My Favorite Five Instagram Features that Support Your Business on Social Media

There are now 400 million users sharing and commenting on Instagram after just five years in the making. The membership is quite global with 75 percent living outside the United States, yet this still leaves 100 million national users!  Eighty million photos and videos are shared every day.  

Statistics from +Instagram's blog

And most important of all, a study of brand posts by Forrester shows that Instagram generates the highest per-follower rate of engagement across 11 platforms at 4.21 percent (i.e. divide the number of likes on a photo by the total followers).  In particular, per-follower engagement is 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter!

Instagram engagement findings from
Forrester and sproutsocial

So Instagram presents us all with a huge and very rich visual resource of ideas and inspiration, a robust network of people behind the images, maximum potential for engagement and a phenomenally simple yet powerful platform to use. 

Posting eye-catching images, visual messages with text, and short videos that include captions with hashtags is the way to share and connect on Instagram. I have found that not only are people readily interactive on this platform, but they don’t necessarily have to be a follower of your account to like or comment on your posts and potentially visit your website.

I really enjoy Instagram and would like to share my favorite five features that can help you be productive with it to support your business on social media. Given the broad scope of this application mentioned above, my five favorites help narrow the focus to finding what you are looking for, creating your own content, engaging with your audience and learning more.

Find What You Are Looking For

Hot off the press in Version 7, Instagram has launched its new Search and Explore resource. You can access it simply by clicking the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of your phone’s screen in Instagram. 

Featured here are the new Top Trending Tags and Top Trending Places that enable you to instantly experience moments in real time from around the world. At the top of your screen, you will see a slideshow of sorts with some curated collections from Instagram such as “Explore Trending Places”, and “Discover New People”.

+Instagram's great new search interface

Beneath this, you will see Trending Tags and Explore Posts with a selection to choose from.  Instagram tailors the content to show you topics you are most likely to be interested in. They do this by displaying images similar to those that you and followers of yours have liked.

When you click on a Trending Tag, you see the Top Posts for that tag followed by the Most Recent posts. The number of recent posts for that tag is also displayed. This provides a frame of reference compared to other tags for how many people are posting with that hashtag at that point in time.  With this information, you can easily tap into a hot topic of conversation at that moment.

The other new feature is the enhanced search when you click into the search bar at the top of the page. Previously you could search for Tags or People. Now you can also search Places, or Top to search all categories at once.

So when you are getting ready to post on Instagram, you can effortlessly tap into any location, topic, activity or theme at any time and join an active conversation that relates to you and your business.  Start by searching a term you are thinking of using to make sure it's a popular tag. Go ahead and use this tag so your content will be included with the others under the hot topic. Then also consider adding a couple of tags with a bit less activity to help your image stand out.

Create Your Own Content

Instagram is about sharing and connecting but even more so, about inspiring creativity.  In addition to many new filter and fade options recently added to give you just the right effect on your image, Instagram has also launched Layout and brand new Boomerang (not to be confused with Boomerang for Gmail, for Gmail scheduling and reminders). 

The Layout feature allows you to create photo collages on the fly and save them as a new image.  Once you select the photos you want to include, Layout instantly displays several custom layouts complete with your photos to help you choose the one you want.  From there, swapping and resizing images are a breeze, plus you can mirror and flip any image!

A silly example of what you can do 

with +Instagram 's Photobooth feature

in Layout

For spontaneous storytelling, Layout also comes with a built-in Photo Booth. Press the camera button, and four shots are instantly taken and displayed in several custom layouts for you to edit as you please. This is a great way to share moments, stories and just about anything on your mind. 

Boomerang is a new spin on eye-catching short video.  The fun app lets you create super short clips of something in motion that is then reversed and repeated.  You simply hold the camera shoot button in for a few seconds to take a burst image of something moving.  The App automatically ends the session, creates the rewind-repeat video and gives you the option to share it in pretty much any way imaginable. Check out my sample video below as well as the hashtag #boomerang to see some great examples. When you post your own Boomerang video, be sure to add the boomerang hashtag plus a plug for your profile where your website link is. Boomerang is another tool to help you get creative, draw attention and make a point!

The added bonus for your images? You are now allowed to think out of the box and use images beyond the square. Instagram now accommodates them automatically.  

So with these inspiring features literally at your fingertips, go ahead, get creative and start pulling people into your world and your business!

Engage with Your Audience

We all want to engage with our audience and encourage interaction that can result in a valuable connection. A study by Curalate, reported on by SproutSocial, suggests that images most likely to catch the eye are also most likely attract engagement. They found seven factors in posted images that maximized engagement:

1. A location tag in your post

2 @mention in the image the caption
3. Lighter images vs. dark
4. Ample amount of background space
5. Dominant color of blue vs. red
6. Single dominant color vs. multiple dominant colors
7. High amount of texture

Once you have your posts set for maximum interaction, you may want to initiate an event specifically designed to engage. The Instagram initiative that I think is a great example of how to do this is Instagram’s Weekend Hashtag Project. They facilitate involvement with their online community by hosting a simple activity that everyone can easily participate in. The link shows an example of the "Middle of the Road" theme. To join in the action, they tell you to follow a designated person on Instagram who will post a weekend assignment on Friday. They announce a theme and associated hashtag. During the weekend, participants take photos related to the theme and post them on Instagram with the assigned hashtag.  The following week, the selected winner and favorites are posted on Instagram’s blog. To build participation, Instagram has taken this a step further and established it as a recurring series that the audience, viewers and participants alike, can now expect every week. Great project!  

So we can try this out ourselves by joining in on the Weekend Hashtag Project when a particular theme resonates with our business and also by using this as a model for creating a group activity of our own to further pull our community together.

Learn More

Instagram headquarters has an informative blog with the four categories including Photo and Video Features, User Spotlight, Tips, and News.  The News section is where they tell you about new features, changes, and upgrades as well as share current statistics about Instagram.  The other helpful resource for more information and Q & A is the Instagram Help Center.  As you can see, I have found Instagram's blog to be an excellent resource for this article!

What's your favorite thing about Instagram?  Which features mentioned in this article do you think you are most likely to try?

3 Ways Social Media Directs Traffic to Your Website & How to Take Advantage of It

With social media activity consistently on the rise, the use of it as a key strategy to generate leads and drive traffic to your website is a strong consideration.  But is there documented value in focusing resources on social media marketing?  If so, what are the most effective ways to utilize social media? Below are three ways social media can be of great value to your business and some things you can do to maximize the impact.

1.      Social Media Can Boost SEO for Your Website

Although social signals including likes, follows and favorites had previously been metrics used by Google, Matt Cutts said in January 2014 that they are currently no longer looking at these numbers to determine page rankings. 

But John Blaze, Digital Media Consultant at Driven Local, and Google Partner said in a seminar this week that 25% of Google SEO for your website is related to quality content on your social media channels. 

He said that the Google search engine is now looking for longer content that contains key search phrases, correct spelling and grammar, proper text formatting, images and videos and links- both outbound to other quality sites and inbound such as those shared on social networks.  It also looks at the frequency and consistency of quality content.

So what can you do to create content on social media that’s deemed to be high quality by Google?

·         Incorporate full phrases that people are most likely to search for in addition to keywords.  Quicksprout created an excellent infographic to illustrate Google’s change in focus for SEO.

·         Share rich original content from your website across the web by linking to it on multiple social channels.  The number of links, as well as the degree of sharing of these links, is considered when assessing the credibility of your website as a strong source for search results.  The more incoming links to your website, the higher the search ranking.

·        The number of quality followers that share and engage with your posts on social boosts the credibility of your website from Google’s perspective.  Quality followers include industry influencers and people with an active following.

·         In addition to using keywords and phrases in your social content, include them in the profile of your social sites to further reinforce the subject of your content.

·         Work to establish a solid history of consistent quality content.  The authority of your domain increases over time as the volume and richness of quality content on your social platforms builds. Even as various social media factors shift in their level of influence on SEO, the goal of search engines is to match users with the information they are looking for.  So it follows that consistently building quality content will facilitate the search engines leading relevant consumers to your website.  

Although Google is by far the most utilized search engine, accounting for about 90% of the search traffic according to QuickSprout, it’s not the only one.  There are other search engines, each with a different algorithm.  Bing, for example, has made no mention of ignoring social signals.

Most notably, a huge chunk of search engine activity is not even accounted for in the 90% mentioned above.  That is search activity conducted directly on social media channels.

2.      Social Media Is A Search Engine!

More and more people are going straight to social platforms to inquire about products and services or to get a feel for the culture of a business before going to a company’s website.

Brian Honigman, CEO of Honigman Media said he’s heard that social media will be replacing SEO completely to become the sole way people search for the information they are looking for.  Though this is an extreme view, social media platforms are now part of SEO, as they are themselves search engines. 

Neil Patel, SEO expert and CEO of QuickSprout says that social media is SEO. 

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube each have their own comprehensive search query capabilities that are highly utilized.  Facebook receives thousands of searches per day, the Twitter search engine handles 2.1 billion searches per day and YouTube handles 1,140 searches every second of every day.  These queries are all completely independent of Google search.

Social channels could even become for some people the direct access point to a business, whereby they become a customer while bypassing the company website altogether.  In fact, 33% of consumers prefer to contact companies and brands over social media instead of over the phone. 

3.      Social Media Drives Traffic Directly to Your Website

When search engines find your social sites based on your content and links, they will index these sites and include them in search results.  Often when a company name is searched for, their facebook page comes up before their company website.

When you share quality content with key search phrases and a link to your website, social followers will be directed back to your website.

However, social followers are not all in one place, so providing consistent quality content across multiple social platforms will help you reach the largest audience. You could miss out on a sector of your audience if your social media presence is too narrow.  It would follow that the more social channels you are on, the wider the net you are able to cast for inviting relevant followers to your website and business.

Search engines are constantly changing and evolving their algorithms while marketers shift their approach accordingly to try and gain the most attention and get the best results for their business.  Still, social media continues to be a powerful way to reach people with a potential need for your business.  So regardless of how the search engine algorithms evolve, the strategy of generating a solid body of quality content for people to interact with across all your social channels is sure to draw your current and future customers over time.

Chloe Mason Gray from Kissmetrics sums it up this way, “Ultimately, the web is all about building relationships, fostering audiences, expressing identity and sharing ideas––it’s inherently social, and there’s no reason that SEO best practices would go against the grain, especially since the rules that govern SEO are ultimately meant to make the web a more enjoyable and useful place.”

What techniques have you tried that have worked to engage your audience and support your business?