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The home feed is dictated by the home emoji on the left-hand side.
The home page offers a number of benefits:
On the Activity feature, you have “Following” on one side, and “You" on the other.
The activity feature side is beneficial to marketers because it:
When you touch on the magnifying glass, you’re able to get to this page, and this page gives you loads of information for you to find new content, discover new users, and see how content is really generated nicely. This is very beneficial to marketers, because it lets you connect with a larger community and influencers, and find them within the niche that you are in.
You can get insights and discover how to do great content creation, and you can bring this all the way back to your brand, and you have the ability, if you’re able to do so, you can get featured on the Search and Explore page, and this will help drive so many new followers and growth for your brand.
When Instagram started out, Filters was a differentiator. Instagram Filters are beneficial because they can enhance a photo, but doesn’t take away from the original concept. You can incite emotional reactions. If you hit a black and white onto a photo, that really produces an emotional connectivity and makes you more emotional towards it. You can make a photo more beautiful, and if you use brightness and sharpen it, you can really add to your photo. You can unite your brand’s imagery and messaging through a creative palette. A lot of times, brands have certain looks for their Instagram grid. They just want to have the same coloring, the same message, and they really create it unified. Filters bring dull photos to life!
Sometimes, you just take that photo and you need some extra help. So, Instagram filters are such a great way for marketers to help their brand, help creative photos become more enhanced, and just really take your Instagram to the next level.
Let’s look at the basic features of a filter strategy. You want to bring out the best elements of the photo to further tell a visual story.
There are many factors to why choosing a certain filter lends itself to more engagement. In fact, a study shows that the world’s favorite filter is Clarendon. However, in fashion posts, the most used filter is Kelvin. Hence, there is reasoning within each niche on what filters you should use.
Hashtags are short words or phrases proceeded by a hashtag symbol, added to content captions to enable discovery and engagement.
Branded hashtags are unique to your business, usually including your company name, company tagline, campaign or contest name used for driving participation and engagement. Learning the art of a hashtag will lead to incredible results. Hashtags are short words or phrases proceeded by a hashtag symbol, added to content captions to enable discovery and engagement.
There are ubiquitous hashtags used by Instagram users, but you can also create a branded hashtag for your business, which is unique and can include your company name or company tagline. Also, when running contests, you can ask your followers to include a branded hashtag to drive participation, searchability and engagement.
Hashtags bring a number of benefits for marketers.
And branded hashtags bring these benefits:
Using the right hashtag in your post is a data-driven art form.
“Double tap” is a colloquial term used to have people like your photos. This is really important for marketers, because they can drive results by asking their users or audience to double tap a photo. By having more likes, this will help your content be placed above while in the algorithm, which is sometimes hard to get in, and asking your followers to double tap or like is just a way to really help that get through.
Regram is posting user-generated content on your own Instagram page. Regramming is super important for marketers.
It can be beneficial in these ways:
And another way you can do it is if you have multiple Instagram accounts, you can regram content from other pages onto that one as well. So, when regramming user-generated content, make sure you always ask permission to use that and you can slide and give them a shout out in their own photos.
Instagram Direct is Instagram’s native messaging platform that allows you to privately exchange threaded messages, and share posts, profiles, ephemeral photos, hashtags, and locations with other users. It’s the best way to connect with users on a one-to-one basis, and is accessed by clicking the kite icon in the top-right corner of the home feed screen.
This feature is very beneficial to marketers for the following reasons:
When communicating with your followers via Instagram Direct, make sure to adhere to these best practices:
When referring to the term mentions on Instagram, we mean that @ button to tag users in photos and videos, and in the comment section of a post, from which users receive notifications. Mentions help with discovery of content and can be used to expand audience reach to community members who would like the content.
It is important, however, to be aware of some key best practices when using mentions to reach your audience. This is in order to leverage a feature effectively and avoid negative sentiment towards your brand.
Here are the ways to do so:
Pinch to Zoom is a feature that allows users to zoom in on a photo or video on a touchscreen device by pinching the screen with two fingers. This took a while on the Instagram product roadmap, but was super important once it was implemented.
It's simple feature, yet one that poses a variety of benefits for marketers. These include:
Save as Draft is a feature that allows the user to choose whether they would like to save a post as a draft or discard it. This is beneficial to marketers that want to take extra time to post a photo even after capturing it.
Let’s take a look at how marketers can benefit from this feature.
You can access the Save as Draft feature by tapping “plus” at the bottom of the screen, then take or upload a photo or a video. Add effects, filters, and a caption or your location. Go back to the filtering and editing step, and then tap the back arrow in the top-left. And lastly, select “Save Draft” at the bottom of the screen.
Archive is a feature that lets you hide any of your posts from everyone else, but keeps them safe for you to look at in private or restore to visibility.
This feature is beneficial to marketers as it gives the ability to test out content to see if it delivers, use it for product launches to create a photo grid, or use it to promote sales and specials that expire.
Save to Collections is a feature which lets you organize your saved posts into individual collections to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
This feature is beneficial to marketers in many ways, and it gives you the ability to capture user-generated content for future use. You can create specific boards within certain verticals and niches and use them to show clients and perspectives, and you can monitor your competition as well as find inspiration.
Back to TopKate Talbot is a Growth Marketing consultant at Vidder Inc., best-selling author of "Oh Snap! You can use Snapchat for Business" and regular contributor to online publications such as Social Media Examiner, Engadget and KISSmetrics. Passionate about building brands through demand generation and strategic partnerships, Kate's expertise in social apps are unrivaled.
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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module dives deep into the leading app-based platforms, Instagram and Snapchat. It begins by outlining the benefits of using social apps in your campaigns. Then, it teaches you how to navigate the key features of Instagram and Snapchat, and how to create fully optimized posts on both platforms. Next, it provides best practices for managing Instagram and Snapchat accounts effectively and covers how to run engaging ad campaigns on each platform. Finally, it provides you with the knowledge to analyze performance on each channel using analytics tools.