Mediaboss Marketing

Credit: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

If you're halfway through the year and your 2017 Instagram goals are starting to feel a bit too ambitious, bots may sound like a good answer.

Instagram automation tools help tons of accounts reach new audiences with algorithms that target users using generic comments, likes and follows, which every so often leads to those users checking out your account and, hopefully, deciding to follow you.

The problem is, this type of social automation can damage your brand faster than a tap-happy intern. Automation needs to be handled very carefully. So how do you decide where to draw the line?

Recently, Instagram took steps to draw the line for you. Major Instagram automation platforms, such as Mass Planner and Instagress, are quickly being shut down because Instagram "requested" this.

Not worth the risk Honestly, these services scared the crap out of me. Injecting a bot's automated engagement algorithms into a brand's DNA may cause a boost in followers, but in the end there's a simple name for it: spam. Posting meaningless comments on posts is not only in bad taste, it could seriously damage your rep. Can you imagine your brand commenting, "This is great! *thumbs-up*" on someone's post about the family dog that recently passed away? That's the risk you're taking.

That's not to say all automation is bad. Here's a trick for automating effective social media marketing: think curation, not conversation. Automatic tools that start internal workflows, distribute your blog posts or aggregate third-party content are all great if you know how to work them. But beware letting a machine algorithm control your brand's voice.

The trick to Instagram success -- like all social media marketing -- is patience. The best social companies online focus on both creating genuine content to connect with fans and being proactive about engaging with the right people. Brands like LaCroix have become dominant forces on the platform by building on small wins over time. You have to keep your eyes on the long view.

So instead of investing in "Insta-bots," it's best to focus on less risky Instagram marketing techniques that have been proven successful -- and on automation platforms that aren't going to shut down anytime soon.

A prime example is outbound engagement. Rather than just focusing on creating great content, think proactively about how you engage with other users. For example, you may want to follow and engage with the people who follow your top competitors or the accounts that inspire you most. Other tactics include committing to posting five comments per day, setting up a hashtag calendar, restructuring your photo database for easier posting, using a tool like OnlyPult to schedule photos in advance, and organizing your notes and schedules so you remember to regularly post throwback photos.

Another crucial tactic is influencer marketing. Partnering with popular personalities allows brands to cut through the "Insta-noise" in a way that's impossible with a branded page. Microinfluencer marketing is just as effective. By encouraging your regular, day-to-day customers to become ambassadors for your brand, businesses of any size can reach a much-wider audience in a super genuine way that really sings on the platform. Whether by offering something like a coupon or a freebie or creating photo display opportunities for them to willingly take part, thinking about your followers as microinfluencers can change the way you do business on Instagram.

A manual approach to Instagram will do a lot more for you in the long run than a bunch of random, automated likes and comments.

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Should You Automate Your Instagram Marketing? - AdAge.com (blog)

Taco Bell Social Media Marketing

Taco Bell serves more than 2 billion customers each year at 7,000 restaurants across the globe. However, the fast food chain has become known for more than their appetizing selection of tacos, burritos, and quesadillas, theyre continuing to prove themselves as leaders in the world of social media marketing.

The Tex-Mex fast food chain has become prominent on every social media platform, creating a unique social media presence thats unparalleled to its competition. While fast food kingpin, McDonalds, may boast more collective followers, Taco Bell has managed to be levels ahead when it comes to engagement and the brand attention that their social media activity receives.

Making use of every available social media platform is one thing, but Taco Bell has lifted the veil that separates most major companies from their customers by engaging with them in a more personal and fun fashion. So how did Taco Bell manage to sear their name in as the heavyweights of social media marketing? The following three aspects of Taco Bells social media marketing strategy show how theyve managed to outshine their competition and how your companys strategy can learn from it.

A quick scroll through Taco Bells Instagram page or Twitter feed and its clear who they are targeting. The fast food company have defined their youth-based demographic and have found a way to appeal to them through a witty and unapologetically sardonic sense of humor. The company understands that to create a relationship with their audience, they have to channel more human-centered marketing approaches.

Many companies attempt to attract a youthful demographic, but fail because they arent able to connect with the audience. The younger generation will naturally always be more savvy when it comes to social media and can easily sniff out inauthenticity. However, Taco Bell managed to find a way to get their demographic to respond, and to do so, they had millennial minds doing the prompting.

Our method is hiring Millennial-minded individuals because they live and breathe social media, Nick Tran, the former social media lead at Taco Bell, told CMO. The digital natives entering the workforce today are passionate about social; by having them dispersed throughout our teams, we are staying on the forefront of trends.

Theres no denying that this marketing approach is working for the fast food company. Many of Taco Bells social media exchanges have managed to go viral, which has resulted in multiple media outlets doing stories on the companys social media moves and in turn, end up doing a portion of the marketing for them.

Anyone who has engaged with a big company through a social media platform knows that a majority of the responses may might as well have come from robots. The lack of personality on social media and flood of product promotions isnt going to inspire a plethora of customers to hit the follow button. Taco Bell found a way to connect with their audience by engaging with them in real time. Its a simple yet time consuming strategy, but one that has proven to grow Taco Bells social media following.

Getting the message out to there to your demographic is crucial, but so is listening to them, which is something that Taco Bell understands and thrives at. Nick Tran explains this strategy shift by saying, The Main difference in strategy now vs. before is that what we are doing today in social media is real-time, and we listen and engage all the time.

By listening and engaging, Taco Bell isnt just tapping a like button or copying and pasting a blurb, they are responding in a humanistic way thats laced with enough playfulness that it instantly warrants a share from the recipient. Theyve also embraced a content strategy that goes beyond what Taco Bell creates internally.

Taco Bell Old Spice Social Media Marketing

Part of Taco Bells content strategy involves influencer marketing where they connect with influencers or other brands that arent necessarily associated with the brand but have amassed sizable fan bases on their own merit. The fast food company found a way to benefit fans of their brand while promoting their products. One way the company has accomplished this is by sending influencers their products prior to the official release.

Webcast, July 26th: Best Practices for Engaging Your Channel Partners

Another way Taco Bell has managed to get their brand out there is by infiltrating trends in an organic way. The company has managed to have multiple tweets go viral by jumping on existing hashtags and trends that are prominent in the moment. To give an example, when #10ThingsIGetAlot was trending, Taco Bell tweeted Do you sell bells? alongside the hashtag. The tweet garnered a significant amount of attention and worked because it was both funny and a tad self depreciative, which further instills a personality behind the brand.

With that in mind, Taco Bell had the brilliant idea of sending hand-written notes and wearable brand-related items to models, actresses, musicians, and other celebrities popular with young people.

Have a look at the ring and letter sent to actress and model Chrissy Teigen after she shared a tweet about getting married.

Taco Bell Chrissy Teigen Social Media Marketing

Every company wants to reach a sense of virality with their social media strategy, but very few are willing to step outside the safe zone quite like Taco Bell is. Not only does the team behind the Tex Mex fast food chain take risks with their posts, they also post where most marketers are known to fail. For example, the Reddit community is quick to shut down anyone trying to market to them, but Taco Bell has managed to infiltrate unscathed.

One of Taco Bells most successful social media campaigns was for their new mobile ordering app. Instead of taking the regular approach of the occasional promotional post to pique the interest of their followers, Taco Bell gave them no choice. The company basically blacked out all of their social media accounts and left only one phrase to promote the app. In just 24 hours after launching this campaign, Taco Bells app secured itself in one of the most downloaded in Apples food and drink category. Not only did the company not risk their promotion getting lost in the rest of their social media activity, it made sure that their followers were the first to know.

Another way Taco Bell made their engagement skyrocket was through the use of emojis. The company realized that there was no taco emoji and started a petition to get one, which worked after they managed to receive over 33,000 signatures. They followed this engagement booster by inventing a Taco Emoji Engine, which not only celebrated the taco emoji entering the texting game, it prompted followers to tweet at them for a unique response. In the first five days of introducing the Taco Emoji Engine, the companys official Twitter page received more than half a million direct tweets.

Taco Bells social media strategy may benefit from their teams creative genius, but theres a lot to learn from the path to success that theyve paved. Creating a brand personality that strives from being blandly corporate, engaging with customers in real time, and taking creative risks are all steps that can be incorporated into any social media strategy to ensure it excels.

Steven Tulman Marketing, Sales and Leadership Enthusiast | Speaker | Author | Investor Helping build stronger brands and loyal customersthrough influencer and social media marketing. Steven is the CEO of Social Pulse Marketing Inc., a leading influencer marketing and social media marketing agency helping Fortune 500 companies increase brand Viewfullprofile

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How Taco Bell is Winning at Social Media Marketing - Business 2 Community

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