Social Media

Instagram is becoming an increasingly vital part of a brand’s digital marketing mix. Instagram’s large user-base, 200 million active users, and ability to improve companies’ overall conversion rates, help businesses reach consumers worldwide in a more compelling way and increase sales.

While Instagram is an effective marketing and sales channel, it isn’t easy to manage. Marketers have to create content, engage with followers, grow audience size, and track performance -- all as part of their daily Instagram management routine. To help marketers manage their Instagram accounts better, we’ve reviewed three tools worth your attention:

1. Nitrogram 

   Nitrogram is an analytics platform.

   

   Nitrogram lets you determine the growth of your Instagram community, the engagement trend of your Instagram account (i.e. week-over-week increase or decrease in number of likes), top countries of new followers, top 10 new followers (based on their number of patrons), and new followers’ genders. 

   
   (Overall engagement trend)

   
   (Top countries of new followers)

   
   (Gender of new followers)
   
   
   (Top 10 new followers based on their number of patrons)

   
   

   (Week-over-week engagement trend)
   
   These insights help you evaluate whether you are publishing suitable content, attracting followers from targeted geographic locations, or growing your Instagram community size at an optimal rate.

   For example, you might discover that your audience size and week-over-week number of ‘likes’ are only increasing by 3% when in fact you aimed for 5%. This assessment helps you identify areas for improvement and develop tactics to improve the result.

   In the case of underperforming audience size growth and customer engagement, you can split test different types of visual content (i.e. product images or community event photos) and see which ones generate the most interactions. Once you’ve identified which kind of visual content garners the most likes or comments, you can publish this type of visual more often to increase the overall engagement trend. You can also initiate social media contests to encourage current followers to repost the contest on Instagram pages. This kind of social content distribution will help you improve brand awareness and attract more followers. 

2. Iconosquare

   Iconosquare is a community management tool which lets you track who you’re following, who’s following you, which images you’ve liked, which images your followings (people who you’re following) have shared, and which images you’ve published. You can see these data in grid or list view.

   
   (Images published by your followings in grid view)

   
   (Images posted by your followings in list view)
   
   
   (Your own images in list view)
   
   This information helps you determine whether you’re engaging with influencers, attracting the appropriate audience, and publishing content that’s consistent with your brand image (based on the style and context of the visuals). 

   In addition to monitoring your followers’ or followings’ posts, you can use Iconosquare to assess your community engagement performance. 
   
   By going onto the Statistics page, you can see the number of likes, comments, new followers you’ve gained in the last seven days. You can also gain deeper insights by clicking on ‘Rolling Month Details.’ This section showcases your most engaged content and followers in a specified timeframe. For example, you can see that your most engaged photo acquired 20 ‘likes’ and 4 comments from April 16th to May 16th.

   
   (Overall engagement performance)
   
   
   (Rolling Month Details)

   These insights help you identify which types of content your audience prefers so that you can publish more of these visuals in the future. You can also use these data to reveal who your most engaged followers are so that you can offer them special customer appreciation rewards (i.e. limited coupons) and encourage them to advocate your brand even more. 

3. JustUnfollow

   JustUnfollow lets you find users who aren’t following you back; you can use the information to perform two activities.

   First, you can it to improve your following-to-follower ratio. By discovering which users aren’t following you back, you can unfollow these individuals and better the following-to-follower ratio.

   In our opinion, a ratio of 1:3 (following to followers) is a healthy number because it shows you’re a popular brand and that’s why more people are following you than you’re following them. But obviously, if you can attain a ratio of 1:4, 1:5, or even higher, that’s more ideal.

   
   (A list of non-followers)

   Second, you can use the information to determine which users you should interact with so that they will follow you back. For example, you may realize that certain prospective clients or influencers aren’t following you back. In this case, you could ‘like’ or comment their posts more often to attract their attention, develop relationships, and induce them to follow your Instagram account. This improvement in community engagement and audience size will benefit your marketing or sales performance because when you post content about upcoming promotions or product releases, you will reach more potential customers.

   By evaluating the three Instagram tools above, we hope we’ve given you some ideas for managing your Instagram accounts more easily and efficiently.
   
   If you have further questions about Instagram or social media marketing in general, please contact us directly. If you’d like to learn about other important aspects of digital marketing, register for one of our upcoming digital marketing training workshops.

Welcome to the second installment in our series introducing B2B marketers to the basics of social media marketing. Last week we covered LinkedIn, with Facebook and Google+ to come in the next two weeks. We’ll address how to set up an optimized profile for each and begin building a social presence for your business. Join us for our webinar on Wednesday, April 10 to learn how to develop a social media plan for your B2B business!

A recent study found that Twitter is the top social network for acquiring B2B leads. The microblogging site allows you to interact with people all over the world who you may not otherwise come into contact with, letting you reach out to a potential audience of millions. The public nature of the forum lets you build your brand and your industry network, and the 140 character limit makes you really refine your messaging. Here’s how to create your company profile and communicate your brand to the Twitterverse:

Setting Up Your Company Profile

Go to www.twitter.com and sign up to create your company profile. When choosing your username, try to pick something as close to your company name as possible so that your profile can be easily found and your brand identity is clear to anyone you interact with. Using your own name or the name of one of your products isn’t a good choice, since people who don’t know your company very well may not know that those are associated with your brand.

1. Profile and Design

   Next, you get 160 characters to write your biography in the Profile tab. Many people will decide whether to follow you based on your bio, so make sure to describe what your company does including any well-known products and relevant keywords.

   Include your company name, location, website, and upload your logo as well as a header image that reflects your brand. Then, use the menu to the left to customize your profile and settings.

   In the Design tab, add a background image and colour settings to align your Twitter profile page with your brand.

2. Account, Password, Mobile, and Email

   These tabs allow you to set up your preferences. You can decide most of them for yourself, but a few are worth mentioning:

   Under the Account tab, there is the option to protect your tweets, meaning no one will be able to follow you or view your tweets without your permission. If you want, you can choose this option for a little while as you get used to the platform and build up content, but as a general rule this option doesn’t make sense for a company page. The goal is to attract followers and spread your brand message, which is impossible if your account is private.

   You can add your Twitter account to your mobile phone if you are often away from your computer or think you will need to post tweets outside business hours. Just make sure not to confuse your business account for a personal one if you have both of them set up on your phone!

   Email notifications allow you to receive emails whenever certain events occur, to save you having to always check back in with your Twitter account. At the least, you should set up alerts when someone retweets, replies, or direct messages you so that you can act on those engagements. Beyond that, it’s up to you whether you’d like to receive emails or not.

3. Apps and Widgets

   Over time, you may sign up for apps across the web that allow you to sign in with Twitter. These apps will request access to information from your account, so be sure to double check before allowing any of them. Some apps will send out tweets from your profile or otherwise make use of your information in ways that you might not want for your company account. You can check what apps are connected to your profile under the Apps tab, and revoke access to any app at any time.

   The Widgets tab enables you to create a feed of tweets and post it to your website.

Setting Up Your Lists

Once your page is set up, you can begin following other people and brands. The tweets of everyone you follow will appear in your home feed.

“Wait a minute,” You might ask, “Once I follow a lot of people, how will I get any valuable information from all that noise?”

This is where Twitter Lists come in.

Go to your own profile page by clicking “Me” in the top menu, and choose the Lists tab from the sidebar. You can set up as many lists as you want to organize people however you like, and then click on each one to view only the tweets from people in that list. Aside from the obvious benefit of organizing your Twitter feed, there are two other things that make lists extremely valuable:

First, you can make them private. This means you can create a list of customers or prospects without airing it to your competitors, or create a news feed without giving up all of your sources. Public lists are a great resource for your followers, since you can direct them to other Twitter profiles that are relevant for them, but private lists allow you to use Twitter for intelligence gathering.

The other great thing about lists is that you can add people who you don’t follow. This means you can keep an eye on your competitors without giving them the benefit of adding them to your account.

You can also use this feature to receive the tweets of a lot more people than you are following while you build up your own followers. As a rule of thumb, the number of people you follow shouldn’t exceed 20% more than the number of people who follow you. This is because an account that follows a lot of people without having many followers tends to look like a spammer. As more and more people follow you, you can increase the number of people you follow.

Promoting Your Company on Twitter

Once you’ve created your profile and built out your lists, it’s time to begin engaging with people and promoting your brand. The following are some tips, guidelines, and general rules of etiquette to maximize the effectiveness of Twitter for your business.

1. Listening

   You’ve set up your lists, which will let you sort tweets by customers, prospects, industry connections, and other people of interest, but there are several other ways you can search for tweets around particular topics and create conversations around them:

   • Use the search bar in the top right to look for tweets that contain particular words, phrases, or user handles. You can search for your product, company, or industry terms to find tweets that you may be able to answer.
   • Hashtags are words within a tweet preceded by a # symbol. Every hashtag becomes a link, and when clicked it will return a list of recent tweets that include that hashtag. This is useful if you want to find other tweets about a topic, or you can include hashtags in your tweets to join the conversation. Just make sure that your hashtags are specific and relevant to what you have to say.
   • In the lower left corner of Twitter, the Trending window lets you know what phrases and hashtags are the most talked about right now. You can set your trends by location to see what is most popular in your area, or choose tailored trends to see what’s being talked about that is relevant to your location and who you follow.
   • Click on a trend to see current tweets about it, or include one in your tweets to join the conversation. As with hashtags, you only want to include these if they are relevant to what you’re saying.
   • Click “Discover” in the top left to see the recent tweets and actions of the people you follow, suggestions of who to follow based on your activity, and find people based on your friends or categories.

2. Sharing

   Twitter is all about sharing information and engaging with others, so it’s a great place to promote content you’ve produced or material from others that expresses your brand or that your customers might find useful.

   • Tweet links to your blog posts, reports, webinars, videos, and other materials you’ve produced to educate and engage your target market. It’s a great way to promote your content to people who may otherwise never have found it, and it helps drive links to your website.
   • Retweet others’ tweets or post links to blogs, news articles, and other online information your customers might find helpful. Include the source’s Twitter handle to give them credit and maybe start a conversation with them.
   • Share links to stories and news that help reflect your brand personality. For example, if you’re a tech company you could post about tech news and new gadgets, even if they aren’t related to your company. This content will be interesting to your target market and demonstrates that you’re up-to-date with what’s going on in the tech world.

   When tweeting links, it’s a good idea to use a link shortener like bit.ly or ow.ly to reduce the number of characters your link takes up. You only get 140, so make all of them count!

   In fact, it’s best to only use 120 characters in your tweet if you can, so that others can retweet them and include your handle.

3. Promotion

   It’s tempting to talk a lot about your products and services on Twitter, but as a rule you want to keep your promotional tweets to a minimum. Nobody wants to watch a TV channel that only airs ads, and no one will follow you on Twitter if you only talk about yourself.

   The 80/20 rule is often applied here, meaning that 80% of your tweets should be useful content, news, retweets, and conversations and no more than 20% should promote your products and services.

4. Insights

   Click “Connect” in the top left to see who has followed you, retweeted, or favourited one of your tweets. These are the people who are interacting with your brand, so return the favour by sharing their tweets or commenting on what they post.

   While Twitter doesn’t offer in-site analytics, you can sign up for a social media management tool such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social which offer analytics reporting on your Twitter and other social media profiles.

   Twitter lets you reach out and engage with millions of people, and it’s increasingly popular for B2B communications. It’s a great source of industry, competitor, and prospect information as well as a way to stay involved with your customers and network. So, create your profile today and use it to promote your content, engage with customers and prospects, and start conversations around your brand.

   Next week’s post will discuss how to use Facebook for B2B marketing and relationship building. If you have a question or want to provide feedback, feel free to contact us or leave your questions in the comments.

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be running a series to introduce B2B marketers to the basics of social media marketing. We’ll cover the four major social media platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and we’ll address how to set up an optimized profile for each and begin building a social presence. Join us for our webinar on Wednesday, April 10 to learn how to develop a social media plan for your B2B business!

LinkedIn is a natural starting point for many B2B companies to begin using social media. Unlike other social networks that focus on users’ personal lives, LinkedIn is designed for business networking, and it’s a powerful tool to promote your company and generate leads online. Here’s how to get started and leverage LinkedIn to promote your B2B business:

Setting Up Your Company Page

You need to have a personal profile to set up a company page, so if you don’t have one you’ll need to do that first. LinkedIn makes it fairly straightforward, walking you through the setup process with step-by-step prompts.

Beyond your name, company, and email address, you can include as much or as little information as you want. But, keep in mind that your personal profile is your introduction to the people you meet on the site, so you might want to let them know a little about your skills and qualifications if you want them to do business with you. Also keep in mind that LinkedIn is a business network, so you’ll want to include photos, language, and details that reflect on you in a professional light.

Once you have a personal profile, you can create your company page. Click on “Companies” in the top menu bar, and then click “Add a Company” in the top right to get started. It’s important to note that you cannot use a generic email address (such as Gmail or Hotmail) to create a company page, your business must have its own domain.

Click “Edit” in the top right corner to begin adding content to your company page:

1. Overview Tab

   Add the basic information about your company and designate employees as admins, who have the ability to make changes to the page. Use relevant keywords in your company description so that visitors know what your company does, and also so that your page turns up when people search LinkedIn for businesses like yours.

   It’s important to provide as much information as possible about your company so that prospective customers get a clear idea of who you are and what you do. Be sure to include an image that reflects your brand as well as your company logo and specialties.

2. Products & Services Tab

   If your company caters to multiple target markets, you have the ability to create different versions of your Products & Services page to appeal to each type of buyer. If not, you can simply create one default page that will be visible to everybody. Include a description with keywords, branded images, and even a promotional YouTube video on this page. Once you hit “Publish” in the top right corner, you can add the products and services your company has to offer.

   Mouse over the “Edit” button in the top right corner to add a new segment for each product or service you provide. Be sure to add an image to promote your offering and a description that includes keywords, along with the key features or benefits for each one.

   You can include a link to the product page on your website, videos and promotions, and specific contacts such as salespeople or customer service specialists for your customers to get in touch with directly. Note that you have to be connected to a person on LinkedIn in order to add them to your company page.

   Once you have added all of your products and services, click the “Edit” button on your Products & Services page and scroll to the bottom to set the order you want them to appear in. The top product or service will be promoted on your main page.

Promoting Your Company on LinkedIn

Now that you’ve built your company page, you can begin to build brand awareness, gather industry information, and generate leads.

1. Connect to People

   Use your personal profile to connect to others in your industry and potential new clients, and encourage your team to create their own profiles and be active in this network. LinkedIn is a great place to keep up with contacts and stay abreast of what’s going on in your industry.

   Your team members can also connect their profiles to your company page, so that prospects can get a sneak peek at who’d be working for them and get to know your company a little better.

2. Status Updates

   Keep customers and prospects up-to-date with what’s going on at your company by posting regular status updates. You can post news, links to content such as blog posts or reports, or run LinkedIn polls to conduct a little market research.

   As with your Products & Services page, you can target status updates to specific audiences based on industry, location, role, seniority, and company size. Everyone who visits your company page will be able to see all your updates, but they will only appear in the news feeds of followers in your target audience, meaning you don’t spam prospects with content that isn’t appropriate to them.

3. LinkedIn Groups

   The real lead generation potential of LinkedIn is in LinkedIn Groups. Your company page cannot join groups, but each member of your team can, so this is a place you want to encourage them to participate and add value. Your product specialists can respond to technical questions, your marketing, accounting, HR, and other support people can have discussions related to their work, and your salespeople can interact with prospective customers. And all of them will be connected back to your company page, so that when their contacts need your products or services, your business is where they’ll turn.

   Join groups to have conversations about industry issues, answer questions, and get to know your audience better. If there isn’t a group related to the topics you want to discuss, you can create one! Just make sure that you offer useful information and promote discussion – nobody wants to talk to the person who just posts sales pitches all day.

4. LinkedIn Today

   Many people who use LinkedIn aren’t aware that it also provides a great news aggregation service, called LinkedIn Today, which can be found by clicking the “News” tab in the top menu. The gear-shaped icon in the top left corner allows you to customize your news by industry and sources, and you can set up email alerts to receive a daily or weekly digest if you want.

   Once you’ve set up your news page, LinkedIn will compile the top news from around the web and deliver it to your Today page, letting you review what’s going on in your industry up-to-the-minute and all in one place.

5. Insights

   Once your company page is up and running and you begin making connections and posting information, you can use Insights to find out what content is working for you and which of your followers are interacting with your company page. Mouse over the “Tools” button in the top left to view your Page and Followers Insights.

   You can also review the stats for each of your status updates beneath each post (these are only visible to page admins) to find out which updates are getting a response from your target audience. Use this information to tailor future updates, and reach out to people who interacted with your content.

   LinkedIn is specifically designed for business, and these days businesspeople expect to find companies and contacts on this networking site. It’s an excellent way for B2B companies to promote themselves to their target market and make connections to prospective clients and industry insiders. So, set up your page and encourage your team to be active on the site to build the reputation of your people and your brand.

Next week we’ll discuss how B2B marketers can get started on Twitter. In the meantime, feel free to contact us for more information about social media, or leave your questions in the comments.