While Instagram is pivotal to promoting anything these days, it’s not easy street as soon as you set up your profile; once you get onto Instagram, you will need to work hard to keep up with this popular platform. Instagram is an integral part of our lives which means that for businesses, this could be one of the biggest keys.

When you think about the fact that it is in the hands of your buyers and wherever they go, they are promoting their lives; you need to get in on the ground floor to promote your business. But what are the best tips for businesses looking to promote themselves on Instagram?

1. Get a Business Profile

It’s important to get a business profile, not a personal one. If you set up a business account, it gives you access to features you cannot use with a personal one, such as Instagram Shopping, Instagram Ads, and Instagram Insights.

A business account is crucial, and even if you set up a personal account, you can turn this into a business account to get the most out of the numerous Instagram features.

2. Use Free Tools

From Instagram Insights to tools like Buffer, there are a wide variety of options to grow your following and can help you to ensure your profile is consistent.

After all, the importance of something as simple as scheduling posts on a regular basis will mean the difference between you and another business gaining access to an important customer.

3. Try Sponsored Ads

One of the best ways to drive traffic on conversions is to use sponsored ads. If you need to reach people who do not follow your account, you can set up your ads using targeted advertisements.

A sponsored ad looks exactly the same as a regular Instagram post but apart from the fact that the word “sponsored” is where the location tag would be, and with a CTA button at the bottom.

Sponsored ads are not annoying like pop-ups and blend in with the rest of the content the user is consuming. While it can be costly, it is certainly worth it if you want to set yourself apart from businesses that are using the many free tools.

4. Use Instagram Stories and IGTV

Instagram Stories are a key component of a fantastic Instagram marketing strategy. Many businesses are using them and getting fantastic results. While Instagram Stories disappear after 24-hours, they are a perfect way to connect with followers.

The best strategy to use Instagram stories for your business is to tell a story, be consistent, and use a call to action. IGTV is also another approach to engage your followers, but the difference between Instagram Stories and IGTV is that it’s built for long-form content.

5. Use Hashtags Wisely

Hashtags are a fantastic way to increase your visibility, and while many personal users fill their content with hashtags, it’s important not to over-egg the pudding.

If you put too many hashtags on a post, it looks like you are spamming, but if you also use repetitive or irrelevant ones, this can also turn users away. Choose hashtags that are relevant and specific to your business, and you must be minimal with them. Between 5 and 9 hashtags per post is the magic number.

6. Find the Best Times to Post

There are a wide variety of times to post based on your industry. If you are a retail business, the optimum times are Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at 12 pm (yes, really). Those that work in education should only post on Thursday at 4 pm or 5 pm. There really is an ideal time to post on Instagram.

Read: Agony Aunt: When Is The Best Time To Post On Social Media?

7. Track Metrics That Matter

To improve your Instagram performance, you need to understand it. Having the right results will give you clarity, but this is where knowing the right metrics will help you get the most out of your campaign.

The three you need to track are CTR (click-through rates), engagement rates, and follower growth rates. By monitoring these metrics, you will market your business far more effectively.

Read: 11 Social Media Metrics To Track in 2020

8. Get to Grips With the Infamous Instagram Algorithm

As Instagram grew in popularity, the chronological feed was replaced with an algorithm in 2016. The purpose was, in theory, for people to see more relevant content, but this can result in difficulties for businesses to optimise their posts.

But Instagram has now revealed how the algorithm works and the key factors that will determine how well a post performs, including interest timeliness, the relationship frequency, following, and usage.

9. Experiment With Captions

Instagram is a predominantly visual medium, but captions are just as important when you are promoting your brand voice. Instagram captions can be up to 2,200 characters which provide a wide variety of options to tell your story.

But only the first two lines of text appear in the news feed, which means you need to make a significant impact in those lines. But that’s not to say you should neglect long-form content. If you can tell a great story and make the caption compelling and relevant, you should go for it.

10. Cross-promote Instagram posts

Cross-promotion is one of the most effective ways to increase your reach. As Instagram is part of the holy trinity of social media, there are so many other platforms that you can take advantage of.

If you have followers on Twitter or LinkedIn, you could invite them to follow you on Instagram, as this will generate more exposure to your Instagram content and improve your brand all for a reduced cost.

Conclusion

If your business hasn’t got into Instagram, now is the time. With over 1 billion active users, it is behind Facebook but ahead of Twitter, making it the middle child of the social media world.

Promoting your business via the holy trinity of social media is essential, and Instagram marketing will increase your audience and benefit your business further.

Social media marketing is one of the most outsourced requirements for a business. There are many benefits to outsourcing your social media, 6 of which we’re going to discuss below.

What does outsourcing involve?

Like with any area of your business that you’re considering outsourcing, it involves handing the reigns over to another brand who specialises in the area you don’t. There are so many benefits of social media to a business that you might not fully understand, allowing the company you outsource the work to, to step in and meet your requirements.

It will involve you working alongside a marketing manager and their team to formulate a plan that not only makes sense but works for your business. They won’t create a social media marketing campaign without consulting you first.

You will often hand over the management of your social media accounts to a social media expert within the company you decide to outsource to, which will also help to free up some of your own time to complete tasks only you can.

Read: Which Is Best: In-House or Agency?

The benefits of outsourcing

1. It can be cost-effective

There are multiple benefits to outsourcing your social media marketing, but the most prominent has to be how cost-effective it is. If social media marketing is not your forte, it’s far more cost-effective to outsource the management of your social media accounts to someone else.

It’s far more expensive to try and hire someone to do it as a full-time role, in-house. When considering hiring an employee, you would have to include payroll, sick or holiday time, and many other payouts that a growing brand might not want.

When outsourcing to a social media management company, you’ll receive an inclusive package tailored to your business for a set price. Some brands will offer different packages, but often they include the full management of your social media pages.

This will consist of daily posting and running ad campaigns that have been created alongside the vision your brand has.

2. It can save time

It requires a lot of effort to manage social media accounts across multiple platforms. As a start-up, this might have been something you spent days on, believing that social media platforms could boost your business presence.

However, it does take up so much time to create campaigns, create daily posts, and to interact with potential customers. That’s why time saved is one of the best reasons why you should consider outsourcing your social media marketing if you don’t already.

There will be specialised skills that only you can manage in-house, such as client meetings, financial meetings, and interacting with customers.

The less time you spend on time-consuming tasks, the more time you can spend on actually growing your business. Whatever brand you partner with should create a social media marketing strategy that’s both time and cost-effective, getting you quicker and more reliable results.

For more on this, read our article on how hiring an agency can save you time.

3. You have access to experts’ skill sets

Everyone has a different skill set. You might like to think that you have a grip on social media marketing because you spend so much time scrolling through social media, but the reality is far different.

It’s not just about posting good content; it’s about understanding the algorithms of each social media platform, the best times to post, what content attracts the most attention and much more.

This is something you might not have the skill set to do. It’s important to remember that some social media marketing companies that you could outsource to will also have different skill-sets.

Some will be better at creating effective campaigns; some will be better at customers interaction. You need to make sure that you partner with a brand that you know is going to work for you.

4. You have access to advanced technology

Technology has transformed the way that a business is able to operate. However, it’s often not our own technology that provides the base for many of the processes that we have in place.

If you were to outsource your social media marketing campaigns, you would have access to advanced technology, especially in the area of tracking and performance. Technology can now do anything from seeing which social media platforms are the best, what age groups you attract, how much traffic each post gets, and many more.

For you to have this technology yourself would mean an added cost, and you might not have the skill-set to use it to its full capacity. Technology is one of the reasons why incredible social media campaigns can be created across all social media platforms.

5. You get platform-specific knowledge

As we have touched on previously, many factors contribute to a successful social media marketing campaign, and that’s having a full understanding of how to utilise each social media platform. There are algorithms to understand, posting times that differ per app, and content creation differences.

For example, Instagram is more for creative and eye-catching content through the use of images, meaning colour plays a big part. Twitter is more for product promotion and customer interaction.

Facebook has changed somewhat over the years and is now more for information about your business. There are so many social media trends, and they’re ever-changing. This is something you might not have the time, or even the capacity to understand fully.

6. You’re exposed to new perspectives on your content

It’s always good to gain a new perspective on anything in life if you feel your surroundings have become stale. The same goes for social media marketing.

If you have managed your accounts from the beginning, you may find that you’re posting similar content all of the time and finding it hard to be creative. Bringing fresh eyes and fresh ideas to your campaigns will boost the reach they have.

Social media management tools

There is a range of social media management tools that you can use to manage all of your accounts under one platform. They are great for scheduling posts and promoting your content in one place.

Here are our favourites:

• Crowdfire
• PromoRepublic
• Postoplan
• Taplink
• Brand24
• Iconosquare

Conclusion

To conclude, these are just a few of the benefits of outsourcing your social media account management and promotion. It’s something you will have to take time to consider and ensure you partner with the right brand for your company.

If you are looking to outsource, why not try Adzooma Marketplace where you can find a variety of social media agencies in your area.

Take a look at the Adzooma Marketplace today, to find the right social media agency for you.

What’s more, 91% of consumers now prefer interactive and visual content over traditional, text-based or static media.

To help you tap into that audience, we’ve pulled together 6 advanced techniques designed to improve your social media presence.

The role of creative content

Creative content has more of an impact than we realise. As children, we’re given picture books to inspire our visual thinking and help us understand what we’re reading. We don’t stop enjoying this as we grow into adulthood; we don’t suddenly prefer to absorb information in harder ways – simplicity is always preferred whatever our age.

For example, if we’re given a list of statistics in both an article and an infographic, most people will remember more of the infographic by nature.

See this data in Adzooma’s recent survey

51.2% of people have purchased from a brand because of the way they spoke online.

What’s more, 57.5% of customers said they are more likely to buy from brands with strong personalities.

29.9% of people have said that they wouldn’t be influenced either way, and just 12.7% of people have said they would be less likely to buy from brands with a strong personality.

Example A – A quote from the survey

With Example B, it’s easy to glance and take away important information with a greater understanding of the other results. Example A does a good job of telling us what we need to know but will be harder to remember amongst the rest of the data.

Images like these also have a better chance of being shared on other sites, which can increase engagement alone.

Compared to standard pieces of text, bold images and videos on social media increase views and interactions. They give you a way to produce immersive experiences and memorable content in just a few clicks, making your audience instantly feel more engaged.

What’s more, with platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn launching new story features, you can use visual content to attract a unique audience across all of your platforms.

6 ways to boost engagement through multimedia

Using these techniques won’t only make your social channels look more appealing, but will help you gain loyal followers who consistently engage with your posts.

1. Utilise user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) refers to the text, images and videos created by social media users. Brands often share the content on their own accounts to show that real people buy from them, making it an excellent tactic to increase customer loyalty and longevity.

Take this example from Five Guys:

Almost all six of these have been reposted from their following, helping Five Guys build their brand, improve the quality of their feed and attract new customers. They also average at around 2,000 likes per post, as consumers are 2.4x more likely to view this kind of content as authentic.

If this doesn’t work for you or you’re a SAAS platform, you can also share reviews or what other people have said about your brand. Here’s what Larry Kotch, founder of The Brains Marketing had to say about ours.

2. Create a visual language

By the term ‘language’, we’re talking about the way your visual content ties together and the feeling it gives your audience. It’s a small move that will make people remember your brand, look forward to what’s coming next and start to trust you.

For example, if you’re a fitness brand, you might use features such as Instagram TV (IGTV) to show your workouts and encourage people to interact. In addition, you might decide to publish snappy eye-catching videos like Hootsuite, but with daily inspirational quotes. It’s easier to be creative if you think of it as a guide rather than a strategy, kind of like a tone of voice document for your multimedia.

At Adzooma, we tend to use:

• Screenshots of the platform to show how easy it is to use and what the different features look like
• Team photos and videos to show behind the scenes at our offices and that we are a group of real people
• Videos created by our design team showcasing the Adzooma brand, typically as announcement posts

Whatever your industry or brand, a strong theme will make you recognisable to both new and existing followers. If you’re struggling to get your brand out there to begin with, one of our highly-qualified Marketplace agencies can get your business off the ground.

Find your perfect match here, using our updated ratings and review system to help you make the right decision. You can even send quick, personalised messages to be sure exactly what the agency is offering. It’s designed for you, for your business and for your success.

3. Become an expert at the basics

If you want to ramp up your engagement, you need to know what makes excellent visual content. You don’t have to be a fully-qualified artist or designer to know what looks good.

This includes:

1. The rule of thirds. This photography rule helps you centre your shot. You imagine every image is split into nine squares and the centre of your image should land on one of four points for maximum impact.
2. Natural light. If your image or video has terrible lighting, no one will interact with it. Take product shots, team photos and everything else in natural light with as little shadows or distractions as possible.
3. A clear focal point. If your images feel crowded or your videos confused, they probably are. Split your content into different posts to make sure each one has a clear message.
4. Adding text, illustrations and logos. A great way to boost engagement is to make your content your own. Test different tools, see how animations work and which font best suits your brand.
5. Little editing. In most cases, the original shot is much better than the edited one, particularly if we’re talking about obvious social media filters.

Following these principles won’t only help you create content that looks good, but will subconsciously draw people to your brand.

4. Make sure all your content has a purpose

You should use visual content to engage your audience, not to fill gaps on your platforms. Everything you post should add value, educate people, entertain them or inform them about something new. If you’re unsure, use Adzooma’s social channels for inspiration.

Here’s an image we posted to showcase our brand personality:

And here’s a video we posted to help customers navigate the Adzooma platform:

And here’s a video we posted to help customers navigate the Adzooma platform:

Watch the full video here.

In the first instance, a stock image of a dog saying our office dog Dexter is in the office wouldn’t have made sense. For the video, the same information would’ve been much harder to follow and understand if it was listed in a static image. It’s about what makes sense for the post, and if it feels like a relatable GIF, go for it.

5. Make use of stories

Stories are an excellent way to involve your followers with something you’re doing at that exact moment. Not only because platforms like Instagram have more than 500 million daily Stories users, but because you can use them to add a personal touch and enhance your visual language.

For example, if you own a bakery, you might have visualised posting drool-worthy content all over your platforms.

But, posting repetitive stock updates, reminding customers of opening times and complaining about people not collecting their goods actually takes up the majority of your posts. For new followers in particular, it might not be the best for engagement.

Making use of stories, on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, helps people to connect with you and show that you aren’t always in strict business mode. It’s content people want to see more of, even if it’s just you trying the baked goods yourself or teaching younger siblings how to bake. Social media influencers are big for this exact reason – people are interested in other people, so content that invites other people into their lives always performs well.

You can also repost content from your feed to drive more engagement, give people a teaser of what’s coming soon instead of a written post, and increase interactions with ad-hoc polls, quizzes and questions.

6. Make visuals part of your strategy

Visual content is as good as the planning behind it. If you have a detailed strategy, you’re much more likely to engage with your target audience and gain followers that will become loyal to your brand.

For example, if you update your Instagram story with behind-the-scenes product launches, can the same content be posted on LinkedIn? If there’s a risk it might get lost between millions of posts on Facebook, how are you going to adapt your content? It’s these questions that will help you increase engagement across all of your social channels.

Likewise, you want to think further than just posting content at peak times.

Will animated content work better around certain holidays? Are people less likely to watch longer videos during the festive period? Planning ahead will ensure you can provide as much value as possible at the exact times your audience is using social media.

Adzooma Marketplace is fuelled with digital marketing agencies who can help improve your strategy. With one onboard, you will have a clear idea of exactly who your visuals are tailored towards and how to make them have the most impact.

Find the expertise you need to grow here.

Using multimedia to your advantage

If that isn’t enough to convince you, we’re 65% more likely to remember information if it includes an image. So if you’re trying to increase awareness, grow your following and boost engagement, it’s time to tap into the world of multimedia.

For more articles like this, head over to our own social pages or bounce around the Adzooma blog.

So as a small business trying to reach new customers, social media should be a critical part of your marketing strategy.

To learn more about your audience, it pays to do research (literally). Ask yourself: who is interacting with us? Then you can start to tailor your content and responses to them. It can also give an idea of how broad your audience is (and whether you have an audience at all).

In this article, we’ll look at how to make the most out of social media marketing for your small business.

Advantages of having a social media presence

You’ll increase your brand awareness. By implementing a social media strategy will greatly increase your brand recognition since you will be engaging with a broad audience of consumers.

It will create more inbound traffic not only through referrals but search engines as well. While social has no direct effect on the way Google ranks pages, it does have an impact on Bing’s search algorithm. According to Radd Interactive:

“Content that is popular and shared frequently on social media may rank better on Bing because its algorithm is designed to acknowledge social signals.”

Social media also builds a loyal customer base. It’s becoming crucial to regularly engage with your customers and build a rapport with them. Customers often use social media channels as a way of communicating directly with your business, meaning that it’s an excellent opportunity to connect with them.

Social media is not limited to introducing your brand’s products and promotional campaigns.

The best social platforms for small businesses

When it comes to what platforms are best for your business, then it’s wise to do some research to find out where your audiences spend their time online. You can use different social channels to reach different audiences or to meet various business goals.

Establish a presence on the social platforms that matter. The best ones are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

It’s also important to keep up with the latest social media trends and apply them to your small business.

5 quick tips for small businesses on social media

1. Consider your goals

First of all, you need to be thinking about what you want to achieve with your socials. For many, it can be a combination of elements, such as:

• Generating new leads
• Building your brands profile
• Driving traffic to your website
• Establishing a ‘community’ to surround your business
• Providing high-quality customer service and effective outreach
• A way of growing your revenue
• Boosting engagement

2. Think about your target audience

It would help if you then considered your target audience, who will share common characteristics, such as demographics and behaviours. They are a specific group of people you want to reach with your social channels, as they are the people who are most likely to be interested in your content, products, or services.

3. Decide what content you want to publish and when

So what type of content should you post and how often? Ultimately, you want to be able to convert your social media followers into customers, so your posts need to be engaging and of course, relevant to them.

Your content should be posted at optimal times and posted using the best hashtags – to help your reach. This can sometimes be easier to manage by creating a social content calendar that will keep your posts scheduled and consistent.

Read: 20 Social Media Marketing Tips for 2020

By creating content that starts a conversation, such as a poll, then you are actively engaging your customers and encouraging them to interact.

4. Make your content interesting

The content you post can be about anything you want, but it needs to attract attention and be useful. This can be new products, client testimonials or videos. You can even post photos of your employees to help put their personalities at the forefront of your brand.

Also, consider eye-catching visuals where applicable. Facebook and Pinterest, for example, are very visual platforms and people expect the best images.

5. Measure your success

Higher audience engagement leads to more people seeing your posts which will help you achieve your social media goals. This is where engagement analytics tools are handy to gain some insight on where your posts might be lacking, which will enable you to focus on creating interesting content to boost your engagement.

You can help boost your engagement organically or pay for this.

How to judge success

There are a variety of metrics available that can help you determine how well your socials are doing and whether your efforts are paying off.

For many businesses, their goals revolve around increased engagement, new followers, faster response times or listening to social conversations more thoroughly.

The use of demographics and post habits can give you a greater knowledge of how well your social media marketing performs. Success can be judged by any number of factors such as:

• The amount of engagement your posts receive
• How many times they are shared
• What their reach has been and whether you have received a spike in followers

Engagement is fast becoming a social media buzzword but knowing when and how users engage with your content can influence your future strategy. For example, Twitter offers 3 ways to publically engage with a tweet:

1. Like it
2. Retweet it (you can also quote tweet or “retweet with comment”)
3. Reply to it

You can do these in any combination and from there you could measure the sentiment behind replies and quote tweets or create ratios between each form of engagement. The more granular you get, the more advanced your techniques will be so only do this if you have the capability.

Twitter also offers its own tips for what to tweet to get the best engagement:

• Limit to 1-2 hashtags per Tweet
• Be conversational
• Keep your copy short and sweet
• Use images, GIFs, and/or videos whenever possible
• Test, test, test (and use analytics to see what works)
• Monitor events and trending conversations

Try them out!

Should you use a marketing agency?

Agencies are undoubtedly useful for bringing new customers to your website, and they’re able to optimise your campaigns to achieve great results.

If a company doesn’t have someone that has the time to devote to social media, then an agency might be the answer. However, it’s becoming more and more common for people to manage their own social media platforms.

It’s important that you keep track of which methods and platforms are working best for your business and concentrate on those channels. By using the available analytic tools, it will help give you a greater understanding of your audience and how best to appeal to them.

Here are 20 useful social media marketing tips that will set you straight for 2023.

1. Set your goals

Do not rush to launch a social media campaign without defining your goals. It’s necessary for you to understand the motives behind your marketing strategy. A clearly defined marketing goal is the primary driver of an effective social media marketing strategy. In setting your goal, ensure that it’s specific, feasible, and measurable.

2. Have a plan for social sharing

You need to encourage your existing audience to share any content you have created. Install social sharing plug-ins like Social Warfare. This application will make it easier for visitors to spot your sharing buttons when they are navigating through your website.

Since Social Warfare is mobile-friendly, you can customize the image and text files to suit different social media platforms and boost the number of shares.

3. Use organic social (and paid social if appropriate)

Organic social media traffic can be generated when you share content on social networks. However, your posts can reach even larger audiences when you boost them through promotions. Be ready to go the extra mile if that means investing your money in paid social advertising schemes.

Companies that invest in paid adverts on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn can generate leads and increase their conversion rates significantly. So, pay for the clicks when necessary.

4. Make a social media content calendar

Scheduling your publications is also of the utmost importance. See it as part of the planning process. A good social media calendar will be of great help when it comes to content organization and timely publication.

With calendars, you can allocate resources more effectively and improve teamwork among marketing groups. Thankfully, by using a tool like SocialPilot, setting up a social media calendar should not be a problem at all.

5. Focus on engagement and reach, not views and follower counts

It’s not enough to post content and watch your views and followers increase; engaging with your potential customers is also key for social media marketing success. Make time to respond to comments or suggestions left by your viewers.

Keep your ears on the ground to know the trends and react to them appropriately. Successful social media marketers see the two aspects of the platforms — that’s the customers, and the business needs to communicate effectively.

A social app like Hootsuite makes it easier for companies to centralize their social media accounts, and respond to all comments at a go.

6. Try Facebook Video (but include subtitles)

Facebook takes the lead as the world’s most popular social media app. Many marketers agree that Facebook video marketing is the real deal. Statistics show that Facebook video posts generate a 59% engagement rate more than non-video posts.

To create a compelling Facebook video, include subtitles, make the video as short as possible, go straight to the point, and catch your viewers’ attention by using compelling thumbnails.

7. Be authentic

To build a loyal customer base, you have to be authentic. Authenticity in marketing doesn’t differ much from its ordinary sense. It talks about the need for open communication and keeping your target audience in sync with your brand genuinely.

8. Use Facebook Analytics

Do you want to get into the bottom of the matter? Use Facebook Analytics to explore how your audiences engage with your company’s Facebook pages and websites. With a community strength of over two billion active users, Facebook Analytics offers you the insights you need to understand customers’ journeys across your channels.

9. Optimize Your Facebook Business Page

Only a few people know that it’s possible to customize Facebook Business pages by using cover videos, instead of static images.

As explained earlier, videos attract more engagement than ordinary posts. Aside from using moving pictures to promote your brand, you can also exhibit your products on your business page and promote upcoming sales as well.

10. Add user-generated content (UGC) to your page

You don’t have to prepare every single post by yourself. Let your customers’ voices be heard by featuring their user-generated content. Generally, customers like their brands to know them on personal levels.

One way to show your loyalty to customers and increase collective engagement is by sharing audience posts which mention your business name.

When you give room for clients’ posts to feature on your page, you can increase your brand awareness, since your customers will spread the good news about your company to others.

11. Use no more than three hashtags per tweet

Using Twitter hashtags appropriately can also boost your marketing strategies by large proportions. Some companies register their presence on Twitter by involving themselves in trending topics. Even though this is not a bad idea, you may want to limit the number of hashtags you use on Twitter conversations.

Using too many hashtags can dilute the focus of your business brand. Instead, use less than three hashtags in your posts, and only participate in trends that are related to your industry.

12. Don’t be afraid to retweet your own tweet for boosted engagement

Also, to further boost your Twitter promotional posts, you can retweet your own tweets. There’s nothing wrong with that. When your followers see your retweets, it can ignite their interests also to retweet your posts. And before you know it, your post has set the trend rolling.

13. Try Twitter Ads

To some businesses, Twitter advertising also works like a charm. If you have a lot of active followers on Twitter, a paid advertising campaign can be a good technique to market your products to the right audience. There are three ways you can advertise your content on Twitter – promoted tweets, accounts, and trends. Irrespective of your choice of a paid advertising campaign, Twitter promotions can help in lead generation.

14. Try using emojis (but not too many)

According to Twitter, companies’ usage of emojis has gone up by 461% every year. And there is a reason for the massive increase. Those smileys and heart emojis can be used to convey promotional messages. But you don’t have to use emojis in your posts excessively.

A moderate number of branded emojis can make your posts stand out and benefit your campaign.

15. Use Twitter Analytics

Businesses can use Twitter Analysis to study the growth of their company Twitter accounts. The analytics page gives you a graphical overview of your follower counts.

Although followers don’t necessarily translate to customers, if you garner more followers, you increase your chances of measuring visibility metrics such as engagement rates and impressions.

Also, you will be able to identify your best-performing content and how to craft your posts to attract viewers.

16. Try Instagram Ads

After Facebook, Instagram is another conducive social media environment for building businesses. With Instagram ads, you can drive your brand awareness, increase your customer landscape, and share amazing stories with your followers. The different kinds of Instagram ads include video ads, photo ads, carousel ads, and storytelling ads. You can check Boosted’s article about Instagram marketing tips.

17. Test different filters (but stick to one afterwards)

The augmented reality Instagram filters were first built for fun. But now, they are finding applications in marketing strategies. Many brands use AR filters to increase the awareness of their products or brands.

They make your posts stand out and boost your engagement. Try different filters to see which one suits your brand, but for proper branding, stick to one filter afterwards.

18. Test different caption formats

In Instagram marketing, visuals make big differences. Aside from that, an appealing photo needs to carry the right caption format. Ideally, you may want to draft your captions before settling on the right one.

Use emojis in moderation, explain the message behind the photos or videos, and include a call to action. This is an acceptable format for a good Instagram caption.

19. Test different hashtags

Instagram hashtags work like that of Facebook and Twitter. Different hashtags can let people find your posts with ease once you make your content and account public. Hashtags allow unconnected people to keep in touch with the same topic.

20. Use Instagram Analytics

As Instagram marketing becomes more popular, Instagram Analytics apps assist marketers in tracking their progress and understand areas that need improvement. For companies that have business accounts on the Instagram platform, they can freely access Instagram Analytics.

Although social media marketing strategies may differ from company to company, the positive results have remained consistent across the industries. Allowing the above 20 tips to guide your social media marketing strategies will help to generate the results that you require.

No matter the size or type of your company, knowing exactly how to sell to your customers during this tough time will help you achieve more success. As the saying goes: you reap what you sow and that’s no different in business.

Here’s how you can be socially conscious when selling through COVID-19, with actionable tips to keep your customers onside.

1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

If you don’t know how your customers feel, you aren’t going to be able to sell to them. It really is that simple. People who are deeply affected by the crisis aren’t going to care about your hand-picked bohemian earrings if you’re trying to shove them down their throat like they’re the next best cure. You have to be realistic.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. For example, if you received an email from a brand trying to sell you some jewellery, would you rather:

1. “Stop stressing today with our beautiful tear-drop two-piece set – perfectly crafted to make you feel better. Buy yours today to make isolation a breeze!”
2. “Want to celebrate your loved one’s birthday while social distancing? We have the perfect gift. Or, if you want to treat yourself once the crisis is over, we’ve got you sorted.”

The first option would probably annoy you because it clearly isn’t true. Yet for some reason, it’s how hundreds of brands are trying to sell their products or services during this time.

To avoid this, you can:

• Imagine every customer is your grandparent. You wouldn’t try and trick them into believing a product or service is essential for them, so you shouldn’t do it to your customers either. By selling to everyone like they are someone you respect and wouldn’t want to be taken advantage of, you will speak in a much softer tone, while still including important details.
• Think about your personal needs. If you don’t think it’s important to order items such as jewellery or clothing during COVID-19, don’t assume your customers will be any different. Write your sales pitch in a way that would be convincing to yourself, and the likelihood is it’ll be much more effective than your usual techniques.
• Address the fact your business isn’t a huge necessity. If this is true, admit it before you sell. You can still highlight the benefits of your business, but this will help you come across much more genuine and show that you understand the effects of the crisis. A brand that has done this particularly well is the personalised gift company, The Book of Everyone, as you can see in their email here:

Better yet, there are several CRM platforms that can help to improve your messaging and scale your lead generation. They’re great for building relationships, analysing key interactions, and putting strategies in place to focus on customer retention.

If you aren’t sure where to look, Adzooma Marketplace can put you in touch with CRM agencies who specialise in these areas.

2. Reevaluate your content

To be socially conscious doesn’t mean to completely get rid of your entire marketing strategy. If you had a plan in place, you can adapt the content you were originally going to publish and turn it into something much more suitable during COVID-19.

A good example to learn from is VSCO, a photography mobile app which recently launched its new video-editing feature “Montage” at the beginning of the crisis. Had COVID-19 never happened, they probably would’ve marketed this as a way to collate and edit your favourite photos and memories in the app, from travelling, special occasions, and more.

However, since it was announced on 22nd March 2020, just two days before the UK went into lockdown, the feature was revealed in a much softer and less promotional tone. The email read:

“Share your perspective with us

As the world slows down, we know that these times can feel difficult and uncertain. And in a small way, we hope our community connects you with others around the world documenting their realities and finding beauty around them.

We also hope that you keep making and sharing your perspective with VSCO Montage, the newest storytelling tool included with membership.”

All three of these points are extremely important: now we’re in a crisis, the things people ‘need’ have quickly turned into luxuries that they can go months without, making it harder than ever for businesses to sell non-essential items. But, when like VSCO, you find a way to sell with compassion, consideration, and understanding, you’ll find people still want to buy from you.

Simply adapting your language also works well, especially if you can use it to fit in with conversations amongst your target market. American brand Anthropologie is a good example of this, keeping their customers engaged through Instagram captions about isolation.

3. Use social media

Blending social media with other marketing channels can really help to drive you more profits, even if you have to step away from the traditional sales techniques you’re used to. Selling doesn’t always mean harsh, straight-to-the-point, and direct promotions, particularly during a crisis.

Social media can have untold benefits for your business. As well as allowing you to promote your products or services without the hassle of PPC advertising (pay-per-click), it gives you the chance to highlight your brand naturally as your posts will be surrounded by other generic content.

The best thing? Techniques like this are made even easier with social media marketing agencies.

Moreover, social platforms are a great way to humanise your brand during COVID-19 by being upfront and honest about the effect it’s having on your business. American television personality, fashion designer, and actress Kristin Cavallari did this excellently, as she promoted a sale for her jewellery brand Uncommon James.

Here’s what she posted on Instagram:

As you can see, she was honest and transparent about her motivations rather than trying to flog her jewellery because she wanted money, which proved she isn’t going to hide behind her impressive following to dilute the impact of the crisis. The fast-paced nature of social media would’ve also spread this message far and wide, making it much more effective than some cold telephone calls.

If your brand or existing social media persona doesn’t really suit this type of content, increasing brand awareness during the crisis will lead to an increase in sales when COVID-19 passes. Some great examples include:

• McDonalds Brazil running an ad showing its iconic golden arches separated to indicate social distancing
• Nike launching a campaign encouraging people to ‘play inside’, with the line “If you’ve ever dreamed of playing for millions around the world, now is your chance.”

To figure out which platforms are worth advertising on during this period, there are useful resources online that break down discussions about COVID-19 and note which ones seem to be the most popular.

Lay the groundwork for an incredible future

Selling your product or service during COVID-19 might not be easy, but it definitely isn’t impossible. Even if you aren’t getting a regular stream of customers right now, considering your context and tone, reevaluating your content, and soft selling on social media can build the foundations for a great strategy once the crisis has passed.

And remember, not everyone is going to be your customer, and that’s okay.

You don’t need everyone to like you, but to keep those who do onboard, you need to prove that you are an attentive, authentic, and caring brand.

They will be coming your way at the end of every single month, bringing you the latest updates from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and more.

Ready? Here are 8 of the biggest PPC news updates from June.

1. LinkedIn launched engagement retargeting

What: On June 2nd, LinkedIn announced engagement retargeting options for video ads and lead- generation forms. This will allow advertisers to reach users who have watched 25, 50, 75, 97%, or 100% of their video ads, as well as those who have opened or submitted one of their forms.

Why: As LinkedIn is a platform designed for professionals, it normally takes longer to convert prospects into customers and ensure you’re targeting the right people. Plus, in just one example, LinkedIn stated that the new remarketing capabilities increased TOPdesk’s conversion rate by 20%, while their cost per conversion went down by 24%.

The result: Audiences for lead-gen targeting can be found under Matched Audiences > Account Assets, and will have a minimum size requirement of 300. Audiences for video are in the same section, though this also extends to users who watched your video on the Audience Network.

2. Google featured snippets now highlight answers on your website

What: Google took to Twitter to announce that featured snippets will now take users to the exact text highlighted for HTML pages when it’s clear where the text actually is. This comes after Google began testing the feature on desktop for non-AMP pages around a year ago.

Why: Being directed to the exact text on a page will make search much faster for users, allowing them to find the information they need instantly. However, as some users pointed out, it isn’t always going to be possible for Google to highlight snippets, and some searches might be faced with a paywall.

The result: There’s no markup needed by webmasters to enable a featured snippet. If a browser doesn’t support the underlying technology needed, or if our systems can’t confidently determine exactly where within a page to direct a click, clicking a featured snippet will take a user to the top of the source web page.

3. Google rolled out four new attributes to GMB listings

What: Google rolled out four new attributes that businesses can use to make their Google My Business listing stand out in the SERPs. These include:

• Online Care
• Online Appointment
• Online Estimates
• Online Classes

All of which will be shown beneath the businesses name and opening hours.

Why: Google has been rolling out updates since the start of the pandemic, such as these for restaurants, to help users make more informed decisions about where to visit. Since a lot of businesses are also only operating online, these attributes should clear up any confusion and direct searchers to the services most ideal for them.

The result: These attributes won’t be relevant for every business, but it’s suspected there will be some more updates related to safety measures when stores re-open. For now, businesses can add these attributes to their GMB listing in the Location section of their account.

4. Google announced free ads for businesses in Google Maps

What: From now until September 2020, smart campaign advertisers can promote their business for free in Google Maps using promoted pins. Advertisers won’t be charged for clicks, calls, or sales generated from this feature.

Why: Promoted pins will help businesses stand out in Google Maps by highlighting specific services and offerings and hopefully make it easier for them to reopen after lockdown. In fact, according to Google, over 1 billion people use Google Maps to see what’s around them, search for businesses, and find directions.

The result: Google has started rolling out promoted pins for advertisers with a Google My Business profile, and suggest it will be fully available in the coming weeks. In addition to this, Google Ads is enhancing smart campaigns with the ability to make the sign-up process easier and faster, show performance directly in the search results, and control when ads are shown.

5. Snapchat to roll out dynamic ads globally

What: Since being impressed with the US beta, Snapchat is now offering their dynamic ads worldwide. The product allows advertisers to automatically create ads in real time using the brand’s extensive product catalogs, instead of manually creating their own format, and showcase their products in a more native manner.

Why: Ed Couchman, Snapchat U.K. General Manager said the number of businesses that wanted to get involved was far above what they expected, “showing the appetite for brands to get onboard with ecommerce”. Adidas’s media team also saw a 52% growth in ROAS using Snapchat’s dynamic ads.

The result: Users will be required to upload their catalog to Snapchat, before their products are automatically put into a template and shown to relevant users. If a product’s price or availability changes, the ads will automatically update in real time, cutting out tedious work for the advertiser.

6. Google expanded business messages in search and local

What: On June 25th, Google announced they were expanding Business Messages in Maps and Search to support a range of businesses. They have also introduced new smart replies, visual product carousels, and unique welcome messages, as well as providing a smooth transition from automated replies to a customer service agent.

Why: The new feature will essentially allow businesses to build a better connection with their customers and make customer care more effective. This can be seen with one of the first organisations to test Messages, DISH, with partner [24]7.ai, who saw a reduction of more than 22% in average handle time using Business Messages.

The result: Business Messages is currently available in English and will cover other languages launching soon. Brands and messaging partners can sign up to access the Business Messages API and developer documentation now, and Business Messages will be available on mobile websites.

7. Users can block political ads on Facebook and Instagram

What: A new feature called the Voting Information Center has rolled out on both Facebook and Instagram, providing valuable information and allowing users to opt out of political advertising. This includes social issues ads, electoral ads, political ads from candidates, super PACs, and any ad type with a “paid for by” disclaimer.

Why: The Voting Information Center will provide details on when and where users can vote, including information on mail-in ballots, voter registration, and early voting options. This comes after Mark Zuckerberg’s statement, which reads:

The best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting, and I believe we should trust voters to make judgments for themselves.

The result: Deemed as “the largest voting information effort in US history”, the new Information Center will aim to double the estimated 2 million people who registered to vote in 2016, without being influenced by political ads. It will appear at the top of users’ Facebook and Instagram News Feeds, reflecting the latest information for their specific location.

8. Google will now auto-delete your location history

What: Following Google’s introduction of auto-delete controls, they are now giving users the choice to delete their Location History, voice, search, and YouTube activity after 3 or 18 months. Users will also have more control over their privacy settings, such as easier access to incognito mode and more proactive privacy controls.

Why: The new update is part of a wider effort by Google to give users more control over their location history, particularly after scandals in regards to privacy. This was addressed throughout the formal announcement, part of which read “As we design our products, we focus on three important principles: keeping your information safe, treating it responsibly, and putting you in control“.

The result: If you already had Location History and Web & App Activity turned on, your settings will remain the same. For advertisers, if the update helps users feel more confident and at ease with their Location History, it will be easier to narrow down targeting and achieve better results.

Keeping you in the know

That’s all from us! 9 of the most crucial PPC news updates from June.

We’ll be back next month to give you the low-down on July, but for now – follow us on Twitter for high-level tips and insights.

Tweeting aimlessly and posting unplanned Facebook posts won’t offer anything useful to your customers. There needs to be thought, consistent effort, and continual analysis and adaptation in order to get the best results and make those all-important conversions.

But you might already have a strategy and it doesn’t seem to be working. Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or an advanced user, this guide will help you create a stellar social media plan.

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is a plan of everything you want to do and achieve on social media, linked with your business goals. It will give you a detailed roadmap that determines:

• What content you will use
• What social media platforms it will feature on
• When you will share it
• How you will measure success.
• Who your audience(s) will be
• What their concerns and challenges might be
• How you can help them in your social media marketing.

A social media strategy is not a static document, but should be constantly evolving and adapting to meet different offers, changing audience demands and wider market conditions.

So, how do you go about putting together a social media strategy that works for your business? Here are 9 easy tips to help you.

1. Set your goals

How you approach your social media depends largely on what you want to gain out of it. The first step is to develop some goals you hope to achieve and effective social media metrics that can guide your activity (more on those in Step 3).

Examples of good social media marketing goals would be things like:

• Achieving a certain number of email sign-ups through Facebook
• Reaching a target CPA (cost-per-acquisition)
• Generating brand awareness on Twitter

These goals should relate to the objectives and KPIs in your business plan. You should also consider whether you’ll use paid or organic channels to achieve these goals. Both come with their advantages and disadvantages and we’ve written a guide to paid and organic social media to give this some more thought.

2. Find your target audience

Understanding your audience and what they need is fundamental to your success with social media marketing. You should never assume when it comes to the needs and wants of your audience. Luckily, there is a whole load of tools for social media analysis, and demographic data available to you to help you make informed decisions. No one platform suits every type of audience, so you must use the information available to help you target your content and spend.

A good way to do this is by creating customer personas. This will help you tailor your content and optimise your activities and strategy.

Think about the following demographics:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Interests
• Marital status
• Employment status

By aligning your product or service with different customer personas, you can plan out what content will resonate with those audiences and hit your targets.

3. Measure the most important metrics

Ever heard of vanity metrics?

They measure things like follower counts, page views, and subscribers. They’re called vanity metrics because they look good on paper but don’t tell a great deal about performance. A Facebook page with 100,000 fans might not get as much engagement as a page with 1,000 fans. You might get a lot of page views but your bounce rate might be very high, meaning they’re viewing the page and leaving without navigating to any other page on your site.

The only marketing that truly delivers is data-driven – so disregard those vanity metrics and dig deep. Ask yourself: what metrics are the most important measures of success to you? Some good examples of useful metrics are:

• Engagement rate – Facebook Insights can tell you which posts have the most engagement, including comments and shares. The same can be measured on Instagram with tools like Phlanx.
• Reach – look at a combination of your current audience growth and campaign reach to estimate a monthly average to strive for
• Bounce rate – Bounce rate is a web analytics metric and social media plays a role in that as you try to get social referral traffic. The average bounce rate from social traffic is around 54%, according to CXL but that can vary depending on the industry.

4. Choose the right social media platforms for you

If you know exactly who your audience are, then it’s far easier to determine the best approach.

According to a 5WPR report [PDF], millennials’ (defined as 18-34 year olds) daily use of Facebook is 77%, compared to 68% usage by 35-to-54 year olds and 52% of the 55-plus age group (aka “boomers”). If you target B2B customers then LinkedIn is generally a good port of call. Understand where your audience is having conversations about you or your industry and aim to be there contributing to the discussion.

5. Consider your tone for each

You may have to adapt your approach across several platforms. It’s not to say that you cannot use the same content across several social platforms, but you will need to adapt it for each – for example, asking more questions or doing a poll on Twitter, expanding the same subject into a blog post or a white paper for LinkedIn, and taking an image-led angle on the topic for Pinterest or Instagram.

You may think about creating a brand tone of voice document so that anyone who posts on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram knows what sort of tone and language they can use to keep things consistent.

6. Decide when and how you will post

Using a social dashboard can help you to keep all of your posts in check, but having some thought behind when and how you post your content will always pay off. You should know the best posting times for your audience and channel by analyzing the reach and engagement of your historic posts. Remember that you can prepare posts in advance according to a content calendar and use social media scheduling tools like Crowdfire and POSTOPLAN to push them out at the optimal times.

7. Research your competitors

Effective competitor analysis is the cornerstone of a good marketing plan, but if you haven’t been including your competitors’ social media channels in this, it’s time to start. Again, there are tools out there which can help you analyze what they are doing and gain insight (Sprout Social, Phlanx, Brandwatch, Buzzsumo). Don’t directly copy their content ideas, but you can look at what is working for them to work out what is likely to be popular for you to try.

8. Start organic, then try paid

The beauty of social media marketing is that there are different levels to it. If you build well-targeted, quality content that is shared appropriately, you should find some success just with organic, or non-paid for activity. Once you have enough of a track record to understand what is working well, you can boost this with some paid ads to gain you a share of the market.

9. Test, test, and test some more

It’s a good idea to test everything to understand exactly why it works or doesn’t work. You can use A/B or “split” testing to make minor tweaks with content and post and understand what works well. Over time, you can draw this information out into wider audience trends to inform your strategy.

Evaluate your work at least once a month to spot what changes there are, and consider using a social media dashboard to help draw out the information.

Conclusion

Your social media strategy guides the direction and purpose of everything you do on your social channels. The right one can entirely change the fortunes of your company, with minimal investment of advertising budgets required. Spending a little more time developing this strong foundation, and you could be on track for big improvements to your sales pipeline.

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (often shortened to AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to create machines that automate certain tasks and make them more efficient. AI is used in hundreds of industries around the world in different forms:

• Factories use robots to automate streamline processes and production
• Recruitment agencies use AI in intelligent software which helps to boost productivity
• AI is perfect for forecasting, useful in industries that need data on supply and demands and finding the best time to launch products

Social media users and the platforms themselves use AI extensively. For example, people have been using AI models as “influencers”. One such AI-generated influencer, Miquela, has over 2 million Instagram followers with the kind of feed that’d make a human influencer jealous.

The science of social media networks

When looking deeper into social media networks, you’ll start to see the science behind them. Used as a way to not only identify how users interact but as a method of identifying how companies can target consumers, there are so many elements that go into each application.

The technology

AI can facilitate the sharing of information, thoughts and ideas and give users quick access to content. That includes their own personal information, photos, and documents and content from news feeds.

Facebook, for example, uses a tool called Deeptext to interpret posted content and find its meaning. It does this with machine learning and then provides relevant ads to users based on that content.

Utilising a range of languages and operating systems including Python, PHP, JavaScript, and Linux, social networks can automate processes with increasing ease. It happens so fast, you’d think it was instant.

The psychology

Social media has had a profound effect on psychology. We spend hours scrolling through different pages, wanting to stay up to date with the latest information so we don’t feel left out (known as FOMO). When we post, we rely on three parts of our neural systems, according to a paper by Dar Meshi, Diana I. Tamir, and Hauke R. Heekeren:

• Social cognition (how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations)
• Self-referential cognition (how people process, store, and relating information to themselves, usually from external sources)
• Social reward processing (how people process the rewards we get from interacting with people and social situations)

On the topic of social media’s effect on how we think, author Nicholas Carr said:

“What psychologists and brain scientists tell us about interruptions is that they have a fairly profound effect on the way we think. It becomes much harder to sustain attention, to think about one thing for a long period of time, and to think deeply when new stimuli are pouring at you all day long. I argue that the price we pay for being constantly inundated with information is a loss of our ability to be contemplative and to engage in the kind of deep thinking that requires you to concentrate on one thing.”

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How The Internet Is Changing Our Brains

With these kinds of behaviours, along with other social and emotional influences that are picked up by social media networks, a never-ending AI-influenced cycle continues to spin with its users in the middle.

Customer behaviour

When looking more deeply into how businesses use them, you can clearly see the effect on customer behaviour. Businesses use social network graphs to adapt their social media strategy so that it suits their respective platforms. This, along with a better understanding of the psychology behind interactions and sharing on social media, marketers can develop content that generates higher conversion rates and build trust between them and their client base.

Benefits of AI in social media

Already, you’ll probably be aware of the ways in which social media marketing can benefit your business. But by effectively using AI in social media, there is a whole host of other benefits that you can take advantage of.

Automation

One of the biggest advantages of using AI in social media is its automation capabilities. Whether this is in automating content creation, content curation or another process, it will make your business far more productive. How? Well, not only will it speed up processes so that it can be ‘delivered’ to customers far quicker, but it will give your employees more time to spend on other aspects of their roles.

Other examples of tasks to automate in social media management:

• Social listening
• Social engagement
• Content scheduling
• Content republishing
• Analytics tracking

If you’d prefer not to use a tool, you can always use a social media marketing service to do it for you and many of the best agencies use AI at the core of their processes.

Measuring of performance

Another huge benefit of AI in social media is that it allows marketers to analyse and track every step that they take. From identifying the performance of an ad to tracking user-engagement and invaluable insights into content, it’s an advance in technology that businesses appreciate. Tools like Hootsuite, for example, give powerful insights to users about their customers and their choices.

But be warned: AI isn’t perfect. The data it uses comes from humans and if there’s any bias in the inputted data, there’ll be bias in the output.

Optimised content

As mentioned above, AI can do a great job of optimising social media content thanks to machine learning. By learning from the generated data, ML systems can create high-quality patterns that better content in the future.

How is AI used in social media?

AI is a key component in almost every social media network today. Let’s dive into how Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest utilise it in further detail:

Facebook

Facebook uses a variety of AI tools to heighten each user’s experience. Not only can they use that data to generate suggestions, but through machine learning, they use facial recognition that allows tag suggestions. This is particularly useful for businesses that want to target customers to gain recognition and gain publicity.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another social media network that has long been using AI in their everyday processes. Its technology provides connection suggestions, targets posts to users, offers specific job recommendations and showcases better candidates for employers.

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is LinkedIn’s employer “marketplace” where they can find potential candidates for their job listings. Using AI with its LinkedIn Recruiter product, it creates “talent pools”.

Instagram

The first way that Instagram uses artificial intelligence is seen on its Explore page. Picking up trending posts and stories due to the hashtag that’s used, it presents them to you in a neatly wrapped package.

In 2016, the company changed its algorithm so its news feed was more value-based, rather than chronologically ordered, although that change has proved controversial. In its current format, the algorithm is optimised for each user, based solely on their preferences.

Pinterest

The main reason why so many users love Pinterest is because of the personalised content that it shows. An aspect that requires AI to work, without it, it’s fair to say that the network wouldn’t be as successful.

However, another example of how they use AI is through the new feature – Pinterest Lens. Through this application, it allows users to take a photo. Once this action is carried out, aspects of it are decoded, from the shape to colours. Based on the information gathered, it shows related results to the user.

The algorithms of social networks

Each social network uses a different algorithm and although we’ve briefly touched on these above, let’s go into a bit more detail.

Starting with Facebook, throughout the years their algorithm has changed depending on certain factors including trends and the demands of their users.

After recent changes, Facebook announced they wanted to use ranking signals in order to increase customer engagement. The overarching algorithm takes into account a user’s past behaviour through who they interact with, the media they post and how popular it was. Making the platform more transparent, they are now offering user’s more control over what appears on their homepage.

For Instagram alongside utilising AI within their algorithm to showcase trending posts on the home page, they also introduced a way of identifying spam and comments that are thought to be harmful.

This is done through the aforementioned DeepText technology. Moderating the content, it’s a step that’s valuable to both everyday users and marketers as it means that only genuine users can find their page. This is particularly important at the moment, as so many fake followers and trolls are constantly on the networking site.

Another feature that Pinterest introduced within their algorithm is PinSage. Based on neural networking, it ensures that every search you enter is related to the particular theme that you wanted to find. Not only is this convenient to users as it only shows them useful content, but for businesses as they are able to post content with high ranking keywords.

Competitive analysis

Businesses post on social media a lot – it’s just a fact. And because of this, it makes it easy for their competitors to create content based upon what content is already out there.

For example, if you’re thinking of creating a social media post, you could go onto your competitor’s page to see what they have already done. Staying ahead and countering their efforts, you can remain on top.

But as well as traditional social media monitoring tools (e.g. as a tool that alerts you when a business uploads a particular post), you can now use tools that have AI built-in. These give you the benefit of being able to identify any complaints on posts as it captures every social media post surrounding your competitor.

Social listening

Another element of social media in which AI is making a big impact is social listening. To put it simply, social listening is a technique that’s used to monitor a business’ social media channels. Picking up any mentions of the brand, related discussions or customer feedback, it’s something that’s available to do on all social media networks.

Through social media listening tools, organisations are able to efficiently analyse millions of conversations and effectively identify any patterns within the data. They can then use these insights to inform their customer service efforts, product development and overall marketing strategy.

A more efficient way of discovering this information, it’s replacing more traditional methods such as interviews and surveys.

Linking with this, is how AI can measure social sentiment. Through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computational linguistics, social media is able to analyse all of the social data it collects.

Image recognition

Image recognition technology that has AI within it will efficiently detect a brand’s exposure and allow for better metrics. Enabling companies to increase their visual appeal and aesthetic to customers on a more personal level, it increases engagement in the long run.

A technology that’s looking to transform social media marketing, it’s one that you shouldn’t ignore.

AI in social media analytics

Businesses will be pleased to know that there is now a variety of tools available that use AI in order to analyse social data. From consumer intelligence platforms to consumer feedback analysis tools, these enable businesses to gather the data before learning from it.

A web tool that shows exactly which social sites are driving the most traffic to your website, it will also help you to make long-term goals and make intelligent decisions – things that will benefit your company, as it could lead to higher revenue and profits.

Natural language processing (NLP)

NLP is a branch of AI centred on the interaction between humans and computers using natural language. Google is a major proponent of NLP and has an API for people to test it out. It allows not only for translation and word processing but to enable social listening, for the extraction of information and for customer service chatbots amongst other useful tools. Assisted by sentiment analysis, it allows businesses to market products more effectively.

Improves influencer strategies

Lastly, AI can be used within social media as a way of improving influencer strategies. A popular and effective marketing technique within the industry, it aims at boosting ROI and organic reach. But is only effective when it’s used correctly.

So how is AI helping with this? Well, AI allows marketers to choose influencers that are suitable to promote their products. Scanning through the millions that are available on the social media network, it makes the process far quicker. Something that’s essential along with regular management, you’ll know that you’re on the way to a successful influencer strategy that generates leads.

Need help with your social media?

Managing your social media platforms can be quite a time-consuming task. Here are our top social media management companies/tools that you can use to help:

• Crowdfire
• PromoRepublic
• POSTOPLAN
• Taplink
• Iconosquare
• Brand24

Final thoughts

Those are just a few examples of how AI works behind the scenes to influence social media networks. Something that will continue to change as the technology develops and evolves, the future is exciting for any business that’s harnessing it.

A fundamental part of how you increase customer engagement, generate leads and grow your brand, without it, it’s clear that your influence within the network would not be as powerful.

But, like any project, the results you achieve will only be as good as the effort you put in. Flowers don’t bloom from a seed that hasn’t been given any water.

Knowing how your customers behave and the times they’re most likely to interact with you is key: posting when they’re asleep or having them engage with your posts when you’re inactive is no good for your business.

If you get the balance right, you can influence your customer’s activity every time they’re on social media and convince them to make a purchase. That’s an average of 144 minutes per day, or four and a half hours for the top 20% of smartphone users.

To help you do exactly that, we’ve put together the 6 main benefits of social media marketing, which you can use to beat your competitors, win more customers, and boost your profits.

1. Increase brand awareness

‘Brand awareness’ = the same phrase used on every digital marketing website, but there’s a reason for it. If no one knows about your brand, no one is going to buy from you. If 1,000 people do, there’s a chance at least 100 of them might.

Social media is swamped with businesses trying to get more customers through the door and buy their products. If not that, they want people to ring and book their service. You want to make sure it’s your business people are searching for.

PPC advertising is a great way to do this, as you can use tools like Adzooma to optimise your campaigns and see where you’re bringing in the most money. But, with 70-80% of people researching a company online before making a purchase, it’s worth building a social media presence first.

Remember relay races in school?

You could only run when you were given the baton, and the person in front of you stood still until you passed it onto them. It was the game that got everyone feeling competitive and energised: ready for the more complex and fruitful games like the egg and spoon race.

In marketing, your brand will stand still if no one knows about it. And by the time your social channels are up and running (excuse the pun), you’ll be so far behind that no one will even care. It’s about getting as far ahead as you can, as soon as you can, and making people feel engaged from the get-go.

To make sure you’re miles ahead, you can:

• Browse trending topics using tools such as Feedly and create engaging content that hasn’t been done before. Copying what everyone else is doing can hurt your business and won’t make people remember you.
• Be present and reactive on all your social media channels. Post content at least twice a day depending on the size of your business and respond to all brand comments and mentions – positive or negative.
• Automate your workload by scheduling posts in advance. SproutSocial and Hootsuite are great for this, and also allow you to analyse your social media performance free of charge.

We also have an article dedicated to social media management tools to help you along the way.

2. Launch creative campaigns

You don’t have to create brand new content every time you post on social media. Use it like an artboard to present your favourite pieces, such as your most innovative campaigns or technology advances. Everyone has a blank canvas to use however they want.

Clothing brand Life is Good are an excellent example of this: to mark their 25th anniversary, the company invite people to tell them “something good”, and donated $1 to the Life is Good Kids Foundation for every #SomethingGood post. It was something optimistic to inspire others and lift the energy in the room.

The campaign hit its goal of inspiring 1 million shares and raising $1 million (USD) in October 2019, just one month after the initial launch, and was displayed on Walls.io social wall.

As well as this, Life is Good would have:

• Showcased themselves as a caring and responsible company
• Earned more customers through creating a positive environment online
• Gained more followers and stimulated higher engagement for future posts

If you don’t have the time or resources, replicating your traditional ad campaigns online works well too.

Even in 2013, global brands such as Mercedes Benz used channels such as Instagram to promote their campaigns and get people talking about their company.

In promoting their ‘Take the Wheel’ campaign on Instagram, Mercedes received:

• 87,000,000 organic impressions
• 2,000,000 likes
• 150 new marketing assets

Now, Mercedes have 26.1m followers on the same platform, with over 100k likes on every single post. Social media can achieve amazing results for your business – it’s just about using it a beneficial way.

3. Highlight your company culture

This is important for all brands but can work particularly well if you work in a more complex industry like tech, telecommunications and finance. Just because you work with complicated products, it doesn’t mean you or your team sit in silence surrounded by monitors. And you must show your customers that.

Instagram is a great way of showcasing the exciting things you get up to when you aren’t deep in the concentration zone: whether it’s creative collaboration sessions, pizza once a month or dogs in the office. Everyone loves an office dog.

This will show your followers and potential customers that there are real people behind your business, who are willing to help them and are much more friendly and approachable as they may seem.

Hootsuite is a well-known favourite, leading the way with their inspiring and uplifting content.

At first glance of their Instagram page, you can see:

• Real people in real offices
• A product update video, explained by a member of staff
• Two animated campaign videos
• An informative video on how to use IGTV
• A collection of images of a brand new office

That’s just from one of their channels. If you inject personality into each of your social media platforms, you’ll attract more customers who engage with your posts and are more likely to buy from your site or store. Show them art, and they’ll want the entire gallery.

4. Strengthen customer loyalty

Customers love brands who are accessible. If people can get in touch with you, even if it’s about a concern, it increases their chances of buying from you again. If you solve their query quicker, even better.

To tackle this problem ourselves, we created a dedicated Adzooma Facebook Support Group where our customers can fire questions over to our support team at any time. This also puts them at the forefront of conversations to connect with other Adzooma users –creating a community that will feed into brand awareness.

Responding quickly doesn’t necessarily mean using chatbots and virtual assistants to speed up the process either. In fact, a Global Consumer Customer Service Report by a business applications company CGS found that nearly 50% of UK respondents prefer speaking to a person than AI-powered technology.

The main benefit for this is because they have limited data capacity and only have a set amount of responses for a certain number of queries. This means they have a high error rate, causing them to misinterpret queries and lead customers to shop elsewhere.

To build and maintain strong customer relationships, we’d recommend:

• Social listening: Interacting with your audience and showing them you’re on the same level will help to increase trust, inspire helpful conversations and provide more opportunity for creative content. You don’t need to be a robot – just be yourself.
• Considering rewards and competitions: This can work both ways: if customers receive a discount on their fifth time buying from you, they’ll be more inclined to buy again. Similarly, running competitions is great for creating buzz around your brand and show that you’re giving back.
• Being consistent: Not only with your content but also during public and private conversations. Keep communication going like you would with your friends and don’t take hours to reply. The more active you are, the more reliable you seem and the more likely people are to buy from you.
• Doing more than is asked of you: For example, if a customer is concerned about their payment going through twice, reassure them you will personally follow it up and contact them from your part if there is an issue. Remember, if you follow the same script as everyone else, you’ll be left with an empty crowd.

5. Encourage positive feedback

With loyalty comes positive feedback: when a customer feels you’ve served them particularly well, there’s no reason they wouldn’t leave you a great review. But you’ll find a lot of people still don’t really think about it unless you go out of your way to ask.

Through asking politely and offering incentives, such as a limited 20% discount in return, you can build a positive online presence with added impact from the review you’ll earn in return. It’s a win-win.

Like UK-based fashion retailer Pretty Little Thing, introducing a one-click rating system in customer support chats is also a quick and easy way to encourage more positive feedback.

This lays the groundwork for future success too, as 88% of customers say reviews impact their online purchasing decisions.

Think of Amazon – the global powerhouse above thousands of online retailers.

When you search for a product on their site, such as ‘bluetooth headphones’, you can immediately see its star rating, how many reviews it’s got, and even the ‘Amazon’s choice’ recommendations. Whether this is accurate or not, it still has a big enough impact to affect purchasing decisions.

As you can see below, although the first product is less expensive and has a 5-star rating, the more expensive product beneath has over 2,000 more customer reviews and a 4½-star rating. Weighing it up, the second product is likely to sell more.

By highlighting your reviews online, people will see that you’re trusted by hundreds or thousands of other customers just like them and become more willing to buy.

6. Research your competitors

As well as promoting your own content, social media platforms are great for keeping an eye on your competitors and monitoring their engagement. This is particularly effective if you’re a new business, as you can find what type of content works best on each platform and create a similar strategy.

Seeing how other businesses maximise their social platforms can be the best type of inspiration. For example, going back to Mercedes Benz, their Instagram makes use of IGTV, the shopping tab, and filters for Instagram Stories.

This means that rather than just showcasing visual content, customers can watch detailed videos of their cars on the road, interviews with their drivers, browse the cars they have for sale with the full spec, and use the F1 filters on their own face. Used together, these elements can:

• Provide more entertainment and information
• Encourage views, enquiries, and direct sales
• Increase brand awareness across different industries
• Promote higher engagement on their posts

Using this data alone, providing you’re in the motor industry, you’ll be able to see exactly where you’re falling short on your Instagram channels and implement similar techniques into your own.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Mercedes: utilising the tools that have contributed to other people’s success will still help you climb the ladder and attract more customers to your business.

When you’ve mastered this and all of the steps above, don’t be afraid to venture out into different areas of marketing to really enhance your results. There’s a ton of great resources out there, but the top of my list has to be Adzooma.

No matter your skill or experience, the Adzooma platform will help to optimise your performance across Google, Facebook, and Microsoft ads. It provides custom automation to save you time, white-label reports to send over to clients and stakeholders, and a free reporting suite.

If you perfect your Facebook PPC campaigns as well as your Facebook social posts – you’re onto a winner.

Google: define social media marketing

Social media is like art: you start with your base colours before adding glitter and sparkles, and when you’re ready, you can create exciting projects that get other artists, or customers, talking. It’s up to you how you decorate the canvas.

But, as discussed in this article, there are a few things to keep in mind if you want to become a vivid success.

To keep it short and sweet:

1. Social media can have massive benefits for your business. It allows you to get your brand in front of your customers whenever you want, with content that can be as wild, creative or informative as you please. You just have to write it.
2. Each platform has its own unique audience, tools and quirks that can work in different ways for every brand. Whether you’re an accountant, an independent upholsterer or a vegan chef duo – increased brand awareness is just around the corner.
3. When you aren’t sharing your own content, explore other businesses’ social channels or even social media influencers. Dig deep, scroll back to see how they’ve grown their following and chase content that inspires you to edit your own.

Finally, you don’t need to showcase every high and low of your business. Bad news can turn into good news, for entertainment purposes anyway, but sometimes it’s worth acting like you’re pleased or hopeful even when you’re not, for the benefit of the brand.