Alerti social media monitoring chart about negative and positive conversations surrounding Facebook’s iPhone app UI change:

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.

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.

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).

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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Interview with Sarah Worsham on BSC Designer

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1. Industry Publications – Since you probably already read industry publications to keep up with news and events, why not see if there are hot topics that you can cover on your blog or other social media platforms?
2. Influencer Blogs – Most industries have acknowledged and respected experts. What topics are they covered and how can you add your opinion or take?
3. Competitors – If your competitors are producing or curating content, what are they covering? Are there topics where you can add your own spin or additional insight or expertise?
4. Sales & Marketing Training Materials – What sales and marketing materials have you prepared for your own employees? Are there topics that could be of interest to customers (removing confidential information, of course)?
5. Case Studies – Have you had a situation where you learned something that might be useful to your customers? Write up a case study on the situation, what happened, and how it was resolved (bonus for providing data and insights with a good story).
6. Customer Service – What questions and concerns are customers bringing to the company? Can you help ease frustration by providing additional content or information?
7. Social Media – What topics are being discussed already on social media for your industry? Look at the conversations that competitors, industry publications, and customers are having and see how you can help.
8. Conferences & Events – Take a look at the topics that conferences and events are covering (for your industry and for your target customers). Covering an event or conference you attend is another great source of content.
9. Related Topics – Instead of only producing content about your products and services, think about related topics.  If you sell water bottles, think about the activities your customers like to do with the water bottle — exercising, hiking, playing sports, gardening, etc. Figure out what topics your customers are excited about and provide content about those topics.
10. Q & A – Solicit questions from your customers and audience — what questions do they have on the topics you are covering (or on your products)? Answer the questions as content for everyone.
11. Guest Authors – Instead of trying to come up with all the content yourself, see if there are guests who would like the opportunity to write for you (or produce a podcast or video) — it’s a win-win for everyone: you get content without having to produce it yourself, they get in front of your audience (guest authors often help promote their content too).
12. Curation – Another content source is to curate content from other sources. It can take a bit of effort to keep up with everything going on, so people often appreciate when someone else does the hard work of putting links to what’s important in one place.
13. Ask – Stuck trying to figure out what content to produce next? Ask your audience what topics they’d like covered.  If you don’t get a response online, ask people in person. Ask co-workers and colleagues as well.
14. Reviews – When people go to buy a product or service, they often like to do some research first.  Are there products or services within your industry (or within the topics your audience is interested in) that you can review as posts or videos? Similarly, how about asking others to review your products? They can serve as content and as testimonials. (Make sure to disclose any relationships you have with reviewers or organizations, as well as if you received anything for free — or were paid to do the review. Disclosure is required by the FTC).
15. Crowd Sourcing – Ask your audience to contribute content — photos, videos, stories, etc. You can even feature the best every week as a round-up post or create a contest.

What other sources of content do you use in your social media strategy?

(photo by Friar’s Balsam, on Flickr)

Broadcast vs. Participation

Radio, TV, and print (traditional media) are all broadcast mediums — one publisher distributes content out to an audience with very little interaction. Social media is a many to many medium where anyone can be a publisher and where the audience can interact with publishers. Broadcast mediums like print, tv and radio are fine for marketing via advertising because the audience puts up with ads in return for free content (tv shows, music, news, etc.). However, on social media, the audience has a voice in what is published — either by whether or not they even bother looking at it, or by voicing their opinion on the content (or organization). The social aspect means that it’s much more important to take into account your audience’s needs.

Audience Needs vs. Your Needs

Since audiences online have a voice in what is published (and whether they look at it), it becomes vitally important to understand their needs so that you can provide content that fulfills those needs.  If all you do is post promotional messages about how great your organization is, that probably doesn’t fulfill anyone’s needs except your own. People are very selfish. If your content doesn’t fulfill a need, they’ll quickly go somewhere else and never come back (which makes it impossible to market to those people).

Immediacy vs. Long Term Effects

Advertising on traditional media usually provides immediate effects (hopefully, or else you’re not likely to do it again). Participating on social media has less of a monetary investment, but a much larger time investment. If you want people to listen to you and have conversations with you on social media, then you need to be consistent about posting and engaging. The upside is that social media can help you build relationships which have much longer effects than a one-time up-surge in sales.

How does your content make your social media strategy?

(photo by Niko Herlin, on Flickr)

1. Increase Awareness – If you rely entirely on word of mouth referrals, then the only new business you get will be through your current customers. While there’s nothing wrong with growing slowly, and referrals are the best kind of business lead, social media can help make more people aware of your services. If more people are aware of your existence, they’ll be more likely to ask their network about you for recommendations (and may even refer you even if they haven’t used your services).
2. Be More Top-of-Mind – The more often you interact with someone, the more likely it is that you will be considered if someone is in need of your products or services. Likewise, the more interactions someone has had with you, the more likely they will be to consider referring you to their network.  Social media can help you increase interactions with your referral network by connecting with them more often than is possible in person.
3. Increase Reputation – People may not realize just how much you know about your industry or niche if they only have a chance to have one interaction or conversation with you.  Social media gives you the opportunity to consistently help people by answering questions, providing support and creating helpful content which can help improve your reputation as an expert.
4. Improve Customer Service – Every business has customers who have a problem or a question. The more available you are to address problems or questions, the more satisfied people are (even if they initially had a negative experience). People are talking about your business, whether or not you have a social media presence.  Being active on social media gives customers another opportunity to resolve a problem or have a question answered before voice their issues to their network. Even if a problem is posted on a review site or a blog, monitoring for your brand names can help you be aware of these posts so you can reach out to the customer who had a problem and help solve it — people realize that problems arise, but they want to see that a company cares about the customer.
5. Improve Loyalty – The best way to increase referrals from your current customers is to have happy customers who are loyal to your organization. Social media can give you an opportunity to reward loyal customers, while at the same time making that reward obvious to non-customers. Social media can also help you track (and give back) for referrals. For example, Foursquare allows businesses to post offers or specials to customers after so many check-ins (or visits) and it also allows businesses to see who their loyal customers are. Most small businesses know who a lot of their customers are, but it may not always be obvious who they are or how loyal they are.
6. Build Relationships – People buy from people. People are more likely to buy from a company if they know someone there. Social media helps humanize an organization by providing an opportunity for customers to connect one-to-one with an employee. Social media also provides opportunities to continue to build relationships that have been formed in person and/or the opportunity to meet people online that you may later meet in person.

How do you use social media to increase word of mouth referrals for your business?

(photo by coolio-claire, on Flickr)

One of my clients has an eCommerce site, but also has a retail location.  He felt like his efforts to post on social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) weren’t really worth it. He wasn’t seeing an increasing trend in online sales, so to him, social media wasn’t working. However, his use of social media has not been constant (and he’s still learning about engagement versus information vs. promotion). Intuitively, it may seem like lack of consistency and posting on social media may be affecting sales, but it makes more impact to prove it visually.

I plotted the number of posts on social media versus the visits that the ecommerce website was getting from social media and the affect on the number of sales (numbers have been removed, but the scale is 1 to 1):

When you see the numbers plotted visually, there certainly looks to be a pattern. When there is an increase in social media activity (measured just in number of posts by the client), there tends to also be an increase in traffic to the site from social media.  There are also lifts in the number of sales (although they sometimes lag by a month). There may be other marketing efforts affecting sales (including efforts for the retail location), but doing a visual analysis can be helpful in spotting overall trends. (Doing a direct correlation analysis may also be helpful.)

Having dedicated landing pages for specific social media promotions would help to figure out the impact of specific social media tactics. However, there still will be some traffic and sales from people who have interacted with you via social media, but didn’t make an immediate purchase (they come back later).

Marketing isn’t always an exact science, but measurement and trending information can help give insights into the effects of various tactics. Having information about how tactics are performing makes it easier to make good business decisions on how to move forward.

How do you measure how social media activity affects sales?

(photo by borman818, on Flickr)