Mediaboss Marketing

If a brand wants to know how many people it reached with itsorganic post on Instagram or how many impressions its Story received, it has had to open Instagrams app to access those stats instead of accessing them through a social marketing dashboard. No longer, though; now that brand will be able to use Facebook to log in to that dashboard,and more options are on the way.

On Monday, Instagram started sharing analytics for brands organic posts and Stories through the Instagram Platform API, so that brands can pull up these stats within the marketing dashboards they use to manage and monitor their various social accounts.

Instagram has been testing the features with marketing technology companies like Falcon.io and is now opening it up to all members of Facebooks and Instagrams Marketing Partners program. And sometime in the coming months, individual developers will also be able to access these features.

To be clear, Instagram isnt giving brands any information that they didnt already have access to. Any brand or individual that has converted their account to a business profile Instagrams version of Facebooks Pages has been able to pull up stats like organic posts reach, Stories impression counts and followers demographic breakdowns through the apps Insights tab. But now those stats can be automatically plugged into social marketing dashboards.

There are a couple of requirements that must be met before these stats can be accessed through the API, though. First, brands must have converted their accounts to a business profile. Second, brands must use Facebook Login to sign in to the dashboards provided by Falcon.io or any other marketing technology firm that plugs into Instagrams API.

The new API is built on the same stack as the Facebook Graph API. Because of this, businesses will need to use Facebook Login to access the new features. Businesses still have the option to use the current Instagram API, though insights will not be surfaced through it, according to an Instagram spokesperson.

In addition to making brands organic post insights available through the API, Instagram will also now let brands use the API to moderate comments on their posts, such as by hiding individual comments or turning comments on or off for individual posts.

For example, a brand could configure their social marketing management software to keep an eye out for comments with certain keywords or have every comment sent through a tool like IBM Watsons text analyzers and automatically hide comments considered offensive or toggle off comments on posts whose comment threads are overwhelmed with spam.

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Instagram starts sharing analytics for brands' organic posts through ... - MarTech Today

If you want your social media marketing to be effective, you need active, engaged, and loyal followers.

Social media follower counts are a distraction. Dont focus on this.

Brand loyalty is what really matters. This will naturally ensure long-term engagement on social media.

Fortunately, there are several strategies that can help you build customer loyalty and enhance your brands online image.

Loyalty matters more than follower numbers. Here are a few reasons why:

If your aim is to aggressively cultivate loyal social media followers who will advocate your brand on your behalf, the first thing to consider is your content and social media management strategy.

You cant rely only on your advertising, marketing, and sales strategies to carry you through social media because each platform comes with its unique opportunities and intricacies.

Social media marketing has moved beyond the simple acts of posting and interaction to include advertising, marketing, lead generation, selling, and support combined.

Its essential to create a social media strategy that includes a cohesive plan for PR, SEO, and link building and prospect mining to keep up with your competition.

When focusing on brand loyalty, ask what value you can create for your fans on social media. The answer you come up with needs to be powerful enough to inspire your fans to be loyal. Its a good idea to research your competition when creating your social media strategy.

To inspire brand loyalty on social media, you need to share valuable content or useful content with your followers.

The way you present your content and the formats you choose also matter. In terms of metrics, quality content is what will give you the most ROI shares, likes, comments, and click-throughs.

Visual content gets noticed and shared more via social networks, so its important to factor them in when planning your social media content. Use infographics, videos, screenshots, graphs and visual aids where possible, to make your content more striking and memorable.

Also, ensure that your content is branded, with your logo, colors and chosen typography consistently used on everything you share.

Followers want to interact with real people, not bots or automated content. Ensure that you dont sideline personal interactions as something to do when you have time.

Prioritize personal interactions and use them to show fans your personality. The warmth will keep your followers coming back for more interactions with you.

Some brands use common values and interests to connect with people. For instance, if you enjoy baseball, you can make the occasional baseball reference on your social posts, or talk about current events, news related to it.

Cause based social campaigns are another way to connect with your audience and their values.

People associate others with their strongest personality traits. Thats what you remember about people and thats what lingers on your mind. As a brand, its important to create and consistently display favorable personality traits to build familiarity among people.

These traits can be expressed through content sharing and conversations you have with people. If your routine includes blog content promotion, answering questions related to your industry and commenting on other peoples shares, each of those tasks should be completed in the same voice.

For instance, Life Is A Game blogger Oliver Emberton, rose to fame through his Quora answers, his distinct style of answering questions, with great visuals.

People want to be acknowledged. If you consistently respond to their queries with useful, detailed answers, you can earn their respect. This is probably what you will notice if you look at the historic footprint left by any social media influencer.

You dont have to limit answers to your fans. You can expand your exposure by finding questions asked by anyone, and answering them.

Use keywords related to your industry as search queries to find questions and respond to them with precise and concise answers. Remember to acknowledge any responses you receive and see the conversations through.

Narrow is one Twitter automation tool you can use to find the right people to interact with.

Your followers are most certainly creating content of their own and participating in conversations, possibly related to your industry. You can use social media monitoring to find them and share them, if they are share-worthy. By doing this, you not only earn the loyalty of those followers but encourage other followers to share content related to your brand.

Another great way of managing relationships with followers is through Twitter lists. Add followers who have similar levels of engagement with your brand in Twitter lists, and visit your lists once a week to interact with them.

Finally, dont forget rewards. The right rewards for the best of your followers can be powerful in earning their loyalty. Many brands have loyalty programs to extend to the best of their fans.

You need to be human to connect with your fans.

Simply pushing content doesnt suffice. You have to move beyond that effort to make a lasting impression on your customers and social media followers.

Brand loyalty is an invaluable reward that you earn by truly caring for your followers.

Featured image: Freestocks.org/Unsplash.com Screenshots taken by Jessica Davis, July 2017

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How to Use Social Media to Increase Brand Loyalty - Search Engine Journal

At Davids Bridal, senior director of global marketing Callie Canfield faced a pressing problem when trying to drive people from the brands social channels to its online store. When the brand would post an imageof new bridesmaid dresses to its Facebook or Instagram, for instance, customers who clicked on it would be dumped into the full online catalog for the bridesmaid dress category. Finding the stylesthey saw in the Facebook photo would require sifting through hundreds of dresses.

We want the customer to click through from Facebook or another social channel to our site, and get to a landing page that shows exactly what they clicked on, said Canfield. But its almost impossible to customize your site that way it would take a major backend overhaul, and were a big, pretty slow-moving company.

To solve this, Davids Bridal has been working with visual commerce platform Curalate in the beta stage of its new Showroom feature, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to create pop-up landing pages for brands to link to on social media. The landing pages pull the exact items promoted on social media, as well as a collection of related items that are populated by Curalates algorithms.

Davids Bridal has tested the Curalate Showroom on Facebook and on its online blog, and Canfield said that in the time since, Davids Bridal has seen 13 times more click-throughs across those platforms and a 40 percent decrease in bounce rate. Other brands testing the feature, including Banana Republic, Forever 21 and Guess, saw an average decrease in bounce rate of 53 percent and a 45 percent increase in time spent on site for shoppers enteringthroughsocial media.

For Davids Bridal, Curalates tools also offer an appealing set of independent data that isnt owned by the platforms theyre working with. Canfield said the brand is part of the beta test forInstagrams shopping tags featureand also uses Curalates Like2Buy platform, which is a third-party shoppable feed accessible to followers through the link in bio on branded Instagram accounts.

Curalate knows whats in the pipeline on the platform side, so they change their platform to make it beneficial for brands, said Canfield. For us, its great to have the analytics. When working with Instagram, you dont really have a good idea about whats working, and its in their interest for you to think something is performing well. Its nice to have a set of independent analytics.

As Instagram has made more progress in developing tools that will help brands drive conversions on the platform, companies that have popped up as intermediaries, like Curalate, have been forced to evolve. Showroom stems from the disconnect between products promoted on social and what customers ultimately are linked to.

Canfield pointed out that this problem is especially persistent in its email marketing, which typically focuses on items related to popular weddingtrends. But, there was no way for the team to send customers who clicked through the email to find all the featured items in one place. Canfield said in the future, she plans to use the Showroom tool for email marketing, as well as on paid Facebook posts, where the brand needs to get the most out of the limited resources it can put into social.

For brands, selling on social media has largely resulted inforfeiting controlto the platform. Curalate CEO Apu Gupta said that makes brands nervous.

Brands have come to realize that they are seeding a lot of information to the various networks, and when customers are making transactions through channels, you worry as a brand who owns that customer, said Gupta. If I start seeding a lot of information about my customer to this third party, what can they do with it? Can they redirect my customer to someone else, the next highest bidder? These are real concerns.

When working with a platform like Curalate, brands are still forfeiting some control. Curalate needs full access to a brands inventory in order to use artificial intelligence to place items in a social-driven showroom. But essentially, Curalates data can corroborate the data coming from a social channel like Facebook.

We have partnerships with Facebook and Pinterest, and theyre really helpful at giving us insight. When we talk with them about whats working best, we can see whether or not thats backed up by Curalates analytics, said Canfield. They all play together.

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How brands are using AI to close the social commerce loop - Digiday

Tata Global Beverages has been one of the rare companies which has mastered the art of social marketing by rolling out concepts like Jaago Re, which has played a prominent role in influencing peoples behaviour thus benefiting the individuals and communities for the greater social good. Now the company is going the extra mile by coming up in new avatar aka Jaago Re 2.0, which focuses on pre-activism, an idea which urges consumers to act before a tragedy happens. It may be recalled that Tata Teas decade-old 'Jaago Re' campaign, which struck a chord with the masses and ignited the spirit of activism much before the advent of social media, has now become a hallmark for social media marketing.

Sushant Dash, Regional President, TATA Global Beverages, stated, I believe the kind of results that you get a movement from the lens of a Brand or from the lens of Marketing can give you a lot more success. What we have realized is that most of the activism happens after an incident has happened. But what we believe is if we really want to make an impact, then this activism has to become pre-activism. We need to raise our voice and do things before a disaster happens. Then only a true change can happen. That is the next phase of Jaago Re, which is about pre-activism and creating a new language. Our new campaign says, Alarm Bajne se Pehle Jaago Re.

Differing with his views slightly from Dash, Jeroninio Almeida, Founder, iCongo, Rex & Karmaveer Awards, maintained, Marketers and Business Heads need to make this an important step of their strategies. What you see in this country is that whenever there is a Tsunami or earthquake or something goes wrong, you dont wait for the alarm to wring. I dont think we should pre-empt something which is preventive. That is where the corporates and business leaders play a huge role. There ideal situation would be when the business leaders, army and the government come together and decide how to prevent a certain disaster, whether it a manmade or a social one."

Delineating her thoughts, Lynn de Souza, Founder, Social Access said, As an individual, whether you are in the army, company or in a managerial department of Tata Tea, or an NGO, ultimately all comes down to the individuals. If the country has to progress, the individual has to contribute. You (referring to Sushant Dash) chose to walk the talk. We being in the social space, urge you to Talk the Walk instead of what you are currently doing. There is so much that needs to be done by NGOs, individuals, etc. They want to talk about it now. Thats where the marketing community and corporate sectors can come and spread awareness and help these people Walk the Talk.

Talking about the genesis of social marketing that the company had pioneered, Dash said, A Lot of people talk about social progress and the role that corporates and brands can play in it. We run a very successful Jaago Re campaign which is a cause related marketing for the last 10 years. When we started this campaign in 2008, we were the first one to talk about cause related marketing.

Talking about its Jaago Re campaign, Dash recalled, When we started in 2007, we believed in apathy among the youth. People were not worried about social progress, but were only concerned about individual needs like job, house, etc. That apathy has turned to activism and people are vocal about it. We had a punchline-dont just wake up every morning, be awake. We were the first one to do it from the realm of a brand doing rather than just a CSR initiative. We did it because our brands DNA is cause related marketing. We do it because my companys profitability is linked to cause related marketing i.e. social movement or social progress. The passion with which what we bring to the table is very different from just a CSR activity.

He also stated how an ordinary person can take a cue from Tata Global Beverages by doing something which is in sync with their brand philosophy. As an individual, dont blame others rather than change yourself. So if you and I stop taking a bribe, then there will be no corruption and we will be able to elect the right candidates. Jaago Re is not just about creating awareness but also about helping individuals Walk the Talk.

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Pre-activism Will Be The Next Phase In Social Marketing: Tata Global Beverages - BW Businessworld

Harris Markowitz was overjoyed when he was nominated for Shorty Award's "Snapchatter of the Year" last year. The award show, which honors the best in social media, pitted the 25-year-old against the likes of DJ Khaled, who would later be crowned.

Markowitz's nomination, however, piqued the interest of some major brands like Zillow and Coca-Cola, which soon commissioned him to create content for their brand's Snapchat accounts.

Fifteen months later, Markowitz's personal Snapchat account is mostly dark, and he isn't working on any brand accounts anymore. "We saw a decline in viewership on Snapchat and an increase on Instagram," Markowitz told CNBC recently.

The shift mirrors the relentless rise of the Facebook-owned Instagram Stories platform since its launch nearly one year ago, costing Snapchat its popularity with a medium it largely pioneered.

"Snapchat should've went back to the drawing board and figured out a new way to compete, instead of being romantic to how [it] has been running for the last couple of years," Markowitz said.

In a statement to CNBC, Ben Schwerin, vice president of partnerships for Snapchat's parent company Snap, said that the company's intent was "to build the best possible storytelling platform for you and your closest friends. Over the past few years, we've been delighted to see that many of the world's most influential people in fashion, sports, music, and entertainment were also using stories to connect with their biggest fans."

Yet Markowitz's outlook is shared by many non-celebrity social media influencers who struggle with posting on both platforms simultaneously.

In a recent study, social media marketing firm Mediakix looked at 12 top influencers who maintain a dual presence on Instagram and Snapchat. The firm found that over a 30-day period, those accounts overwhelmingly preferred Instagram Stories to Snapchat, posting 25 percent more on the former than the latter.

To be certain, Snapchat where boldface names such as DJ Khaled, Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen are prolific users is a slightly different animal than most other social platforms.

Those who post don't 'like' or re-share the disappearing video snippets that helped the platform become wildly popular with Millenials, most of whom use Snapchat to communicate with friends, celebrities and experience events. In that context, high follower counts are less important when the content is ephemeral and can't go viral.

Still, in a space built on an instantly recorded video where two giants are slugging it out for users, is there room for both?

Link:
Instagram encroaches on Snapchat's turf of social media influencers, winning their hearts, minds and posts - CNBC