Tag: social media

Instagram Officially Launches Business Profiles

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After testing business profiles and some new data analytics features for a few weeks, Instagram officially released the new business tools on Tuesday. The business profiles allow users who already have a Facebook Page for their business to upgrade their Instagram accounts and gain access to a set of new features, which include a Contact button that allows customers to get in touch via phone call, email, or text with just one tap, as well as a map offering customers directions to the business location. The new analytics tool Insights offers business accounts a detailed look into whom their followers are and how their posts are performing. Moreover, business users can now turn regular posts into ads directly within the Instagram app, with options to select audience segments for targeting and the  duration for promoted posts.

Why Brands Should Care
Instagram is making its platform increasingly brand-friendly by modeling its business-oriented products after its parent company Facebook, as it continues to vie for the massive amount of ad dollars shifting from traditional channels, such as TV and print, into social media. For brands with an established presence on Instagram or considering joining the photo- and video-sharing network, it would be smart to take full advantage of these new business tools to engage with users.

 

Source: AdAge 

Instagram To Offer Marketers Detailed Analysis On Followers And Posts

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram continues to make its platform more brand-friendly, now offering brand marketers more detailed analytics beyond “likes” and number of followers. The photo- and video-sharing social network has started testing a new analytics product called Insights that dives into granular details of followers and posts. Follower data includes a demographic breakdown by age, gender, and location, as well as follower activity by hour, and Top Posts will sort all posts published within a week or a month by impressions to let social marketers easily identify the best-performing posts of that time period.

What Brands Need To Do
By introducing detailed analytics to its platform, Instagram allows brand marketers to better understand their audience and to learn how to engage with them more effectively based on the data. If your brand is on Instagram, you should definitely explore the data analytics when it becomes available to gain some insights that can help improve your brand’s social strategy.  

Source: Marketing Land

Instagram Starts Testing Business Accounts For Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram is about to become a lot more brand-friendly as the social network starts testing the business accounts it teased back in March. The new business accounts come with several useful features that distinguish a brand’s profile page from regular accounts, including a Contact button placed next to the Follow button to encourage users to initiate communication via email, a label under the account name categorizing the businesses by type, and access to maps to direct users to a store location.

What Brands Need To Do
By all accounts, the new business accounts on Instagram bear a striking resemblance to the Brand Pages on Facebook. This should not come as a surprise, as Instagram has been following the steps of its parent company Facebook to build out its ad products and make its platform more appealing to brands. Instagram currently serves over 200,000 advertisers, yet many have found the platform frustrating to use due to the restriction on links it imposes and the limited interactive features it offers. Business accounts should provide brands with a good tool to remedy those drawbacks and convert more customers on Instagram.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Header picture courtesy of Later.com

Instagram Now Supports Videos In Carousel Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram launched a clickable Carousel Ad unit over a year ago, allowing brands to showcase their products with three to five still images in a single promoted post. Now, brands can cram multiple videos into one Carousel Ad, as the company doubles down on its quest for video ad spending. Airbnb, Macy’s, and Taco Bell are among the first brands to try out the new multi-video format.

What Brands Need To Do
Following the steps of its parent company Facebook, Instagram has been making a strong push for video ads in recent months. It revamped its Explore tab to add “Recommended Video Feeds” last month to encourage more video views and extended the length limit of video ads to one minute in February. By allowing videos in Carousel Ads, Instagram enables brand advertisers to craft a narrative with multiple videos to engage with consumers without cluttering their timelines. For brands that wish to capture attention on Instagram with their video ads, this new update to Carousel Ads should come as a welcome addition.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Why Brands Should Consider “Micro-Influencers” For Paid Social Campaigns

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A new study from influencer marketing platform Markerly found that once a social media influencer passes a certain amount of followers, the audience engagement they get actually begins to decrease. The study surveyed two million social media influencers and concluded that for paid posts on Instagram, the sweet spot for maximum impact is an influencer with a following in the moderate 10,000 to 100,000 range. Markerly calls those micro-influencers. While major social influencers with millions of followers may provide more extended reach, brands that activate a number of micro-influencers may actually achieve a higher conversion rate.

What Brands Need To Do
As consumers increasingly opt out of seeing ads and Instagram plans to introduce a Facebook-like algorithmic feed, more and more brands are turning to paying social influencers to get their messages across via sponsored posts. For those brands, this new study should prompt a reevaluation of their influencer strategy to see if it makes sense to team up with some micro-influencers with compatible audiences in order to reach their target demographic more effectively.

 

Source: Digiday

Interactive Video Ads Are Coming To Facebook And Instagram

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Soon brands will be able to engage Facebook and Instagram users with interactive video ads thanks to a beta program launched by video marketing firm Innovid today. British tea and coffee brand Taylors of Harrogate ran a campaign last December to test the format on Facebook with some positive results. The 30-second video ad invited desktop viewers to tap on an embedded button to pull up an overlaid window where they could take a branded quiz, purchase featured products, and sign up for newsletters. Mobile viewers will be able to click on the videos to open a webpage where they can enjoy the same interactive experience.

What Brands Need To Do
According to research by the IAB, interactive video ads drive higher brand lift than non-interactive ones and boast an 8% lift in purchase intent. Similarly, a 2015 study from Innovid which measured global impressions delivered to desktop browsers via its platform in 2014, also found that interactive video ads outperformed standard pre-rolls across almost all metrics. By making its interactive video ads compatible with Facebook and Instagram videos, Innovid is opening up new opportunities for brands to more effectively engage with consumers on social media. Brands should consider trying out this new format to step up their video ad game and move consumers down the sales funnel.

 

Source: AdWeek

Pinterest Expands Promoted Pins To Select International Markets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pinterest is ready to extend its ad products to some international markets as the social scrapbook network continues to seek higher ad revenues. Previously, Pinterest had limited the availability of its ad products to domestic advertisers only. Now, advertisers in U.K. are able to buy Promoted Pins to promote their content. Pinterest also plans to launch ad products in several English-speaking countries soon.

What Brands Need To Do
Of Pinterest’s over 100 million active users, more than 45 million of them reside outside the U.S. so it is crucial for the company to expand its ad products to overseas markets as it seeks further growth. For brands with an international presence, this expansion should be good news as they gain another valuable social channel to target their audiences with paid reach enabled by the ad products.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal

Instagram To Follow Facebook’s Playbook In Ad Products

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In an interview with Re/code, a spokesperson for Instagram revealed its plan to build out its ad products to make its platform more brand-friendly. Taking multiple pages out of Facebook’s playbook, the photo-sharing social network is said to be expanding its tools for marketers including profiles for businesses similar to Facebook’s Pages, additional measurement data on all posts whether they are paid or not, and the ability to buy ads via a mobile device.

What Brands Need To Do
Throughout last year, Instagram ramped up its efforts to court brand advertisers, introducing several new ad products and targeting tools that use Facebook’s data. In January, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app announced that it had hit 200,000 advertisers, which is more than Twitter has. As Instagram becomes more ad-friendly, brands that are seeing positive results from their Facebook campaigns should certainly try out what Instagram has to offer as well.

 

Source: Re/code

 

Pinterest Tests New Targeting Tools For SMBs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pinterest continues to improve its ad products as it debuted new targeting tools on Tuesday, one of which allows brand marketers to upload their own email subscriber data to Pinterest as a targeting option. The new targeting tools will also drastically increase the number of keywords and interests advertisers can target against from only 30 to 420. In addition, the company is rolling out its self-service ad platform Pinterest Ads Manager to all small- and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. Pinterest released several new ad products last year, which were well received by advertisers and propelled its ad revenues to eightfold growth in 2015.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook first started the trend of allowing marketers to target against their own customer email lists in 2012. By adding support for this feature, Pinterest can help brands and SMBs advertising on its platform reach their desired audiences in a more granular way, allowing them to dive deeper into specific areas of pinning activity and find potential buyers. For brands with an overlap between their customers and Pinterest users, the new targeting tools should be worth a try.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Facebook’s Instant Articles To Be Available For All Publishers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Nearly nine months since its debut, Facebook is ready to make its mobile content initiative Instant Articles available to all publishers. Starting on April 12, anyone with a website and a Facebook page will be able to take advantage of the program and publish content directly on Facebook instead of posting links that direct users to their own sites. Facebook initially placed some restrictions on ad placement in Instant Articles, but loosened its grip after pushback from major publishers. Now some publishers are reportedly able to generate the same amount of ad revenue from Instant Articles as from their own mobile properties on a per-view basis.

What Retailers Need To Do
Making Instant Articles widely available will no doubt increase its reach and encourage more publishers to try it out. For brand advertisers, this presents more opportunities to reach mobile Facebook users by offering them quick access to content. At a time when more and more consumers are turning to ad-blockers for a less cluttered online experience, Instant Articles can provide brands with a valuable platform where the ads will not be blocked.

For more information on how brands and publishers should deal with the rise of ad-blockers and earn consumer eyeballs, check out the Ad Avoidance section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal