to play natively – without forwarding users to the YouTube app on their mobile, wireless and digital devices.

Other Features

In addition to the group calling, the app will also be offering support for stickers in the coming months. This will allow third-party developers to offer more creative ways to enjoy the app. Similarly, WhatsApp will also roll out new group administrator functions. This allows existing group admins to revoke rights from other participants if needed. You will simply access the user in “Group Info”, while selecting the “Dismiss As Admin” features. However, you can use the same portal to make users admins in your private group chats.

With WhatsApp continuing to grow at alarming rates, it’s imperative to add this crucial program to your social media networks. While social in nature, the app is proving to be an effective tool for business and client communications as well. So much so that more people downloaded WhatsApp in the last six months than Skype and other popular audio-video-chat interfaces.

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Small Business Checklist – Three Ways to Improve Rankings

by Nishad Jiwa
written by Nishad Jiwa

Search engine optimization (SEO) is never easy for any company. With so many metrics involved, it can be truly challenging to secure measurable results for any new or existing brand. Similarly, digital marketing can be complicated for clients with limited time, money and resources. This is why it’s pivotal to have a seasoned and reputable company handle all your online advertising needs.  For small to medium-sized businesses, there are several ways to improve your visibility and Google rankings. In fact, here are some key points to address on any business SEO checklist:

  • What to address in your online SEO marketing campaign?
  • Why is SEO important for any new or existing company?
  • Which tools will help you secure higher visibility, page rankings, and client – customer patronage?
  • How much time commitment is involved for improving my business rankings and industry ratings?

If these are some of the questions you have, it’s important to know that great organic (natural) rankings do not happen overnight. In fact, it’s a comprehensive, cohesive and ongoing process that requires you to have patience across the board. Similarly, a sound and effective SEO package reflect all the current and burgeoning trends. This includes mobile optimization for pages, along with social media integration and captivating and compelling content. With this in mind, here are three ways that have been proven to improve rankings for small and mid-sized businesses across the nation.

1. Understand What your Customers are Looking For

Before you venture into SEO, you need to know what your customers are looking for. For example specific products, tailor-made services, or quick responses to customer questions and concerns. Analyzing and assessing your small business needs is a specialty of any seasoned and reputable SEO agency. In fact, they can provide timely solutions for the following:

  • Optimizing your websites and blogs to reflect the latest changes in Google algorithms. Creating gripping websites that attract and engage your geo-specific or core customer bases.
  • Incorporating mobile optimization to secure higher visibility on Google Maps, local search results, and business listings. This is a crucial way to build a strong mobile presence while promoting your brands to new clients and consumers.
  • Ensuring your sites, blogs and online stores are fully compatible with desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. SEO experts take into account page loading times, which is important in reducing bounce rates and keeping potential customers on your pages longer.
  • Making sure your content is easy to scan and digest with industry-specific keywords, relevant text, and social media links (embedded and visible).
  • Promoting your business on Google, Yahoo, Yelp, Bing, and all social – mobile – and business platforms and directories.

2. Fix your Technical Issues

Another important aspect of small business SEO is fixing technical issues. While you may a great looking website, an SEO audit is the only way to ensure complete optimization across your pages. In fact, the way you present your pages are just as important as your business offerings and content. With this in mind, here are some of the technical issues SEO professionals address and resolve:

  • Speed and page download times. Long gone are the days of lengthy content and flash intros that would take forever to load.
  • Checking for duplicate content on the Web. This is important since duplicate content can seriously impact your rankings, ratings, and web-traffic.
  • Repairing broken links to ensure customers link back to the products, services, and information they seek. Broken links can prompt users and visitors to leave your sites and go elsewhere. Similarly, Google can penalize your pages for promoting misleading, false, or incorrect content and links.
  • Making sure all your pages are fully optimized for SEO. This allows search engines to properly crawl and index you web-pages on their listings and user searches.
  • Enhancing the strong areas of your pages, while improving the weaker and non-optimized areas of your website.

3. Optimizing your Pages

SEO on-page optimization is much more than just placing strategic keywords on pages. In fact, your content must also be streamlined, centralized and properly structured across your pages. Similarly, you must have keywords (preferably long-tailed) that effectively target your specific customer and client bases. With SEO content specialists, you are able to tap into important ranking signals and non-spammy keywords and links. Local experts will also optimize the following for optimal results:

  • Website, blog and online store titles and sub-titles.
  • Meta descriptions with back-links to your sites and pages. The correct form of preview content that can be accessed by users – by simply hovering their computer mouses over the content and links.
  • Body content – easy to scan content that is precise, concise and gets your messages across to users.

These are some of the ways to improve your small-business visibility on Google. However, you need a dedicated SEO company to cover all bases and take your brands to new heights in any industry.

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Instagram

Grow Your Audience on Instagram with Better Engagements

by Nishad Jiwa
written by Nishad Jiwa

Instagram continues to grow by leaps and bounds. In fact, this popular social media platform is now a permanent staple in online marketing and advertising. So much so that Instagram is seeing increased numbers of users building strong presences across the network. However, the platform is not seeing as many ‘follows’ for users as Facebook and Twitter.

With this in mind, it can take some time to build your audience at such a gradual rate. In fact, as popular as Instagram is – some business owners are wondering if the platform is worth their time at all. If you too are struggling with growing your company and brands on the network, here are three ways to increase visibility and stronger engagements.

1. Engage your Audience

Social media is about responding to follower comments and concerns. However, if you fail to do this each day – chances are your users will get bored and stop interacting altogether. While Instagram enables you to showcase your business visually, it is still a social platform at the end of the day. With this in mind, here are some key components of engaging your audiences and building brand visibility and awareness on the platform:

  • Respond to any and all comments – even if they are negative reviews. Be professional, courteous and stay committed to resolving customer questions and concerns.
  • Devote your time and energy into posting each day, but also be active and communicate with your followers and clients.
  • Trigger conversations by posting special sales, discounts and upcoming brand announcements. Provide insightful comments that extend your brands’ reach, while targeting your audiences with relevant links to your pages, blogs and stores.

2. Stay Consistent

Like Facebook and Twitter, consistency is the key to greater brand visibility and customer patronage. Hire a leading SEO agency to manage all your social media, including creating high-quality and relevant content for your Instagram marketing and online campaigns.

Do not be fooled by sudden spikes in followers due to a certain post or campaign. You need to invest more in your content to maintain, preserve and expand your business across the social media networks. Here are some essentials of remaining relevant and consistent on Instagram:

  • Create a posting schedule for your Instagram social media calendar. Strategize what and when you will post, and monitor your follows, mentions and feedback at all times.
  • With every content post, try sticking to a unified visual theme. For example: you can allocate certain posts to reflect your new products and services. Your future posts can discuss your business growth and achievements, along with how you helped customers get exactly what they were looking for.
  • Even with rigid posting schedules, it’s still good to be creative and exciting. In fact, surprise your viewers to keep things fresh, current and engaging.

3. Interact with Other Accounts

As a business owner, you need to reach out to other Instagram accounts in your niche. This can create collaborations, which enable you to build business relationships across the board. No matter the industry or sector you serve, the best way to grow your business is by growing your relationships with other owners and followers.

Instagram is not just relegated to building new friendships and rekindling old ones. It is rapidly becoming a central hub for business marketing – just like Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Make a conscious effort to expand your network by building commercial bridges across several industries. Remember, the more people your business is connected to – the more it can grow and attract new customers and clients from all over the globe.

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Tagging and the Importance of Hashtags

by Rolando Herrera
written by Rolando Herrera

Social Media Marketing is billowing and there are a number of things that can be done to make it work wonders for your business- hashtags are one of them. It is one of the best ways of promoting a service or product via social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+. For hashtag novices who can’t seem to figure out what function the “#” sign has when its added to a tweet or a video post-read on…

What is #?

On Twitter, the # sign (hashtag) turns a word/group of words that are suffixed to it, into a searchable-link. This helps you track discussion topics and organize content, based on those specific words. For Instance, if you wanted to post something about a current Wimbledon match, you would then include #Wimbledon in your tweet & join that particular conversation. Hashtags should ideally be short & contain natural keywords/phrases to improve their visibility in online rankings.

Why Hashtags Matter

When you click on a hashtag, you are able to view all posts which mention that particular subject- all in real-time!! Take a look at why they are important:

  • Hashtags are a very powerful research tool & website developers who are interested in SEO can easily view trending news on social networking websites
  • They are also very important when any breaking news has to be spread and are commonly used to get people talking and discussing major global events
  • A hashtag can also be used to promote an event for your business and helps attract more potential customers to your website. It’s a great way of promoting a new product launch or when you want to announce a sale, offer or discount
  • Many websites also give you the functionality to track the performance of the hashtags you have added. It helps you analyze which keywords/phrases attracted traffic to your site and upped your sales

Aspects to Focus On

As you can see, for any online marketer or small business owner, hashtags can be the magic wand you wave over the Internet to magnetize customers to your business. But there are some things you must remember while using them- when you add a hashtag to a post on any social networking site, try to incorporate an external web-link into the content, to your site/blog. This helps people link to more information about your brand or company. Incorporate short, simple, impactful and trending phrases and use hashtags to create a strong customer base.

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Social Media is Here: Embrace It

by Rolando Herrera
written by Rolando Herrera

Technology is a part of the daily fabric of today. What once seemed to be a fad, with beginnings in chat rooms, hubs, and then later on places like MySpace, has evolved into a trend that’s integrated itself within the conveniences that came with its evolution.

We are now through digital networks able to connect to family, friends, and acquaintances anywhere in the world. So why not take advantage of this connection to create and grow a business?

What is a business but the exchange between one person and another?

It’s therefore important for businesses to see that no matter what industry they’re in, the personalization of their brand through a digital network will help them connect with their audience.

It’s important to be aware of the multiple social networks and to capitalize on their success to capitalize on all the rewards available.

Below are a couple of statistics:

Facebook

  • 1.15+ Billion Users
  • 345 Million Users Check their account more than 5 times a day

Twitter

  • 500+ Million Users
  • 400 Million Tweets sent out per day

Google +

  • 500+ Million Users
  • The +1 button is served more than 5 billion times per day

LinkedIn

  • 238+ Million Users
  • Over 1 Billion LinkedIn Endorsements

Instagram

  • 130+ Million Users
  • 5 Million photos uploaded every day

Pinterest

  • 70+ Million Users
  • More than 69% of users are female

Other Important Numbers

  • 1 Billion Unique Monthly Visitors on Youtube
  • 4.2 billion people use mobile device to access social media sites
  • Social Media is The Top Internet Activity: Average American spends more than 37 minutes a day on social media more than any other internet activity including email.
  • Social media generates almost double the marketing leads of trade show, telemarketing, daily mail, or PPC according to digital insights

There are many benefits to Social Media like:

  • Lead Generation
  • Higher Search Ranking
  • Business Partnerships
  • Reduction in Marketing Expenses
  • More Sales
  • Analytics on your Audience

Just because Social Media is effective and easier to build a business on doesn’t make it easy to manage consistently. However, there are many tools that your Social Media Marketing Company can provide you with that can facilitate the persona and interaction of your business.

Make the most out of technology, get on this trend and capitalize on the possibilities.

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Instagram Software To Help You (Finally) Love Instagram Posting

by Edward Kost
written by Edward Kost

Instagram was created to solely be a mobile application, which means you are unable to edit and manage your posts from your computer.

Thankfully, some software solutions have been developed to help you manage and automate all of your Instagram posts straight from your…wait for it… computer!

So before you upgrade your phone’s internal storage to accommodate all of your future coffee cup art posts, consider the top 3 Instagram software options we have reviewed that will make your ‘Instagram-ing’ MUCH easier.

These software options are not listed in any particular order

Hopper HQ 

Hopper HQ allows you to create, schedule and publish posts across multiple Instagram accounts.

This is a great option to have for Instagram marketers and also for entrepreneurs with multiple Instagram pages.

What’s particularly great about this software is that it gives you the option of designing and editing your posts within the actual platform.

You have the option of adding frames, text overlays and adjusting picture settings.

The software integrates with multiple photo storage solutions so you can upload and edit photos from Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

The software offers an excellent clear overview of all your schedules posts by week or month.

If you want to change the order of scheduled posts, it’s as easy as dragging the posts over to a different day or week.

The ability to write captions for future posts means that you no longer need to waste time writing a caption for each post as you publish it – so no more messy copying and pasting hashtags saved in your phone notes!

If you are looking for a complete end to end post designer AND scheduler, Hopper HQ is a definite win!

Pricing starts at $16 per month per user (billed yearly). They also offer a 14-day free trial.

Later

The software Later allows you to plan an entire week’s worth of Instagram posts in only 20 minutes!

The speed of post scheduling is a result of their highly responsive and intuitive platform.

I particularly like their feature of easily rearranging the photos in your profile by just clicking and dragging them over to your preferred position.

Though the software does provide in-depth analytics to the performance of your posts, it does not offer a post design feature like Hopper HQ.

Without an inbuilt post design feature, you would be forced to use 3rd party software such as Canva to design your Instagram posts and then import them into Later.

A unique feature to Later is the solution they offer to add external links to each of your Instagram posts.

It works like this:

Once a user clicks on the unique link in your bio, they are taken to a landing page that replicates your Instagram feed.

You can then add links to each of your posts to whatever external webpage you like.

This feature does not seem like much of a unique offering as it could easily be replicated by designing your e-commerce store in a similar tiled fashion like your Instagram feed and then adding your e-commerce web link to your bio.

The benefit of this workaround is that you would not have to worry about any landing page ‘middle-man.’

Price starts at $9 per month for an individual profile.

Buffer

Buffer is a comprehensive social management solution for multiple social platforms – including Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, twitter, etc.

You can add comments to each of your posts that will be displayed throughout all social media platforms when published.

Its analytics dashboard provides invaluable engagement data such as likes, retweets, and replies.

I love its collaboration feature which allows you to invite multiple team members to edit and manage posts.

Though this software also lacks an inbuilt post design feature, it does offer an extension for your browser that allows you to push posts into the platform straight from your browser.

Posts can also be scheduled via the Buffer mobile application (available on both android and apple devices)

Pricing starts at $15 which includes the management of 8 social media accounts.

Keep in mind that Instagram, as well as other social media applications, are predicated on creating a REAL engaging community between creators and followers.

So though it is a great thing to take advantage of software solutions that automate your daily mundane tasks, never pursue too high a level of automation at the expense of genuine people interaction.

Keep it real, genuinely engage with your followers, make them feel special and leave the boring admin to the robots.

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