5 Things Your Brand Should Start Doing With Instagram Right Now

Hopefully by now your brand has joined the 40+ million users in sharing photos with the widely popular mobile app Instagram and hopefully it has proven to heighten engagement, provide compelling content and afford your brand added depth.

If not, go do that right now.

I’ll wait.

I am sure you’re an all-star when it comes to applying the perfect filter or capturing the perfect angle, but there are a few features and tricks Instagram yields that are a little less obvious that will help attract and engage your awesome brand army!

Consistency Wins in Instagram Hashtagging

 If you are reading this, I am going to assume you are the woman or man with your hands on the brand (say that five times fast! Just kidding. Don’t.). And since you are assigned that role, I’ll also assume you are a wildly enthusiastic creative solar flaring with the brightest ideas your company has ever seen. I’m like a mind reader, I know.

It’s not secret that hashtags are effective for organizing posts and helping content gain traction organically (meaning without being paid for) or at least that’s the ideal. As your company’s branding guru you’ve probably developed time and time again a creative hashtag for a specific campaign to help promote across Twitter, Tumblr, G+, etc…

Where you will win with hashtags on Instagram is by designing a unique hashtag with longevity. A hashtag that will accompany every Instagram photo you share. The reason for this is being that your hashtag is tied to a compelling piece of visual content that can then be in turn displayed on your website, Facebook, G+, or micro-blog by way of RSS or a third-party aggregator such asStatigram or SnapWidget.

You now have created a visually stimulating driver for your social platforms, website and blogs; a place where your fans can check out what you’ve been up to and easily share giving your profiles and content a little more muscle.

Additionally, by remaining consistent with your hashtags on Instagram, you are setting the record for how the hashtag should be used within the social space further fortifying visual branding within your social communities. 

Location, location, location

Using Instagram works like this: Take a photo, make it awesome with filters, write a clever little caption and share it. Right?  100% right, just not 110% right.

Instagram allows user to tag the location of photos by using Foursquare’s geo-location technology. Geo-tagging a location is an easy way of authenticating your brand’s photo and simply saying, “Hey, check out this awesome photo from the awesome place we actually just visited.”

I know it may not sound astonishing, but you’d be surprised how your community responds when they know your brand is out and about interacting in an interesting place or just places in the neighborhood.  Really send it all the way home with the location tag.

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What Google+ Circles Mean to Us by Jerry Rizzo

Do Google+ circles have your head spinning in circles? Having trouble deciding whose in and whose out?  Have no fear, I’m here to hopefully quell your Stokenphobia.

Sto·ken·pho·bi·a/ˈfōbēə/ Noun: An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to round objects.

It’s easy enough to continue Facebook style categorizing and adding every user to your “Friends” circle.  By solely using a “Friends” circle you are essentially implying that you don’t care who sees your posts and you don’t care whose posts you see.  There is no harm in this categorizing method, but you may miss out on lots of opportunities to engage interested users.

 

If you want your posts to be read and you want to tailor your feed to your interest you must be a little more selective.  This may seem daunting, but it’s important to remember that the G+ experience is all about YOU!  When you are faced with the decision of which of your circles another user belongs to ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of content does this user share?
• Do I want to read this users content regularly?
• What kind of content do I want to share with this user?
• Does this user have an interest in what I’m posting about?
• How often does this user post?

Most importantly, I advise against becoming overly consumed by determining whether somebody is a friend , acquaintance or random.  It’s okay if you find that most users end up stock piled into one circle, because let’s face it many users are still new to Google+ and are not frequently sharing interesting content yet.  Ultimately it’s about the content being shared and if YOU want to share or be shared with.

Hopefully the room has stopped spinning and you can now create more appropriate circles to create a more favorable G+ experience.