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The great thing about Instagram is the fact that a user can utilize the tool just like anyone else. While some picture taking services and sites, such as Pinterest, are best used by advanced designers and are usually only looked upon by the average Joe, Instagram is easy to use for anyone who knows how to point and shoot. This tool also has what are called “filters,” which change the picture color and tone slightly and often add borders in order to change the look of the image.

Consider the following example:

As you can see, different filters give the “normal” photo a different look. This puts a little bit of editing power into the hands of non-editors. According to co-founder Kevin Systrom in an interview with TechCrunch, Instagram is really a “storytelling service. It’s the way you go out in the world and tell a story about your life.” Because Instagram users can connect with other Instagram users, it makes it more than just a picture taking tool. Naturally, this leads many to scratch their heads and wonder: So how can this be utilized for businesses again?

Top 5 Ways to Heed the Power of Instagram

Instagram can be utilized by any business in any industry, but I would be lying if I said that it would yield great results for every type of business. The truth is—B2C businesses that sell a concrete product, such as restaurants and clothing stores, as well as bands and those in the entertainment industry are much more likely to benefit from Instagram. Companies such as law firms or Internet marketing firms will have a much tougher time taking advantage of Instagram. Nonetheless, below lists a few ways that a business can utilize this tool and get in on the phenomenon while it’s hot:

1. Find Your Fans – Know who is mentioning your brand. Go to your Instagram account, hit the profile button, hit “search Instagram,” and then hit “tags.” Once you type in the name of your company, you will be able to see all of the people who have already been using Instagram to take photos of your products. This will help give you an audience and help you identify where your power with Instagram users lies.
2. Geo-Tag – Geo-tagging photos means adding a location to every photo before putting them onto your Instagram account. Many people from out-of-town are actually beginning to use Instagram as a way to see what cool things are in a given area (much like Foursquare). Make sure that your cool photos are uploaded with your location so that out-of-towners can get some awesome local food or funky foreign outfits.
3. Contests – This is probably the most popular way that brands are leveraging the tool. Hold a contest and ask fans to take pictures using your product or hanging out in your store. Levi’s even held an open casting call on Instagram for models, and Starbucks simply asked fans to use Instagram to answer a question (completely unrelated to coffee). Ultimately, it’s all about the interaction.
4. Event Markting – This is one way any type of business can take advantage of Instagram. If you hold a seminar or an office Christmas party, take a few photos and post them to your Instagram account. Ask those attending your event to also take photos using Instagram.
5. Social Media Sharing – You can post any photo you take onto social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If you’re starting a business and feeling overwhelmed with social media, this makes it easy to hit all of the bases in one fell swoop. Many major brands have already started their Instagram story. These brands include fashion brands such as Puma, GAP, Gucci, and Nike, and restaurant brands such as RedBull, Ben and Jerry’s, and Starbucks. Music stars such as Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber also love Instagram, and sport teams like the Chicago Bulls and Philadelphia Eagles are taking advantage. To get a larger list of brands taking advantage, visit the Instagram Notable Users Directory.

Has your business started using Instagram? How do you leverage the tool, and have you had any success?

Photo Credit: phandroid.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to phone systems. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including business credit cards to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

Alerti social media monitoring graph on social media chatter surrounding the Google Hangouts on Air release:

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Highlights:

• Integrate SMM tools into your social marketing campaigns.
• Analyze the data they give you to improve those campaigns.
• Try tools that fit your budget and needs!
• Newlands recommends Alerti since it has good analytics and a free 90 day trial.

What can brands learn?

• Make your customers feel important and appreciated…
• Reach out to them offline even if your product is partially or wholly online…
• Engage with the people who use your product!

Graph by Alerti social media monitoring tool:

Part 2 highlights

• People don’t click on display ads anymore…
• The way around this is to put ads within the content…
• Interactive, in-content image ads are very effective in producing revenue for publishers!

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. Be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

1. See what competitors are doing
2. Target competitors’ customers
3. See how effective your branding campaign is

and more! As a result, the benefits of using a good social media monitoring tool far outweighs the drawbacks. Some businesses simply utilize “drive by” social media, but this does not work. They are too results-oriented with their initial efforts and see it as a broadcast medium instead of an interactive medium, so they quit posting to their Facebook wall or quit making tweets when they don’t “see sales” coming from their content. Frequently, they simply aren’t grabbing customers’ attention. SMM tools can be used to find out what to write so that you can grab the customer’s attention effectively. In this Future of Engagement episode, host Murray Newlands looks at how to use social media monitoring tools well:

Social media monitoring tool: How can they change social media?

Social media monitoring tool use among tools like Alerti has skyrocketed at a faster rate than the growth of social media itself, and they are showing that they can have a direct effect on how businesses use social media. For example, when businesses realize that their marketing campaign does not work, they can shift gears and become more interactive or produce different content. Also, the act of monitoring itself lets them directly engage with users who like their product so that they can target them more effectively. They can then use these people’s profiles as high quality leads at which to aim well-targeted marketing campaigns.

Highlights

• People respond to pitches best when they know you personally…
• Sometimes this creates win-win relationships…
• Where everybody benefits.

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. Be sure to Like us on Facebook .

Highlights

• There was a jump in coverage the day before March 9.
• Coverage on the #SBSW hashtag is so widespread that that tag gets lots of unrelated posts.
• But there was a high negative-to-positive coverage ratio, with 6% negative and 14% positive.

Coverage of South by Southwest by platform:

Graph by Alerti social media monitoring service.

Get Alerti for free for 3 months using
the alertivideo promotion code!

The Suburban Collection, who owns car dealerships in the Detroit area (for all sorts of brands), has been running a Social Test Drive campaign where they put local bloggers and social media influencers in the driver’s seats of cars for a few days, and ask them to use social media to talk about their experiences. Here’s what makes this campaign especially good:

• There are no requirements about how many tweets, pictures, posts, etc. each driver has to make or what types of social media to use. Zac, the Online Marketing Coordinator for Suburban, just asks that you talk about your experience and followup with at least one blog post or video or some type of content summarizing your experience.
• Equally important, there are no requirements that you only post good things about the car. Zac makes it clear that he just wants you to post what you think.
• Every test driver is recommended by a previous driver. As a test driver, you get to recommend others who you think might enjoy the experience, so it’s a nice perk to give to your network, and it’s equally nice to receive a recommendation.
• Most of the time when you go to test drive a car, you get it for about 15 minutes. The Social Test Drive lets you take the car for a weekend, giving you a better understanding of how the car handles under different conditions. Not only does this give you a better feeling for the car, it helps you give a more balanced opinion to your network.
• People trust what their friends and colleagues say more than what a company says.  By putting cars into the hands of people with strong networks, The Suburban Collection, is providing the opportunity for people to have a conversation about the cars (and about the dealership brand).

Now, about the car.  I drove an Acura RDX for a weekend:

The RDX is a sporty little SUV/Crossover that has nice luxury features and ride, but also handles pretty well with good pickup. It also has quite a bit of space inside considering how compact it looks on the outside:

You can fit full load of groceries in the trunk and both the backseats fold down for more cargo room:

The inside styling has a rich color palette and fairly user-friendly controls (very similar to my Mazda CX7):

Unfortunately, the RDX doesn’t get great gas mileage: 22-24 mpg highway depending on if you have an AWD or FWD model.  I believe city is around 18ish.  But the car does have a nice ride and good pickup for the size (turbo, which probably is also the issue with the gas mileage).  I took it down a bumpy country dirt road and it was the smoothest ride I’ve ever had on that particular stretch of non-pavement.

I hadn’t really considered Acura before as a brand, but I would definitely look at their products when I’m ready. The gas mileage may be an issue when I’m ready to look for another car, but I definitely would put the RDX on my short list of contenders based on the ride, pickup and amount of interior room (we need to travel with stuff for a kid and 2 dogs, plus I like to kayak & bike).

Store review company Yelp is not profitable and it hasn’t made money since it was founded eight
years ago, yet social media was aflurry with positive responses when Yelp announced that it would go
public. On the day of the IPO, Yelp’s stock price rose almost 60%, from $15 to almost $25. Was this a
result of social media buzz, and how can other companies use social media to create and benefit from
similar buzz? Find out in this episode of Future of Engagement!

Highlights

• Yelp’s IPO got almost entirely positive social media coverage…
• And its stock price rose 60% over the day of the IPO…
• Even though Yelp isn’t even profitable.

Graphs courtesy of Alerti Social Media
Monitoring and Management

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands, CEO of Influence People.

1. 7 New Facebook Changes Impacting Businesses (Social Media Examiner)
2. 5 Tricks that Every Marketer Needs to Know to Exploit the New Facebook Page Design (Duct Tape Marketing)
3. The Complete Guide To Facebook Timeline Pages (All Facebook)
4. The Complete Guide to Setting Up the New Facebook Page Design (HubSpot)
5. 14 Ways New Facebook Betrays Small Business (Convince & Convert)

How are you handling the new Facebook changes to Timeline for businesses?

Highlights:

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands, CEO of Influence People.

Highlights:

• The media knew Cohen would go to the Oscars as Aladeen beforehand…
• …So he already had a lot of cameras on him…
• …But he got almost as much negative response as positive response on social media.

Graph by Alerti Social Media Monitoring and Management:

This Alerti graph looks at what and where people were sharing about the terms “Sacha Baron Cohen” and “Dictator”

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands, CEO of Influence People.

Adele was awarded her third Brit Award, the British version of the Grammys, on Tuesday night. When she wanted to thank her friends and family for supporting her, the host cut her off after about half a minute. She was angry and gave the middle finger to the producers. In this week’s Future of Engagement, I looks at how bloggers, and others in social media, responded to both Adele flipping the producers off and to the Brit Awards’ decision to cut her off. I also analyze how both sides handled the coverage of the incident.

Highlights

• Adele got strong support among bloggers and others in social media.
• Lots of the responses were emotional.
• The public accepts sincere, genuine apologies if they’re issued quickly.

Graph by Alerti social media monitoring and management

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands, CEO of Influence People.

Image via Wikipedia

Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?

A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.

A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?

Put some time into it

Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.

Run an advertising campaign

Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.

Social media monitoring

Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.

Measure your success early

When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• HootSuite
• Bit.ly
• Twitalyzer
• SproutSocial
• PeerIndex
• CoTweet
• Twitter Grader
• Wildfire Analytics
• Klout
• 10 Twitter tools for better social networking (Webdesigner depot)

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