What a Profitable Social Media Marketing Strategy Looks Like (with 4 Real Examples)

We’ve come a long way in the last few years. Back in 2011, the biggest question that people were asking was if social was profitable. Since then, industry conversation has moved from ‘will I see an ROI’ to ‘how to measure social ROI’ and the tools that can help.

Yet, only 15% marketers have proven the impact of social media quantitatively. If you aren’t part of that 15% there could be two potential hitches – you aren’t working with a sound strategy, or you aren’t measuring the right metrics.

[ A sound strategy = targeted content + the right channels]

To eliminate the first possibility, let us study profitable social media content marketing strategies and compare them to our own.

1. ShipServ

Who’d have thought that a maritime e-commerce company would seize the social media opportunity and win at it? Shipping companies seem unlikely to be seeking information on social media, but ShipServ saw this differently. Since no one in their industry had conquered the social space, they moved in full force and established thought leadership in it.

ShipServ supplies software to support shipping companies and connects the industry’s vendors to buyers. In 2008, they were struggling with a host of marketing problems. They were selling technology to people who didn’t consider it necessary and on a limited budget. Creating that change in perception would be a huge task.

They began by studying their audience’s content consumption. They identified keyword themes to work with and planned a quarterly content and SEO strategy. A series of original content was promoted through a host of social media channels, driving traffic back to the main site. The channels they used included their blog, newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and podcasts. They also ran a white-paper series and created a LinkedIn group.

The result?

400% more leads

150% more contact to lead conversions

3 month break even on the social media investment

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Study your audience. One thing that people forget to do is to study how an audience consumes content, where exactly the look for it and what they look for.

2) Consider your content competition when building out a social strategy. One of the social media marketing mistakes that people make is blind-sighting content competition. ShipServ boomed on social because none of its competitors were on it yet. You need to identify a platform that has your audience and isn’t already monopolized by your competition. You need to share content with a unique value proposition.

2. Lyfe Kitchen

For a food industry product, social media marketing may seem like the clear-cut solution. But Lyfe Kitchen is B2B, a restaurant and grocery product line. A few years ago, this company wanted to increase word of mouth on social media and rapidly expand into new supermarkets. What should their approach have been?

The company ran influencer marketing programs, but with a slightly unconventional approach. They chose influencers who belonged to their high-potential target audience across industries – health and fitness, sports, the fashion world, and moms. In addition to this effort, the company also did tastings for a national sports company and magazine editors. The sports management company loved the product so much that they convinced their clients (sports celebs) to get on board. The editors wrote articles and talked about the product on social media.

The result?

Their product distribution grew from 400 to 1400 stores within a few months of the effort. The expansion was a result of direct requests to stock the product.

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Tap into every vertical of your target audience. Don’t restrict yourself to one target demographic or group. Consider all possible consumers when creating your social media content or planning a marketing strategy.

This company considered influencers across so many verticals, from health and fitness to the fashion industry. They even included influential moms, who may have been instrumental in getting distribution to local supermarkets.

2) Look beyond the conventional. Don’t tunnel vision your marketing strategy. If you think laterally you may be able to accomplish more than just your major objective.

For instance, Lyfe Kitchen could have sent free samples to influencers or interacted with them separately. Turning the activity into an event provided a unique PR opportunity, and to make the Lyfe Kitchen experience more memorable and exciting for potential influencers.

3. Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel is a chain of American retail stores that sell home furnishings. Wait, so why did they create the ultimate wedding contest? Well, they did it to drive gift registry creation and engage new consumers in the process of it.

Participants were required to create a gift registry with Crate and Barrel to enter the contest (Note: A requirement like this one to enter a contest often introduces legal complexities). After verification of the registry, the participants could move on to the next stage – submission of a photograph and some answers to questions. The contest was then judged by public voting and a panel to pick the winner of a $100,000 fantasy wedding.

The contest was promoted on the company’s website, on-site in their stores and by advertisement.

The result?

Over 17,000 applicants, each with a minimum registry value of $2,000 (a net value of $34 million)

Direct access and engagement with the participants wedding guests, potential new customers

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Craft marketing strategies that target both current customers, and new customers through them.

Crate and Barrel could have simply worked with the contest applicants, but the registry angle increased their reach exponentially (Please consider legal complexities before creating a campaign of this sort).

The simplest version of this tactic is to share the contest post to enter (which will give you access to your audience’s connections).

2) Make your unique value proposition exciting. A dream wedding of that value was certain to attract large application numbers. It was also compelling enough to make applicants want to get through stage one – the registry.

4. IBM

The popularity of ad blockers tells us this – people are growing immune to advertisement. In this market scenario, how do you reach your target audience? How do make someone willing to consume your content?

At IBM, it is all about people. The focus isn’t on the corporate blog or Twitter id, but the people who make the company. IBM has over 17,000 internal blogs, and a 100,000 active bloggers running that community. People are more likely to listen to other people than they are to a faceless brand.

IBM trains its social champions. They call themselves IBMers, and they are given the tools necessary to build a powerful social media presence. Thousands of people identify themselves as IBMers on Twitter and LinkedIn. I was surprised to see that the company culture remains with employees even when they leave IBM.

The result?

Over $100 million in crowdfunding

Over 40% in gross profit revenues

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Invest in people. Employees, partners, well-wishers. There are over 40 studies to prove that they are more influential than official brand accounts on social media.

2) Use an employee advocacy platform to help your employees share your content on social. Build a powerful employee advocacy program that can achieve incredible reach and drive impact for your brand.

How to Be Profitable While Marketing on Social Media

So far, we have broken down profitable social media marketing strategies for insights. Now let us explore the basic framework that a social strategy requires to be profitable. Here five tips to help you implement a solid and returning social media marketing strategy.

1. Create awareness

2, Blog

3. Focus on the right platform

4. Collect and use audience data

5. Engage with your audience

1. Create awareness

Irrespective of your industry, brand awareness should be on your plan. Your target audience should be aware of the need for your product/service, what concerns of theirs it addresses and why they should choose your brand over others. Ensure that your business is known for something.

Begin by building a solid social media presence.

Organize your blog

Optimize your social media accounts

Participate in the relevant social media communities

Social media success depends on the value you create. You have to give away substantial value to succeed in a market where so much of it is already free. Do it HubSpot style, help potential clients achieve results by sharing free insights from your experience. Several companies see returns from their credibility and reputation on social media.

2. Blog

People seek help on the internet, and social media. It is no surprise that ‘How to’ is a heavily searched term. Your blog could be a powerful platform to field and answer queries that your target audience has. Like we discussed in the ShipServ case study, it is good to know exactly what they are asking first.

Share your expertise (make it unique)

Partner with bloggers and industry experts to create more value

Spend 20% of your time creating blog content, and 80% of it distributing it (on social, in email newsletters)

Your blog is an anchor to pull and hold your social media traffic. Ensure that the loop is complete though. Write blog posts that drive people to purchase your product/services. You don’t have to be promotional about it, you only have to show readers its use cases.

3. Focus on the right platform

Every platform you build a presence on is an investment of your time and money. Look at your budgeting as a mathematical equation. The variables (spends on each platform) on the left add up to the maximum budget that you have on the right.

Prioritize your platforms by their ROI

Accordingly allocate resources to your prioritized platforms

Track your progress and optimize your spends each month/quarter

Sometimes, the cost of work on a platform doesn’t justify what you earn out of it. In such a scenario, you could de-prioritize that platform and push something else up the priority list. Optimizing your effort and spends in this manner can help increase your overall social media ROI.

4. Collect and use audience data

Google Analytics has a module called ‘audience insights’. Based on visitor data, the module helps you understand more about who you are targeting and helps you identify the groups that you aren’t targeting yet. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter also give you demographics and user interests so you can build an informed content strategy.

Pull audience insights from Google and social media platforms

Keep the insights in mind when creating your content marketing strategy

Tailor content on each social media platform based on its audience demographics

Your audience will make a move only when encouraged by exactly the right content. The more you know about them and the more you consciously use that information, the better your conversions are likely to be.

5. Engage with your audience

There are many ways in which you can engage your social media audience. While you should engage them on your platforms, you should also go beyond them to target your potential audience. They don’t have to be consumers, they can be partners or simply enthusiasts.

Target communities, forums, websites and blogs that are popular in your industry

Don’t sell before your audience is ready. Begin by being useful to them regardless

Engage with your target market and people who have access to them

Consistency is key in a community. You have to establish yourself as an expert and really become part of your community. Becoming a thought-leader us even more effective, but that requires staying ahead of trends and covering the evolution of your niche.

It is possible to generate ample revenue from your social media pages alone, but you require clarity in terms of your goals and plan of implementation. With the right tactics, partners and tools, you can surprise yourself with your social media results.

Image credit: Pixabay.com

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How to Get More Facebook Fans Organically: A Guide for Small Business Owners

According to a study conducted by G2 Crowd, 80% small businesses now consider Facebook their primary marketing channel. This could be because they find Facebook marketing affordable, or effective, or a combination of both. This could also be because creating a Facebook Business page is among the easiest things small business owners could do to kickstart their marketing efforts.

While it’s easy to create a Business page, it’s anything but easy to run marketing successfully on the platform. Here are some of the reasons why your Facebook marketing is failing –

-You publish content sporadically (if you don’t have the time to post consistently, consider using a social media management tool that supports automation)
-You don’t have a Facebook marketing strategy
-You rely on ads to grow and engage your audience
-Your marketing strategy doesn’t address Facebook’s declining organic reach

Why your organic reach on Facebook has declined

Ever since Facebook switched from EdgeRank to a sophisticated machine learning algorithm in 2013, organic reach for businesses has been on the decline. The new algorithm considers over 100,000 factors to rank posts in users’ feeds. Among them are –

-Affinity – The interactions between your fans and your brand
-Weight – The quality and type of your content (On Facebook, certain types of content, like visual content, carry more weight than others)
-Decay – The age of the post (Older posts show up less often on feeds than younger posts)

It's no surprise that Facebook has limited organic reach for businesses, after all, Facebook is a for-profit organization and is home to millions of business pages that are all vying for user attention. So it gets businesses to pay for exposure.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you rely completely on paid exposure. Organic reach on Facebook is still relevant and important.

Why organic reach on Facebook matters

People react differently to advertisements and organic content. A growing segment of people despise ads, and about 30% of them have begun to use Ad Block software to keep ads astray.

Plus, Facebook ads are not intent based like Google ads. Facebook ads are simply displayed to the entirety of your target audience, a group that includes people who are not remotely ready to purchase from or even engage with your brand. Organic Facebook marketing plays an important role in targeting such people.

How to organically grow your fan following on Facebook

Publishing without a strategy won’t get you very far with Facebook marketing. You need a sound strategy and content created considering Facebook’s feed ranking system. Here are 7 quick tips to increase your organic reach on Facebook today.

1. Post more often

Social media managers underestimate the volume of posts published on Facebook. Like Twitter, Facebook has tons of posts being published every second, and it doesn’t hurt you to publish posts repeatedly.

Create multiple versions of the same post and save them in DrumUp libraries. Connect your Facebook page to DrumUp and set the posts in the libraries on an auto-posting schedule.

2. Identify windows of high engagement & capitalize on them

Your audience is more active during specific time intervals. But those time intervals won’t necessarily give you the most engagement. For some brands, publishing during off-hours gives better results. Jon Loomer found that his engagement was better for posts published during off-hours (10pm to 3 am) than for posts published during peak hours (6am to 3pm).

Use Facebook’s analytics (or DrumUp’s social media analytics) to identify your windows of high-engagement and log them into DrumUp for easy 1-click schedule of posts during them.

3. Use CTAs

Most social media managers misunderstand virality. “Viral” doesn’t mean a massive amount of engagement; it simply refers to how a content is distributed (through engagement). When your fans engage with your content, it appears on their friends’ feeds. And CTAs work wonders in getting fans to engage.

Facebook marketing expert Nidhi Singh A/B tested a post, with and without a CTA, and observed that the CTA version got 20% more reach than the expected standard.

4. Experiment with content types

As mentioned earlier on this post, certain content types (especially visuals) get more reach on Facebook than other content types. And there are so many types of visual content with which you can experiment.

Conduct A/B tests every time you publish a post and collect data pertaining to what works best with your audience. You can even curate content in libraries and set them on a repeat schedule.

5. Go LIVE

Everyone who has liked your page will get a notification when you’re LIVE, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s official statement.  So for important messages and brand announcements, consider using Facebook LIVE in addition to your regular marketing activities.

You can use Facebook LIVE for anything from product launches to QnAs and random entertainment. Trey Ratcliff, professional photographer, gets fans to submit photos and reviews them LIVE.

6. Cross-post on other social networks

If you have already built a sizeable audience on other social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn, or marketing channels like email, you can use that audience to build your Facebook following.

Add your Facebook page link to your other social profiles, add clickable social icons to your email or broadcast your Facebook page info to your other social networks and ask them to follow you.

7. Use transparency

Today’s audience is smart. They don’t appreciate ads being forced on them. They celebrate independence and honesty, which is why transparency is such a great marketing strategy when targeting them.

Show your audience what happens behind the scenes. Be transparent about your intentions. Respect their space and refrain from forcing ads on them. McDonald’s has a website dedicated to answering customers’ questions about the food in their kitchens.

Wrap
Organic Facebook marketing matters, when building a real and engaged community that will earn you business in the long run. Use the ideas mentioned on this post to boost your organic Facebook reach today.

Feature image via Freepik.com 

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The Ultimate Instagram Marketing Guide

Just how important is Instagram marketing anyway? Many marketers who use Instagram for personal purposes, don’t quite see the full potential of the platform in brand marketing.

This guide is an attempt to provide perspective into Instagram’s marketing potential, discuss Instagram lingo and help social media managers and business owners create a fully-functional Instagram marketing plan. Before we delve into the details, here’s an overview of the guide.

I. Why invest in Instagram for marketing?

II. What a successful brand profile has & how you can create one

III. How to create an Instagram marketing strategy

IV. Instagram demographics – Which of your target groups should define your Instagram marketing?

V. Influencer marketing on Instagram

VI. Instagram Stories

VII. Instagram contests

VIII. How to create a content strategy for Instagram

IX. How often and when to post

X. How to grow your follower count & increase post engagement

I. Why invest in Instagram for marketing?

It has been 8 short years since Instagram was launched, and since then the social media platform has expanded its user base and engagement by an impressive amount. Here are a few stats to summarize Instagram’s potential as a social media marketing platform.

1. Instagram has 800 million MAU (Monthly Active Users) and over 2 million advertisers, clearly a sign of the platforms marketing potential.

2. Your audience engagement rate could be 15 times more on Instagram than on Facebook and 20 times more on Instagram than on Twitter.

3. Brands on Instagram with a following of greater than 100K can grow by over 100%biannually.

4. 75% of Instagram users who view brand posts act on the information in them.

Now that you’re convinced about investing in Instagram marketing, it’s time to discuss how you can get started. The next section focuses on how you can create an Instagram profile for your brand.

II. What a successful brand profile has & how you can create one

A brand’s Instagram profile acts like a homepage, gives space to include important information and holds the potential to drive traffic back to a website. That’s why your Instagram profile should be optimized for the best results in each of those areas.

Your Instagram bio

What should a brand’s Instagram bio contain? A bio is professional but personal, and should contain only what is truly representative of your brand. Here are a few examples of how brands have crafted their bios. As you will notice, some of them contain custom hashtags. This strategy makes sense only for large brands, who already have tons of people conversing about them.

AirBnB’s bio describes what they do and what you followers can expect to see on their profile, which sets the expectation for people who follow you.

Lorna Jane’s bio describes what her brand is about and invites followers to participate in a conversation, which is likely to increase social media engagement.

In addition to describing the brand’s focus, LetterFolk’s Instagram bio also includes a mention of the people behind the brand, which makes the brand appear more human and approachable.

Your Instagram profile picture

Your profile picture is what everyone will see when they arrive on your page and when they view your comments anywhere in Instagram. That’s why it’s important to –

Choose a memorable profile picture – something that’s representative of your brand and intriguing/thought-provoking, so people will remember it.
Pick a profile picture that’s consistent with all of your social accounts – the same people are likely to follow you across multiple platforms and consistency will affect recognition.

Your Instagram URL

There’s only one link that you can ever share on Instagram, and it goes in your profile, so your choice is critical. Most businesses display their website homepage link here, but this space can also be used to send traffic back to landing pages created for campaigns, contests or top converting blog posts.

WeWork’s bio features the link to an awards page for an ongoing contest.

FinFolk’s page links to a FundRaiser.

Shiseido’s Instagram profile advertises their YouTube page.

Now that you’ve figured out what your profile needs to have it’s time to move on to creating an Instagram marketing strategy.

III. How to create an Instagram marketing strategy

The first step is deciding your Instagram marketing goals. Why are you on Instagram? What do you wish to accomplish from Instagram marketing?

Setting goals will help you create a more effective strategy and achieve desired results. Here’s a list of goals that many brands chase on Instagram.

1. Community building – Since Instagram is great for audience engagement, it’s the perfect place to build a community of customers and fans.
2. Increasing brand awareness – Instagram’s visual platform makes it easy to build awareness about your brand and its products.
3. Showcasing products and services – Several brands are using Instagram to showcase their products, visuals, in the right context, to seduce their target audience.

Apart from these goals, brands also use Instagram marketing to share company culture, increase brand appeal and loyalty, and share company news and updates.

Once you are decided on goals, it’s time to create the right content that can advance those goals. An important part of this step is understanding who makes up your target audience.

IV. Instagram demographics – Which of your target groups should define your Instagram marketing?

The success of marketing depends on the relevance and timeliness of messages, and demographics can give you insights into how to create such messages.

Here’s an insight into what the Pew Research Group has discovered about Instagram demographics.

If your target audience is primarily female and young, Instagram marketing could be your primary source of audience engagement. Regardless of who your audience is, you can find and engage small target groups of them on Instagram.

The best part of social media is that once your get certain people on a social media platform, their friends are likely to follow. You simply need to engage the micro-influencers in friend circles, and you could create a community of loyal followers and customers to engage with on Instagram.

Once you know who your target groups on Instagram are, it’s time to identify influencers who can give you access to these groups more easily and effectively.

V. Influencer marketing on Instagram

As per Instagram’s 2016 algorithm update, posts with more engagement appear on the top of users’ feeds, as opposed to posts that were published first.

And that’s where influencer marketing comes in. Influencers can not only help you reach more fans, but also help you get more attention and engagement for your marketing messages.

To run a successful influencer marketing program on Instagram, follow this process –

1. Conduct enough research.

There’s a lot you can learn from analysing other brands and their marketing activities. By using a tool like Whalar Labs, you can compare your brand’s Instagram page to up to three others for factors like engagement rate, comment rate and frequency of posts. And based on numbers, you can decide on what works and doesn’t with respect to content.

2. Draft a clear brief.

Once you have a sense of what works and doesn’t with marketing content, it’s important to create a brief that can convey to influencers your standards for content. While it is important to set solid rules to follow, you should also allow influencers creative leeway so they can create genuine and engaging campaigns for you.

3. Find the right influencer.

Instagram has an interesting mix of influencers, covering a wide range of niches. The idea is to find the influencer who has a following of your target groups. The right influencer also feels relatable to your audience and can influence their decisions.

4. Create a framework for collaboration.

Once you have narrowed down on an influencer, it’s time to set up a collaboration process that works. How will you communicate? What will the timeframe on each campaign be? What content usage rights do you expect them to provide you with? How much will you pay them for creating and managing campaigns?

5. Focus on extensive distribution.

Influencer content can be maximized by publishing it across platforms. Many brands publish content on their product page, using apps like TagTray.

You could also use the content in Facebook ads, or share it on other social media networks. Embedding Instagram posts not only adds social proof, but also increases engagement and conversions in the long run.

Now that you have an idea of how you can create far-reaching content on Instagram, it’s time to explore the specific features the social media platform has to offer.

VI. Instagram Stories

In late 2016, Instagram launched a new type of content – Instagram stories – which disappears 24 hrs after you publish it. To create stories on Instagram, you need to click on the “+” button or swipe left on the dashboard, to enter the “stories” camera.

Once you have posted stories, you can view how many people and who have viewed each story.

How brands can use Instagram stories

First, why use Instagram stories?

Instagram stories has over 300 million users, surpassing SnapChat which originally introduced the story feature. And 33% of the most viewed Instagram stories are from brands. Plus, 1 in every 5 organic stories receives a direct message, which is a great deal of engagement (20%).

Brands can use Instagram stories in so many ways. Here are a few.

1. Promotions for products, product launches and events.

2. Interviews and host Instagram takeovers. (A host Instagram takeover is where a designated host takes over a brand account and shares content with their followers.

3. Behind the scenes at work and events.

4. News and information sharing.

Apart from using Instagram to promote products, share behind-the-scenes pictures and interviews, some brands also use the platform to conduct contests.

VII. Instagram contests

Instagram is a great platform for running contests because of its visual nature and its high rates of engagement. However, before you decide to run a contest on Instagram, it’s important to review the guidelines –

1. Don’t randomly tag content or users, and don’t encourage other users to do the same.
2. Clearly declare that Instagram won’t support, moderate or sponsor the contest in anyway.
3. Take lawful responsibility of the rules and restrictions that your contest includes.

Once you have considered the guidelines, it’s time to create a fun and engaging contest that your fans might want to participate in. The simplest way to do so is by picking from the popular contest types. Here are a few –

1. The comment on the post contest.

2. The like the post contest.

3. The post a photo contest.

You could choose one of the above types or run with a combination of them.

Next, choose a tool to manage your contest. Gleam, Woobox and Wishpond are both excellent options.

Once you have considered contests, it’s time to work on your daily content posting schedule.

VIII. How to create a content strategy for Instagram

There are certain key factors to focus on when deciding what to post regularly on your Instagram account, such as –

Style and color palette

Since Instagram is primarily visual, it pays to decide on a style and stick to it through your all of your posts, because consistency in your profile is important to appear professional and classy.
To create that consistency, you can come up with a style guide, for your content creators to follow. The style guide has to include preferred font styles, color palettes and filters you would like to use. You could even design a couple of post layouts to work with when creating daily posts.

Captions and hashtags

Instagram captions are usually under 2,200 words, and brands have to work with that space to make an impact on their viewers. Further, every post’s text is only visible for the first three lines, after which the para is cropped into three ellipses to maintain the text:visual ratio.

Captions can be used to enhance any image by adding micro tales or thought-provoking one-liners. But remember, this is where your personality comes through, so you have to be careful about what you decide to say.

MailChimp has a fun, friendly tone on Instagram that carries through very well on their posts.

Everlane has great one-liners for captions.

Hashtags are used by Instagrammers to discover new content and accounts to follow. The right hashtags can help your potential followers discover your account, so it’s very important to be choosy about the hashtags that you use on your posts.

Post composition

Finally, you have to decide what makes your posts and how to present them. Set a few composition rules, so you can create a great overall Instagram presence.

1. Choose a few background colors to work with
2. Decide the subjects of your photographs – employees, partners, customers, products, etc.
3. Finally, choose what tone you want to maintain on your posts – serious and informative, instructional, humorous or sassy.

IX. How often and when to post

How do you figure out what the best frequency is for posting on Instagram? And what times are best for publishing your Instagram posts? A consistent publishing schedule can help with building consistent engagement, because your followers will know when they can expect you to post content.

When to post on Instagram?

Create a publishing schedule calculator test. Schedule the same post on different times on different days and see which time on which day gets the most engagement.

Schedule your most important posts on those days and spread the rest of your posts through the rest of your week.

How often to post on Instagram?

According to a Union Metric study, brands post on Instagram daily. It’s not easy to publish content everyday, but you can effortlessly manage consistent posting using recycled best posts, curated posts and a social media management tool to schedule content in advance.

DrumUp just introduced Instagram management, and you can use the app to schedule reminders to accurately post your content.

X. How to grow your follower count & increase post engagement

Once you have created a solid Instagram presence, it’s time to focus on growing your follower count and engagement. Here are a couple of tips that can help you get started –

1. Use more UCG

User Generated Content is especially easy to curate on Instagram because your fans are already posting their organic content. Using already uploaded posts on Instagram, you can create a vibrant and engaging community around your brand.

If you’re running contests on Instagram, it’s even easier to curate UGC.

2. Share Instagram posts to Facebook

Another way of increasing reach and engagement for your Instagram posts is by automatically sharing them on Facebook. Doing this will help you engage both your Facebook and Instagram communities in one go, and a study has proved that images shared from Instagram to Facebook get more engagement in general.

3. Include more faces on your posts

A study by Georgia Tech has proven that images with faces get 38% more likes and 32% more comments. To increase engagement on your posts, simply share more posts with faces in them.

The faces could be of your customers, employees or partners, and the more people you include the more excitement you automatically create around your posts.

4. Use Instagram analytics to measure and improve performance

Both SimplyMeasured and Socialbakers are good tools to use to measure your brand’s engagement on Instagram.

Use the insights you get via these tools to assess the success of your content strategy, so you can refine it and improve your Instagram marketing performance.

Wrap

Instagram is has become an inevitable part of any brand’s social media marketing, and if you haven’t used the platform yet, it’s time to get started. This guide gives you everything you need to create a content plan for Instagram and begin your marketing.

Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

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