Content Creators: 3 Ways to Develop an Instagram Community Around Your Brand

Instagram has become one of the most popular platforms for creating and sharing branded content. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University studying Communication Studies, I have found two articles that highlight the importance of engaging customers on popular social media channels, namely Instagram. 

In her article Using Instagram to Build Brand Awareness, Amanda Clark highlights three main ways to build brand awareness on Instagram: encourage engagement, include customers as parts of the stories, and call users to action. Brands can encourage engagement with photo contests, include users in their stories by reposting and sharing their photos related to a branded product, and utilize many hashtags to call users to action and increase brand awareness.  

Hashtags for Major Sports Brands

Instagram recently updated the look of its icon and inner app design. A more major change involving an algorithm, however, is in the works. Mike Isaac in his article, Instagram May Change Your Feed, Personalizing It With an Algorithm, discusses the potential results of this new algorithm. Instagram will be implementing a new algorithm that pushes the moments it believes the user cares about the most to the front of their feeds. The order will be changed based on ‘likelihood of interest’ and relationship the user has with the person posting. The goal is to increase the personalization and engagement of Instagram. As a result, brands must find even more powerful ways to stand our from other content posters and enhance their relationships with followers.

  

Instagram User Feed

Based on my review of the these two articles and my work with content creators at Northwestern, here are three actions items I recommend you consider:  

1. Engage your followers: To ensure you don't get lost in the cloud of content, focus on engaging loyal customers by pushing them content that prompts them to act (ex. hashtags, reposting for prizes, social mentions). Just as valuable is reaching a wide enough group to hold onto a more diverse audience. 
2. Share your stories: Not only engage your followers to be active, but also engage directly with them. Share personal brand stories, create brand narratives, and allow users to tell their own stories. Listen, but be heard, and the connection will form.  
3. Show you care: Show customers that you are seeing their personal stories and that you appreciate them. Comment on and like users photos, give special shout outs, and highlight loyal customers. This will increase their relationship with the branded content and the likelihood for followers to see the brand’s content. 

Social media use will continue to increase, and content will continue to be moved on to user-curated platforms. With over 400 million users on Instagram, instead of just selling a brand, we should think about forming relationships with followers. Instagram is not only a platform to send creative messages, but has become a place for conversation and connection. 

Helen Chen is a undergraduate studying Communications and International Studies at Northwestern University. She is currently completing the Integrated Marketing Communications certificate, and is interested in a future in creative advertising, nonprofit work, as well as starting her own small business. She is also very passionate about education and is involved in a student-run nonprofit called Supplies for Dreams. Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

#CEO #CMO, 3 Steps to Turn the Little Hashtags into a Powerful Tool

As CEOs and CMOs, you are definitely familiar with those little hashtags that appears everywhere, some of which might be #yourcompany. As a graduate student in Northwestern University Medill School’s Integrated Marketing CommunicationsProgram, I have put my emphasis on leveraging social media to boost brands and have found two articles that are of interest to CEOs and CMOs who are willing to better understand the powerful hashtags for their brands.

In his article How to Use Hashtags to Increase Your Social Media Presence, Warren Knight indicated that hashtags, when being used strategically, can create huge popularity around your brand. Tweets with hashtags could double engagement rate. You could use hashtags at various occasions like sales promotions, special offers or educate others of your brand, but you have to make the hashtags you use concise and unique. Furthermore, you should also measure some KPIs (e.g. number of reposts, number of replies, link click etc.) in order to see whether your hashtag strategy works and if not, you should make adjustment accordingly.
 

Source: gregbeazley.com

In another article written by Warren Knight, 8 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid in 2014, he specified 8 mistakes to avoid, all of which could be applied to hashtag usage and eventually could be broken down into the following three points: First, don’t use hashtags to build your brand without a strategy. You should first know social media well and then build a strategy specifically for hashtags. Second, don’t blindly create social media presence on every possible social media platforms. Figure out where your customers aggregate and use hashtags to engage them where they are. Third, don’t use too much hashtags in one tweet. Confusing your customers is the least thing you want to do.

After reviewing these 2 articles, here are 3 actions CEOs and CMOs should consider taking:
 

l  Monitor Social: Do consumer research and social monitoring, know where they are and what they are talking about.
 

l  Define Social Strategy: Develop social media strategy as well as hashtag strategy and act accordingly.
 

l  Track KPIs: Constantly keep tracking your KPIs and make necessary adjustment.

Those three actions should be done in a sequential way and should form a loop. Though as CEOs and CMOs, you don’t have to change your strategy constantly, some minor update resulting from changes in consumer behaviors should be reflected in the strategy. If all three actions could be followed in a sequential way, hashtags will be at your service and create huge returns based on little investment.

 

Qingyang (Fernando) Ding is a Master of Science Candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill School, Northwestern University concentrating in Social, Digital Media and Branding, who is expected to graduate in December 2014. He is a four language speaker with multi-cultural background and is good at uncovering insights. With previous internship experience in automobile, industrial design, cosmetic and international commerce industries, he is aspired to be an exceptional customer oriented brand builder. Contact him on Twitter at @fernando_ding

Tweet this: Little changes that create a big impact

It's amazing how many mistakes can be made with just 140 characters. Fortunately, not all of them are major enough to make headlines. Still tweeters, both new and seasoned, are making some serious missteps, ones that can add up to fewer followers and a lot of lost time. As a graduate student in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, I have been studying twitter and its impact on individuals and on brands. Here are some of my recent findings about learning to tweet effectively.

Think before you tweet.
Source: Lauren Hise

A recent study by Buddy Media shows that even the biggest brands can end up making major mistakes when it comes to Twitter. The company examined 320 Twitter handles belonging to some very prominent companies from December 11, 2011, to February 23, 2012, and organized some tips in a handy cheat sheet. What they found were companies guilty of tweeting too much, too long and with too many hashtags.

"User reach and engagement can vary drastically with just a few minor tweaks," said Gillian West, in an article for The Drum. "Primary success metrics included in the report were; reply rate - number of replies as a percentage of followers, retweet rate - number of retweets as a percentage of followers (include manual retweets), and, engagement rate - a combination of the replies and retweets in the number of followers."

Straight from the study, here are three ways that you can immediately improve the effectiveness of your tweets:

1. Know your audience, then seek them out. What is your audience interested in? Who are they? Are they students or professionals? How old are they? These are just some questions that need to be answered before you can begin to market effectively. Fortunately, there are some services that will help you target, such as the age-verifier that Twitter and Buddy Media have designed to help alcohol brands. Still, a lot of those answers are going to have to come from research and discussion with your customers. Take it as an opportunity to not only learn but also to engage.



2. Tweet during the day and on weekends when people are most likely to be paying attention. The study shows that the hours between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. are the busiest and are therefore the best times to tweet. Weekends, too, can be a great time to be on Twitter. Publishing saw 29 percent higher engagement on Saturdays and Sundays. 



3. Use hashtags and links effectively, and remember that sometimes less is more. According to the study, only 24 perent of the tweets observed used hashtags, even though they are twice as likely to result in interaction. However, don't go overboard. Using more than two can actually cause a 17 percent drop in engagement. Tweets with links were also retweeted 86 percent more than those without, but make sure the links you include are good ones. An embarrassing 92 percent of the links studied by Buddy Media did not work. Finally, keep it short. Tweets that are less than 100 characters are the most effective (17 percent higher engagement) because they are easily retweeted by followers.

As you can see, there is a method to the Twitter madness, one that fellow social media scholars are still decoding. Fortunately, with just these few minor changes, you can make sure that your tweets and your time are being used to gain truly valuable interaction. 

Lauren Hise is a graduate student at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, with a concentration in interactive publishing. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in English, with a minor in Communication. Lauren loves web coding, reading, cooking, keeping up with the latest Apple products and walking her dogs on the beach. Twitter | LinkedIn