Why Instagram is good for your business

Instagram is a free photo sharing app for android and iOS devices that turns everyone into a photographer. Since it’s inception in 2010, this photo sharing platform has grown by leaps and bounds and now boasts over 90 million users who are posting about 40 million photos a day, generating nearly 8,500 “likes” per second.

Instagram allows users to take a photo, apply photo filters and captions and share it through a variety of social networking services including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and on Instagram itself. Instagram is sort of like Twitter, except instead of connecting with others using 140 characters or less, you’re connecting through the sharing of photos.

    

Add Some Personality To Your Business

If you’re wondering why we’re talking about Instagram, thinking that it’s just some fad for the young, you should know that it’s also an effective tool to add to your business’ social media strategy.  If you’ve already established a business presence on other social networks, you can leverage Instagram’s potential by sharing what’s going on in your office across multiple networks. It can help highlight your products and services but it can also help humanize your business by allowing you to share pictures of what’s happening in your office. In addition to sharing images of your new products and services, you can post pictures of your staff parties, office mascots, crazy hat day, employee of the month, whatever.  It’s also a way for you to take your customers with you to trade shows or promotional events so your audience can get a feel for your brand by learning about the events or causes you attend, support or sponsor.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

By adding captions to your photos before you upload them, you can increase the potential for customer engagement - by asking questions, including calls to action or posting tips online. Whether you have a brick and mortar or online business, you can increase interactions with your audience by beginning the conversation through images and captions. You can even use hashtags to help you organize your photos and to help your Instagram connections to find photos on topics that interest them (like your products).

 

Take a look at 5 Awesome Examples of Instagram marketing from real brands.

Reward Your Audience

Everyone loves to win and Instagram is the perfect platform to hold contests to promote your business. Asking your customers to share pictures of themselves using or promoting your products in order to win free stuff is a great way to go. Instagram can be an effective and fun way to get Instagram users and other lovers of social media talking about who you are and what you do.

Some say that taking your business online can dehumanize the customer experience. When you’re looking to build trust in what you offer, this can be a bad thing. Instagram lets you put a face, literally, on your business efforts in ways that can be targeted to help build confidence in you and your brand. And that’s always good for business.

Are you using Instagram yet? If you have any questions on how Instagram could help enhance your social media strategy, we’d be happy to help.

How to Use Pinterest to Create a Community

Pinterest is a visual way to share, collect and curate information. You can bookmark, or pin, interesting content, how-to articles, quotes or even places you’d like to go. Pinterest isn’t just a great way to showcase your business, your products and your creativity, it’s also a great way to to share great ideas beyond the scope of your speciality with your audience. Finding interesting and relevant information and images for your audience and putting it together in one spot, not only helps to drive traffic to your website but it can also foster good relationships with other, complimentary businesses. And really, that’s what using social media effectively for business is all about: creating relationships.

Curating content on Pinterest means creating specific topic boards. It’s about pinning interesting and complementary information together in one spot for your audience to see. Here are two businesses we think use Pinterest exceptionally well, creating a whole visual story and really engaging with their audience:

Onya Baby

Even though Onya Baby sells baby carriers, they do a great job of building their community with boards that speak to their audience about a lot of different topics that are not directly related to baby carriers. Parents have learned that when they visit Onya Baby on Pinterest, they will always find interesting and relevant information, which, of course, keeps them coming back.

Notice that while only one of their boards focuses on their product, many others feature content that parents are likely to find interesting.

Mabel’s Labels

Another Pinner we think is pretty awesome is Mabel’s Labels. Like Onya Baby, they showcase their labels but also create a community where parents can find birthday party ideas, lunch ideas, recipes, pregnancy and parenting tips and ways to organize their homes.

While there are still many more ways to use Pinterest, what we want you to take away from this is that even when you think that it would be hard to draw in your audience with your products or services using beautiful and striking images, by creating a community that provides your audience with a place to go for tips, information and advice, you will ensure that they come back time and again to see

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption illustrates this point well.

Plus, as a bonus to creating your own community resource centre, you’ll be creating a business networking community that will, hopefully, share your Brand with their own audience, too.

3 Things to Remember When Using Pinterest

Pinterest, the virtual scrapbooking site, has fast become one of the hottest social media platforms around. While you probably spend a lot of time sharing interesting links on Pinterest, did you know that it’s also a great tool to spread the word of your products and services? Especially for those businesses that provide design, fashion or retail services. When using Pinterest, however, there are three crucial things that you need to be aware of.

Broken Links

There is nothing more frustrating than reading a great teaser on Pinterest, clicking the link to read more, only to have the link fail. When you’re pining for business, this can cost you clients, credibility and business. Please take the time to ensure that each and every link you post takes your readers to the right place. There is nothing more frustrating than a broken link.

Sharing = Endorsing

Like with most social networks used for business, a valuable piece of advice is this: Do not share any link unless you’ve read it first. In social media, sharing is endorsing. Even if the link you are sharing comes from a seemingly reliable source, there are things that can pop up in an article that may not be appropriate to share with your audience. There may be some questionable links at the end of the article or advertisements that do not mesh with your business values. So unless you’ve looked at the whole article, image or video, do not hit that Repin button.

Watch Where You Link

When you’re sharing a site on Pinterest, make sure you link to the permalink, and not to the main page of the site. A permalink is the URL that will bring you to the specific page the post can be found on, and not just the home page of a website. With most websites, people post new content on the homepage so it changes often. What was on the homepage one day, may be gone the next. By going deeper into the site to find the right page and linking to that specific URL (or permalink), you’ll be able to ensure that your audience will always be able to find what they’re looking for. For small business owners, Pinterest can prove to be a valuable, fun way to build brand awareness via visually driven content. It’s a great way to highlight your products and share your expertise to show your audience who you are and what you do. As an added bonus, Pinterest is an incredible driver of traffic to websites - more than Google+. Youtube and LinkedIn combined. While you don’t need to invest hours of upkeep each week, with a little TLC, you could be pining your way to business success.

Have you joined Pinterest yet? Please follow us on Pinterest for more great tips and information.

The conversation is already happening

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard of the Internet. In fact, you’ve probably used it to find recipes, read reviews on upcoming movies or to find out whether your favourite restaurant is open or not. It’s pretty safe to say that most of us use the Internet today as our main source of gathering information. Along with Internet use comes social media networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. All of which are great ways of sharing information with our families and friends about what we like and don’t like.

One of the reasons people hesitate when considering using social media for business is because they think that when they open themselves up to comments and critiques from the public, they will face a backlash of negative reviews and criticisms about their business and products. The fact is, however, that the conversation is already happening. Especially if you’re a big company with a recognizable brand.

The reality is that even if you decide not to use social media as a way of promoting your business, you aren’t protecting your brand by staying offline, you’re losing out on being a part of the conversation.

Social media can be a great way to reach out and communicate with your customer base about what they need and how you are doing in meeting those needs. Social media is also a great way to reach out and solve any customer service issues, showing your customers and the world that you are responsive and caring. It’s a way to let your expertise shine through.

Let’s use a high school analogy. In high school, some people talk behind your back but smile to your face. Social media is like that friend in school who always has your back. They’ll tell you what people are saying about you and help you deal with the fall-out, either positive or negative, from the conversations going on about you.  Don’t get left out of the Conversation.

If you’re having some difficulties getting your social media conversation going, we’d love to help you take those first steps!

Buzz and Brilliance: Week ending Mar 23

Over the week we go through a lot of content - news and blog posts, how tos and conceptual posts on the state of the internet.  Every Sunday we share some of our favourites with you.

Check out the links and let us know in the comments if you have any questions or if you read any great posts this week!

Lara

I’m always trying to learn more, and always looking for the time to do it.  That’s why I love podcasts - they’re perfect for when you’re driving or cleaning.  Amy Porterfield has a relatively new podcast that I’m really enjoying, am learning from and being inspired to action by. Check it out. 

Why should you have a blog and be creating niche content?  It’s one of the best ways ways to increase visability for what you do.  Add search engine optimization and measuring and reacting to that information and you have the top three online marketing action points in this article by Lee Frederikson. 

Are you fairly certain you’d have nothing to say if you had a blog?  Here are some great ideas on generating ideas for content that people will find really interesting on Copyblogger. 

Karen

Twitter turned SEVEN this week!!! Hard to believe it’s been that long since the network got its start, but it’s true. I loved reading this Twitter story on Social North from Craig Silva. Be sure to share your twitter story in the comments!

There are some interesting insights in this article from Ilana Rabinowitz on Social Media Explorer. The clear message in traditional advertising seems to be (from her limited viewing) a move to more personal. So, now we need to apply that to social network interactions. My personal view is that we can indeed offer a personal touch. It’s simply a matter of altering how you communicate.

Hashtags might be on their way to Facebook and it’s got everyone talking about what this means, whether it will work and if it’s a valuable addition. In light of graph search, I’d say hashtags are going to make Facebook incredibly powerful. It will also mean (again) that people need to be careful of what they post.

Any time I see a post about social media and small businesses, I have to read it (Inkling Media). I think this one is particularly poignant for me because I’ve rarely met a small biz owner who wasn’t passionate about what they do. So, even if they aren’t passionate about social media, sharing about what they do online shouldn’t be a hard sell. Right?

The Media Mesh

Case Study: The facts about buying Twitter “followers”

Facebook Page Guidelines: The rules have changed for cover photos…again

How to set up or change your Facebook vanity URLs

App of the Week - Discussion

There’s a new app from Google called Keep - it’s essentially another version of Evernote (or One Note, Springpad or a number of others out there.) I’m inclined to agree with Om Malik that I won’t be using it. Even if I have to pay $50 a year to ensure Evernote sticks around, I trust them to do so more than I ever will a free Google service. This, my friends, is why I’m happy to pay for apps that are valuable to me. ~Karen

Leave us a comment and tell us what some of your favourite reads were this week!