How to Use Instagram Analytics to Grow Your Following

Did you know Instagram has more than 500 million active users and counting? Are you using Instagram to build a following for your personal brand, blog, or company? If so, you might be wondering how you can grow your follower count without engaging in odd tactics such as buying followers.

The best approach lies in Instagram’s native analytics platform, known as Instagram Insights. This platform is only accessible to users with an Instagram business account.

Here, you can find information about your followers, content, and Stories. By knowing how to interpret and implement this data, you can develop a quality growth strategy for your profile.

To find Instagram Insights, navigate to your Instagram profile on your smartphone – this feature is not available in the browser version of Instagram. In the top right-hand corner of your screen, you will see 4 vertical bars of varying sizes. Click this icon to access Instagram Insights.

Navigating Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights offers surface-level analytics about your followers, posts, Instagram stories, and promotions. This data is communicated through metrics including:

• Impressions: The total number of times your posts have been seen
• Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts
• Engagement: The number of times a post was liked, saved, and/or commented on by users

Additional metrics include profile views, website clicks, email clicks, and directions clicks.

When you first open Instagram Insights, you will be presented with a 7-day view of your account. Here you will find the number of impressions, reach, profile views, website clicks, and email/call clicks for the most recent week.

Under this section is Followers. This is where you can find information about your followers, such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Activity (Categorized by hours and day of the week)

Directly below Followers, you will find a section full of your Posts. In this area, you can look at various metrics for your content, including reach, impressions, and engagement. You can also organize the posts by date range, metric, and type of content.

Following the Posts section is Instagram Stories. If you post regularly to Instagram Stories, you will find details about their engagement here. In addition to impressions and reach, this section provides insight into the following metrics:

• Taps Forward: The number of taps to see the next photo or video
• Taps Back: The number of taps to see the previous photo
• Exits: The number of times someone exited your story
• Replies: The number of replies (to your Inbox) a photo or video in a story received
• Swipes Away: The number of swipes away from this photo or video to skip to the next account’s story

Lastly, Instagram Insights also shows information about any promotions you may have launched on the platform.

Play around with the various sections of Instagram Insights. Once you know how and where to find specific information within the tool, it’s time to utilize the data and grow your Instagram following.

4 Ways to Leverage Instagram Analytics and Grow       Your Following

After becoming comfortable with the built-in analytics platform, use the data to test out the following growth ideas.

1. Determine When Your Audience is Active

Instagram does not serve content to users in chronological order, meaning there is no true “best time to post.” However, you can discover when your audience is most active. You can find this information in the Followers section of Instagram Insights organized by day of the week and time of day.

Using this insight, plan to post your Instagram content within these time frames. Be sure to track the success of each post and time and adjust your schedule if necessary.

2. Appeal to Your Target Audience

When reviewing the Followers section in Instagram Insights, does the age, gender, and location information align with your target audience? If so, you’re doing something right! If not, you need to examine your posts and identify why you’re appealing to a different market than initially intended. Adjust your content accordingly to attract attention from the right audience.

On the other hand, if you’re unsure about who your audience is, Instagram Insights will tell you. With the audience demographic and geographic information in mind, you can craft relevant and timely content to appeal directly to this particular segment of your market.

3. Understand the Type of Content Your Audience Engages With

Users won’t want to follow your account if you don’t post content they are interested in. Using the Posts section, look at the engagement, impressions, and reach data for your Instagram Stories, photos, and videos. Out of the three content types, which tends to generate the best results? You can also organize your content by certain metrics and time periods. This is beneficial in determining what type of content your followers tend to interact with most.

For instance, use the tool to organize your posts by engagement over the past year. What do you notice? Did you do something similar in the copy? Did you use a specific hashtag that generated a lot of likes? Perhaps your image was stunning. Or, maybe your video asked viewers to comment below. Identify the commonalities between your top posts and implement them throughout your upcoming content.

By having a consistent and engaging presence on Instagram, you’ll attract more followers within your target market as time goes on.

4. Analyze Your Call-to-Action

Data from Instagram Insights is an excellent way to determine if your call-to-action (CTA) is working or failing. For instance, many accounts tell users to “click the link in their bio” for more information. In addition to the traffic acquisition data from Google Analytics for that particular webpage, Instagram Insights can tell you how many people clicked on the link in your bio over the last seven days. This information can help you test which calls to action work best to drive a specific action, such as website or call clicks on your profile.

Another commonly used call-to-action asks people to comment or tag a friend. By organizing your content by comments in Instagram Insights, you can see how many followers completed that action.

However, since you’re interested in growing your followers, asking people to follow your account (if they don’t already) is a beneficial call-to-action to use. Monitor your follower account to see if this CTA works well with your particular audience. If not, use the information from Instagram’s analytics to pivot accordingly!

How to Calculate Growth Rate

While Instagram provides basic metrics, such as follower count, it does not offer in-depth insight such as growth or engagement rate. You must calculate this information on your own. Alfred Lua of Buffer provides excellent insight on how to calculate growth rate and engagement rate using data from your Instagram Analytics account.

To find out how much follower growth your profile has experienced, perform the following equation:

[(Followers Then – Followers Now) / Followers Then] x 100

This results in the percentage change in growth over a particular period of time.

After adjusting your Instagram content strategy using the tips provided above, use the Growth Rate calculation to determine how well these tactics have performed in increasing your overall follower count.

How do you use Instagram Insights and metrics to grow your following? Share your thoughts and experiences with us by commenting below.

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The Benefits of Using Instagram for Business

I know what you’re thinking already. Another social media site I want you to look into. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, your blog and all the other sites out there, how are you supposed to incorporate Instagram into your social media strategy? And, more importantly, why should you bother? You’re doing just fine without it, right…

Here’s why you should consider using Instagram for business – it’s the future of social media marketing.

Instagram isn’t going anywhere.

In just three years, they have grown to 150 million users. This is a faster growth trajectory than Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. And with 60% of users outside of the US, the global reach of Instagram is growing.
Beyond just the popularity and rapid expansion of Instagram, there are a number of reasons why it is beneficial to use this platform as a part of your social media strategy.

Visual Marketing

Instagram, and other visual content sites like Pinterest, are gaining popularity for a reason. We’ve heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” countless times since we were children. As marketers and content creators, why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of images as part of your content marketing strategy? Just think how much less typing you’d have to do!
“Visual marketing” is one of the latest buzz words, and for good reason. Consumers want images and content marketers need to provide them. Think about your Facebook feed, do you read every post? Likely not. What about photos? You may not stop on every one, but you stop and look at a good majority of them. And what about Pinterest? Think about how much more content you consume when each post is a well crafted image.
Instagram is just the same. It’s an entire feed of visual stimulation encouraging interaction at its highest levels. If you’re seeing any success with visual marketing on the other platforms you use, imagine the capabilities you have on a site dedicated solely to visual marketing.

High Levels of Engagement

While I don’t have scientific studies from Pew or Mashable to substantiate this claim, I have read other blogs and I ran my own studies that validate Instagram engagement is typically higher than any other site. The ratio and number of likes and comments on Instagram posts significantly surpasses the ratio and number of likes and comments on any other social media site.

High Visibility of Posts

One of the reasons Instagram posts receive such high levels of engagement is that posts are highly visible. There’s no Edgerank or other algorithm that selectively showcases your posts. Every single one of your posts will appear in the feeds of every single one of your followers!
Strategic use of hashtags can also significantly boost the exposure of your posts to new users who will like and comment on your posts and who may even follow you as a result.
Your posts also live on forever. They don’t disappear or get archived like old tweets. And they don’t get buried so far down your stream, like Facebook, that they get lost. A quick scroll through your profile showcases every single post you have ever shared. This is a great way for new followers to connect with your brand!

Connect With a Targeted Audience

I promise that your audience is using Instagram. With 150 million users and growing, your customers are on there. There may be a smaller number of your customers and it may take a while to grow your community to significant levels. But take advantage of the smaller community now to cultivate real brand advocates and loyal customers. Instagram users are passionate and active – they want to interact with you and get to know you.

Emotional Connection

Photos immediately convey emotional responses. You can easily use your posts to evoke powerful emotions in your audience in order to produce the reactions you desire. If you want people to donate to your non-profit, use images that elicit the desire to participate and donate. If you want to celebrate a milestone or achievement with your audience, use posts that stimulate those emotions. Using the right emotional connection through your posts will drastically increase your engagement and help you reach your goals.

Drive Traffic to your Site

One of the most important things we all want is more traffic to our websites. And, yes, you can drive traffic from Instagram! Make sure you post a link to your site in your bio – this is the only place you can put an active hyperlink on Instagram. Mentioning your website or using calls to action (CTA’s) in your post comments are great ways to generate traffic to your site. I also recommend using a specific landing page from your website as the link in your bio in order to capitalize on visitors coming from Instagram.

It’s fun!

One of the best things about Instagram is that it’s just plain fun! The posts make you laugh, you get to stage awesome photo shoots, and you see the beauty in the simplest things. Instagram will change the way you think of content marketing – because when you’re having fun creating your content, it really isn’t all that much “work”!

The growth and expansion that we’re seeing on Instagram is only the beginning for this powerful site. Instagram is the latest site to grow into a permanent position within the big social media giants. As this site gains more traction and more users, the more powerful it will become for businesses and marketers. The solutions and long term benefits that are provided by Instagram for business are inescapable. Be prepared – if you’re not on Instagram now, you will be in the near future.


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9 Surprising Facebook Marketing Tips for Small Businesses That Actually Work

It’s a small margin of people who seek out your page to interact with it on Facebook. Most of those who do probably come from your current customer base or from the Facebook plug-in on your website. So most of your activity that people see is actually what ends up on their news feeds. Focus on optimizing that presence and that category of opportunities for visibility and you’ll get the most of Facebook. As a small business, your budget for marketing may not stand to compete with that of larger companies, but the good news is that there are effective and budget-friendly strategies that you can use.

With the right social media management tool and ideas, you can make an impact on Facebook.

Here are 9 tips to help you up your Facebook marketing game:

1. Kill it with your cover photo

In the event that people do land on your Facebook company page through links, redirects or piqued interest from one of your great posts, you have got to be ready! This is your one chance to make followers out of them and you’d be smart to use it well.

Your cover photo is prime property for 3 reasons –

It’s the first thing that people see, a visual is one of the best marketing tools you can have, and it’s free.

So tell a story with it, make it intriguing, create it so your viewers go “Wow”.

Also, one of Facebook’s features is showcasing cover photo updates on timelines of friends of fans. So if someone were to become your fan, your company’s profile picture and cover photo would be displayed on that new fan’s friends’ timelines.

Boom! You’ve got instant, free, visibility. And it’s an image. According to a study visuals get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs.

Try and connect your Unique Selling Point, your brand’s services, or your story to that cover photo. People love stories, and people love pictures.

Here’s an interesting example of a smart image with a strong selling point:

2. DrumUp some smart content

If you haven’t capitalized on the currency that is content curation yet, you’re missing out on some real action! Content curation lets you appear active on social media with the least of efforts, build relationships with the people whose content you share, and position yourself as an expert in the eyes of potential and current customers; provided your curate the right kind of content!

How do you curate the best possible content for your industry? You could spend hours reading through multiple sources on the internet to identify the influencers or leaders in your industry, or, you could get an app to do that for you!

Apps like DrumUp have been designed using intelligent machine learning and Natural Language Processing algorithms. What do they do? They understand your needs, and find you relevant and fresh content based on keywords that you set, from 100,000s of sources all over the internet.

The ultimate goal of content curation is to be the one-stop destination for information for your target audience. Be exhaustive, cover possible current concerns that your audience might have. Giev them everything in one place so they don’t have to go looking for it. Do that with interesting, useful and current information, and you’re easily one of the guys to watch out for on social. The best part of this strategy is that it can be done easily and with minimal time investment.

Here’s an example of a brand that’s pro at curating content:

3. Go Live

The beauty about live streaming on Facebook and other platforms like Periscope, Meerkat and Hangouts, is that is comes so close to actual face-to-face interactions. If you want to connect with your fans, Facebook Live can drive real results.

When planning a live broadcast, choose a focus in advance. Choose your title carefully, because it’s what people will see as a notification when you’re live.

Pick a device with great audio setup – mic, so your fans can hear you clearly. Always end with a call-to action, like Shop Now, Learn More or Sign Up.

There are plenty of ways you can engage your audience using live video. You could:

• Create a behind the scenes adventure, and take your fans to an exciting place to discover together. This could be your office, store or an exploring-worthy place related to your brand.

• Broadcast a Q&A session, answering questions that concern your fans most.
• Plan a How-To video, with insightful advice to further your fans’ goals.

 4. Be a friend, and a good one

A lot of social media marketers have spoken about the power of humanizing marketing. It isn’t just enough to have a company page on Facebook, an interesting way of meeting your target audience is by interacting with them like their friends would. This also opens the social media platform up for so much more interaction with your audience than you can do by maintaining a purely official front. People on Facebook interact with more people than brands and humanizing your brand is one of the best ways to connect with your audience.

Reach out to your fans occasionally with no agenda in mind. A simple “Hi there! We’re just writing to check on you. Is the product treating you okay?” Or “Hi! Here’s an inspiring write up that we thought would really brighten your day,” could do wonders. Giving away value without expecting anything in return is part of how you build lasting relationship with customers. It is really hard to be promotional all the time and still have people like you. Do you like the guy who’s always talking about himself and who approaches you only when he needs something?

Also, encourage your marketing team to read every comment and reply ASAP, comprehensively and with warmth. It is also a good idea to have them sign off each of the replies with their first names.

One of the best ways to humanize your brand is to post with faces once in a while – like your team’s or your customers’.

Do you know any questions related to your industry that your audience might have at this very moment?

These are gold. If you’ve let these go, you’ve lost valuable social capital. If your posts could be direct answers to any of these questions, you’re being very useful to your audience, and they are more likely to stick with you for a long while.

5. Get your customers to do the talking

Ever looked closely at a successful social media brand page? It has tons of engagement and conversations initiate from both sides – the brands and the audiences.

One great way of getting your audience to communicate with you is handling customer service via social media. By the way, there are more reasons for you to do that – social media is quick and you can quick-fix issues here before they blow up, and there are people voicing their grievances about products on social media anyway, so best get ahead of it and be there with a page dedicated to customer service.

The best part about using social media for customer service however is this – Your audience will tell you exactly what they think about the product. What they like, don’t like and what they wish you had. This again is gold. How you use this information is up to you, but there is tremendous value in it.

Yet another great way of getting your audience to talk to you is through contents and questions. Do quick, cool contests – quizzes, captioning contests, tweeting contests; Don’t let your imagination limit you. Don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from the rock-stars. Give away exciting prizes – they needn’t be big, or expensive. You could give a discount on a product. Ask them to vote for a favorite design and give discounts on the design that gets most votes.

Ask your audience what they like, get them involved in planning your events, ask them for opinions, everyone loves feeling like a part of something bigger.

Lastly, do story swaps. Share your stories – what happens behind your business front, celebrate your milestones with your audience. Humanize yourself. And encourage them to share their stories. A great story surrounding your product/service is definitely one of the most powerful ways to market it. If it goes with a great image of a happy customer with your product in a picture, even better.

6. Stop by and say hi

Social is just the entire world online. It functions pretty much the same. You still have to make friends, build relationships and “network” to run a successful business. It is ironic how so little of traditional marketing’s relationship building values go into online marketing.

Don’t feel shy to reach out to people on social. Look at social media platforms as if they were tools, tools to make relationship building so much easier.

For instance, in the past you’d have to physically stop by someone’s office or pick up a telephone and give them a ring in order to touch base. Now, all you have to do is move a finger to “Like” a picture of their on Facebook, or type a few characters to “Comment”. Do this often and you have a cordial relationship.

Of course, you have to be genuine. Keep in tune with what’s happening and be genuine when you react. The great part about networking on social is how easy it is to find people. If you’re looking for potential customers, reach out to them on any of the millions of focused groups on Facebook. You can easily locate groups formed around topics related to your industry.

Who should you ideally network with? Potential and current clients, industry experts and influencers and possible partners who you can work together with for mutual growth.

Suppose you are a band looking for gigs in Bangalore, these are the communities you’d want to be an active part of.

7. Put yourself on Facebook’s maps

Facebook uses a Google API that lets you mark yourself at places you’ve visited. You know this one, yes, it’s the “Check-in”. You’ve probably used it many times yourself, but you may not have considered what this can do for your business.

If your business is mainly local, this feature becomes especially useful. Each time a customer “checks-in”, their timelines displays the both the check-in and a link to your Facebook brand page. The check-in feature, by the way, works only for businesses listed under the ‘Local Business or Place’ category.

You could encourage customers to do this with discounts or points for checking in each time they visit. If your customers have an average of 500 friends on Facebook and at least half of them are locals, you have instant and targeted visibility for your brand!

Plus, people trust people and many times behavior of people is influenced by behavior of other people, especially friends. Check-ins are effective for this very reason, they encourage friends of friends to visit your store.

8. Go visual and get it right

The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text. Images also have the ability to influence human emotions. With the 6 second window you have to capture your audience’s attention on social, you have to bring the big guns. Do it with stunning images.

Visual content can be really fun. This is has been reiterated by every social media marketer on the internet. But what hasn’t been impressed upon is the need to hit that idea on the nail. The visuals you share have to be pleasing, interesting and varied. There is such a thing as a boring image. There is also such a thing as a sloppy image.

You can pull in stills, collages, graphs, infographics, gifs, comics, videos – anything you think best represents your topic of discussion visually and tonally. This could help you stay new with images. Although, if you find one particular format to work better than images – say quote overlays for example, do more of that than the others. Quotes are also very easy to make.

Are you worried about the challenges in creating great images? Put that fear aside and get cracking with tools that can help you do that. There are quite few good ones that are heavily graphic oriented. Using simple buttons and borrowing from already existing libraries, you can effortlessly create your images.

If you still can’t afford to waste time doing that, you could always curate images as long as you provide proper credit to the creators and a link to the original image.

It is very important to be sure of the availability of the image you’re curating. You can only use it if it is intended for sharing, or if it is under the Creative Commons license. There are image libraries online that are present solely to help you find images to fit your requirements. Some good ones with free images listed are – Pixabay and Freepik.

Again, always remember to give credit to whoever has created the images, whether they ask for it or not.

9. Tell stories 

Facebook now has its very own version of expiring content which is referred to as Facebook Stories (via Instagram). This feature is great for brands that want to keep in touch with their audience everyday, without seeming promotional or annoying. Stories is that unique feature that can help you build a bond with your audience and stay “top of mind”.

There’s much that a social media manager can do with Facebook stories, from sharing behind-the-scenes content to demonstrating expertise, and sharing UGC (User Generated Content), exclusive offers or even light-hearted jokes and memes.

Some brands even use Stories for audience research, through which they ask their audience questions to which they want instant answers. Through Stories, even the most brand-focused questions are forgiven or met with enthusiastically by fans.

Finally, Facebook Stories is excellent for time-sensitive content, so you can use them to run everyday offers, share seasons greetings or conduct daily communication.

That wraps up 9 surprising marketing tips that you can implement to take your Facebook marketing up one notch. Remember to keep your audience in mind when trying any of these ideas, after all, it is them who you’re looking to captivate. If you ever have trouble deciding what you should post, just think like a consumer and share what you’d want to see.

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LinkedIn Marketing Insights: 7 Top Trends in LinkedIn Posts

Among all social media networks and their posts, LinkedIn and LinkedIn Posts stand unique. Do you know why? This is because unlike Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, networking here is on more professional grounds. Your Facebook friend who might be very casual and friendly to you will present himself/herself differently in front of you as your LinkedIn connection.

So, what sort of posts fall under top trends in LinkedIn posts – let’s take a look – turn by turn.

1. Images and videos in LinkedIn Posts

According to a survey conducted by Social Media Examiner, 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%).

In addition, when people hear information, most probably three days later, they can remember only 10% of that information. On the other hand, if a significant image is corresponding to that same information, three days later, people can retain 65% of the information.

This indicates how important it is for you to use visual content comprising videos and images. Furthermore, according to the latest update of LinkedIn, you can now upload or record video on your LinkedIn mobile app.

Have you tried DrumUp’s new image editing feature?

Note: Unlike Twitter or Facebook, only one image can be included with posts that are going to be published to LinkedIn. However, the ability to add multiple photos is available now on iOS and is coming soon to Android and desktop.

2. Call-to-actions in LinkedIn Posts

CTA is a tool for an effective B2B lead generation. And, LinkedIn being a social media marketing platform try to include call-to-action in your LinkedIn posts wherever logical and possible. Of course, you should not sound like a salesperson.

The best place to add call-to-action is your blogs on LinkedIn Pulse. CTA, being a critical as well as a visual item for blog posts, helps the reader get more information to move along their journey and to resolve or satisfy their need or problem with your product or service.

One school of thought suggests that every LinkedIn Posts should end with a proper CTA unless you are writing or posting just for the sake of keeping your account active. There is no hard and fast rule on the type of CTA. However, you can include CTA in your LinkedIn posts in the form of:

• Engaging image that conveys that what they will get by clicking on it
• URL to your customized landing page    

In addition, you can directly ask for opinion or feedback to drive your users to the comments box.

3. Article marketing on LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is one of the best places for publishing and promoting your articles and blogs. This is indeed an effective way to drive traffic to your website and boost brand awareness. It is strategic to share content that makes sense coming from you as well as makes you look like an expert but doesn’t directly relate to your offerings.

Few things to be considered while doing article marketing on LinkedIn:

• Always include author bio, it will give credibility and build trust of your users.
• Beautify your story/article by adding banner images, it increases click through rates.
• Use images inside the article. Note: Images that are at least 700 x 400 pixels suit best.
• Do not forget to add tags. The tagging feature enables you to label your post using categories such as “web development” or “digital marketing.” These specific tags will make it easier for users to reach your post.


Tip: Always aim to publish an article that interests your clients and users even when they are not in need of your services.

4. Long-form content in LinkedIn posts

Having said article marketing is a booming trend, let’s focus on the length of articles as well. These days long-form content not only work best for your SEO, but it also enhances user experience. When you create and publish your own original content on LinkedIn’s Pulse, you invite yourself in the competition of building a network that is relevant.

Remember, it usually takes a considerable amount of patience and time to build an audience of followers. However, with LinkedIn Pulse, if your voice is exactly in line with users’ requirements, you can get noticed as an expert in your field and boost your professionalism.

Long-form content also performs well and gathers traffic over time. To make the most of long-form posts, create an extensive social media schedule to reach a wide audience.

On DrumUp, you could store post sections or different versions of post promotions in libraries and set them on “auto-post” for a pre-decided interval of time.

According to research, “Posts between 1900 and 2000 words perform the best and gain the greatest number of post views with titles having a length between 40 and 49 characters.”

5. Timely, relevant, and conversational LinkedIn posts

When it comes to posting your original content or sharing others’ content, don’t just do it as an activity or just for the sake of doing it. Rather, do it using all your analytical skills and relevance of the content.

Few examples on what sort of content should you post that sounds timely, relevant and conversational:

• Tips about succeeding in any particular marketing activity
• Tricks and tactics to standout unique in competition
• How to posts to help users understand the required processes
• Questions to instigate conversations

L’oreal has built up a following of over 700,000 people by posting timely, relevant and conversational posts.

All the times it is not possible to provide tips, tactics, strategies, and so on. There you can always re-purpose evergreen content and help your users by providing with the content they need at their finger tip.

6. LinkedIn Page posts

Whatever LinkedIn posts, you want to post – choose to post it from LinkedIn page over the LinkedIn profile. You can expand network through your profile. But as a business what all you need is a dedicated base of followers. At the end of the day, people trust on what’s happening inside the business, where it is heading, and how it is doing. For this, they visit your fan page. And hence, make the optimized use of it. To increase the number of your followers, make a compelling LinkedIn posts for them to sign up for your free report, newsletters, video series, blogs, webinars, podcasts and others. This is a secret sauce for moving your social contacts to your email list.

If you are sharing your posts from LinkedIn Page to various groups, make sure you check their terms of participation. Some groups permit discussions only and restrict links to your content or site.

Tip: Make sure your twitter account is connected to your LinkedIn profile, so your twitter handle is included in the tweets people share.

7. LinkedIn posts with the personal touch

Of course, LinkedIn is a way professional network. However, at times, a personal touch is also required to boost engagement. In case your LinkedIn following is much lesser as compared to followings on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and other networks, what best you can do is a cross-promotion. Cross post the URL of your posts on other networks with an added compelling social prompt and post it on LinkedIn. This will, for sure, help you build your LinkedIn connections.

Since this is a social network, and you are looking forward to expanding relationships with people, include some personal elements which build their trust in you. Not on a daily basis, but occasionally add a bit of you into your LinkedIn status updates. Such posts could be testimonials, your new venture, mention of a new client, and any new learning, certification, or achievement.

Closing thoughts

B2B social media marketing on LinkedIn has always been a challenge for most of the search marketers. However, keeping the recent and most working trends of LinkedIn posts in mind, we are sure – you will not regret your time invested in LinkedIn marketing. Pump up your energy and start exploring LinkedIn posts trends which are aligned with your marketing goals. Any of the above mentioned Posts will surely excite your readers.

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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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