Which Sites Should You Use for Image-Focussed Social Media Marketing?

In the previous blog-post, we discussed the importance of having an image-centric approach to your social media marketing drive. Let’s see which top sites cater to this...

Pinterest

This site is quite recent and people have actually been hooked to it. It is one of the most preferred visual websites and has gained its popularity due to its simplicity and artistic feel. It does not focus on lengthy textual pieces, but is neatly designed with simple colours and backgrounds with pins of attractive images and videos. It is not too interactive, and allows members to ‘pin’, ‘re-pin’, ‘like’ and write short comment on images and boards. It is mainly used to exchanging ideas through visual content.

Those who are not yet on this site can create a profile and carry out a social media campaign. It is user-friendly and extremely easy to understand and learn. One has to only create boards, separate them categorically and pin relevant images/videos accordingly. Before publishing the pin, there is a description which is to be written in the given space on the board. This helps users and search engines to find content. These descriptions help to form a link with people having similar interests. More followers you have, more will your content be repined. This can increase your visibility and improve your online exposure with fewer efforts. Pinterest helps achieve most of the social media marketing targets and is wonderful for niche businesses like artifacts, food and beverage industry, fashion, home decors and other such.

Instagram

Instagram is a popular site for individuals and brands to share photos with their friends and audience. This site is said to be growing faster than Twitter. It is a great step to build a presence on Instagram. It is fun, innovative and interactive for companies and consumers. It’s good for brands to create a friendly rapport with customers since one can share all pictures of his/her company and staff members. If you’re a brand owner, you could suggest your customers to click a photograph of them using your product and share it on Instagram. This will help you in instant branding and make the user happy as well. This site allows you to use customers in your marketing campaigns, creating loyalty among them. It is an ideal took for branding with a small budget.  

Tumblr

This is a micro-blogging site that is used by creative-minded people. Adding pictures here is easy and is done by posting images from the internet or by re-blogging from Tumblr. It is useful to display a product/service. If you have a product, you can show images of it and attract the consumers to buy and use it. For example: If you are a jewellery designer, you can showcase a model/person wearing one of your pieces. The Tumblr network is very valuable if you aim at a young audience. It is easy to share and tag pictures here which will help improve your product’s SEO. Also, it’s good to be up-to-date with latest trends.

These sites are leading due to the positive results they have given marketers so far and if you use all of the above optimally, your brand will get a great boost.

Keep reading our blogs and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest! 

All About Hashtags

Are you wondering how to use hashtags? This blog-post will explain what exactly hashtags are, how they can help your business some different types of tags.

Hashtags are everywhere today. We use them on Twitter the most, but now they seem to be all over Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and so on. If you’re a marketer, the use of hashtags cannot be ignored. Hashtags can increase the reach of content, highlight your brand, hit your target market, make your content seen, improve your SEO strategies and do wonders to your social media marketing.

What is a Hashtag on Social Media?

Hashtags are words or groups of words after the # symbol. Eg: (#India or #SocialMediaMarketing). It basically makes it easier to track a specific topic of discussion. If you type #India, you’ll be able to see an entire conversation about this topic by thousands of people. In the same way, you can create a hashtag for your brand for more publicity and recognition.

3 Key Marketing Strategies for Hashtags are:

·         Brand & Campaign Specific

·         Trending and

·         Content

What are they and how do they help your business?

Brand and campaign specific hashtags are those which you make for your own business. You can use them to market your brand and for promotions. Your hashtag should ideally be the name of your brand or company tagline. Make a brand hashtag that is relevant to your business. Your hashtag should be like a signature tag. Get more and more people to use them so that your brand gets marketed. Similarly, campaign hashtags are made for every marketing campaign you hold. For eg. If you have a sale/discount scheme at your store/business you can create a unique hashtag to highlight the sale. If you get people to use the tag, your campaign will get enormous reach.

Trending Hashtags

A trending hashtag is that tag which has become very popular. You must have come across the term about “what’s trending now.” It is referring to the hashtags that are trending or most talked about right now. Trending hashtags constantly change in real time. To have your business hashtag to trend, you must make sure it is used extensively and reaches an enormous audience.

Content Hahstags

Content Hashtags are those you use in your posts. They are not brand hashtags and are not used to define your business and marketing. These may not be trending or may not be that famous. They are simple hashtags that are relevant to your posts and content. Content hashtags improve the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your content. They get your updates noticed by people who are searching or using your hashtag words. 

Hashtags are widely used and are an integral part of marketing your business on social media! 

Keep a track on our upcoming blogs and also find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest!

Social Media Predictions for Year 2014

The New Year is almost here, and it is quite necessary to know where social media is heading in 2014. This blog-post can help you keep pace with the fast changing social networking trends.

Social Media Will Be a Necessity

2014 will no longer be a year where will you be able to get away from making a presence on the social media! As we all know, even today this is necessary but you will be in a do or die situation in 2014 in this digital world. Businesses will realize the importance of getting their internet marketing in place with a perfect content strategy, lead generation and so on. Also, organisations will see a big need of hiring digital marketing experts to get their job done.

Google+ is seen as a superstar in 2014

Ofcourse, Facebook leads the pack when it comes to social media but Google+ is racing it’s way too. Google+ has bigger ownership in terms of search power and is one of the most powerful social forces on the internet today. By the time 2014 dawns, no one will be able to underestimate Google+ and people will be able to use it as a personalised web experience that integrates all interactions that a user has with Google products. Google authorship is said to become one of the key factors to Google‘s search ranking algorithm by the end of 2014.

Visual Websites Will Be a Huge Success

Websites that are image centric will see success. Visual social media platforms are more appreciated than text-based ones. This will amplify in 2014. So, visual based sites such as Pinterest will be a critical part of marketers and retailers. Tumblr, Slideshare, Instagram are all on the higher side of the graph for the next year.

LinkedIn will be on the top as a B2B Market Player

In year 2014, LinkedIn will be a primary player in the B2B market. It has 238 million users and is the best social networking site for professionals. It has managed to position itself as one of the largest sources of content generation for professionals. This means, B2B marketers will enjoy great benefits from LinkedIn.

Hope this blog-post has made you well aware of where you should make a presence in social media for your personal as well as professional growth!

Keep reading our blog and do follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.  

All about Facebook Hashtags

Facebook recently introduced the hashtags feature to it. In this blog-post, we will be talking about how to use Facebook hashtags effectively for social media marketing.

The general function of a hashtag is to bring together communities of similar interests. However, the use of this feature differs slightly depending upon the social media platform. Facebook got this tool into action to bring common people, conversations and the buzz about various topics in the limelight. These hash-tagged topics could include movies, sports, events and so on. It helps people to be on the same page while talking about one common topic. Hash-tagging is the most organised and convenient way to monitor discussions on Facebook on such a huge scale. Hashtags also help people to indulge in conversations they are interested in. On Facebook, it works well for pages, posts, photographs, comments, status updates, etc. 

Some information on Facebook Hashtags   

·         Tap on the hashtags to get directed to its feed. You can even click on hashtags that are from different platforms such as Instagram. Read our blog on Instagram hashtags.

·         On Facebook, every hashtag has its own URL.

·         You can search for a particular hashtag in your Facebook search bar. This is possible even in your browser. For example: www.facebook.com/hashtag/abc (Replace ‘abc’ with the topic of your interest).

·         You could also compose posts from the hashtag feed and search and get results.

For Social Media Marketing

·         As mentioned above, each hashtag on Facebook has its own URL so you should aim to drive maximum traffic to that URL from other websites to create more discussions.

·         Use hashtags as much as possible to start conversations. Every hashtag will be united into its own status update box on Facebook.

·         Make sure your hashtags are relevant to your target audience or your industry.

·         Use this feature in trending topics related to your line of business.

·         Remember to use capitals to first letters of your tags to make it easy to read. Eg:- #FacebookHashtagsBlog

·         Restrict the number of hashtags per post. 1 to 2 tags is good enough.

·         Be aware hashtags privacy settings in Facebook.

Hashtags on Facebook are being used widely. Follow the above tips and enjoy this useful and easy social media feature! Keep reading our blogs for many more informative topics on social media.    

Hashtags on Instagram

Just like Twitter, other social networking sites too, have introduced hashtags. The use of hashtags has increased drastically as they unite different groups of the same interest. On Instagram, hashtags are created from a different perspective, i.e. from the perspective of an Instagram user. People on Instagram can now add hashtag to a word in a comment or caption of his/her photo. Anybody can then tap on the hashtag in your comment and view all the pictures with the same hashtag. This feature on Instagram directs people to a vast pool of specific photographs. Adding hashtags can make you a part of a group of people sharing similar photographs. As an addition to this feature, every hashtag has an RSS feed attached to it. This makes it simple for you to subscribe to new photographs. You can also search for tagged pictures.

How do you use Instagram Hashtags for your Brand?

Before you begin using hashtags on Instagram, keep in mind that hashtags on Twitter and Instagram are not the same. Read our blog on Twitter Hastags to know the difference . Since a tweet can only have 140 characters, you have to limit the number of hastags there, but on Instagram, you can use as many as you like.

Some Instagram Hashtag stuff you need to know:

· In Instagram, you can tag just your photos
· It is possible to add a hashtag to your photo even once it is uploaded. Just add the hashtag in the captions space and your pictures will get tagged to the pool of similar photos.
·  Try to limit the hashtags to 5 or 10. If you use more, it may get mis-tagged.
· You can click on a hashtag and view the page of the tags pool. Here, you will be able to see similar photos like yours.
·Use only relevant hashtags to your photographs.

Choosing the right hashtags on Instagram is like choosing the right keywords for SEO. Tags on Instagram make it easy for users to search for your pictures and increases the visibility of your photographs.   

It is simple and fun to use hashtags on Instagram! Try it out using the above guidelines.

In the next blog-post, we will be talking about hashtags on Facebook. Keep a track!