How to Create a Poll on your Instagram Story

Do you want to proceed and survey your followers and audience? Then, all you need to do is follow the next few steps to create a poll for your Instagram story.

Create Your Story

The first step is creating a poll on your Instagram story, and if you want to customize it, you can add images and seamless videos related to the poll to look like a pro. To do so, click on the sticker icon visible on the top right corner of your smart phone’s screen.

Once you have successfully added a video or an image you want to use for the story, tap on the sticker icon shown as a smiley face in a square.

Select the Poll Option

Among various options displayed for you, you will also find a poll sticker. Select that option and start creating your poll for the story. These are the steps you must follow to create a poll.

• Type in a question that you want to ask your audience
• You must add two possible answers –the answers selected by default are “Yes” and “No.”Always remember that the poll answers are limited to only two options.
• Tap in each box to customize the responses if you want. The poll text for each option cannot exceed more than 26 characters.
• Share your poll with the audience, and your followers will start voting. There are no options to customize the font or color of your questions and answers as of now. However, you can play around with resizing your poll and place it wherever you want on the video or images.

Poll Metrics

Your Instagram polls can help extract some valuable metrics related to your audience’s interactions. You will get the poll results in a percentage format. So, what metrics will you find?

Story Views

You will get to know how many followers and who exactly saw your poll. However, this does not mean that every visitor of the story voted on the poll.

Voting Results

You will also get to check the number of viewers who chose each of the options you provided. You can share the results of your polls with your followers. However, they will only get to see the percentage of each answer and not what each individual chose.

Why Use Instagram Polls

Using the poll features will help you discover your consumer’s interests, especially if you are planning to launch a new service or product. You can float out an idea of the product in the market and get real-time feedback about the probability of success of the new product.

Creating a poll on your Instagram story is also an effective and fun way to increase your interaction with your Instagram followers. Personalizing your brand on Instagram will help depict the human side of your company to your followers. Hence, the followers will know that a normal person like them run your company. If you want to create a brand strategy for Instagram, reach out to our team.

The post How to Create a Poll on Instagram Story appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

If you’re looking for new ways to advertise to your customer base, Instagram is a visually-centric and engaging social media platform that has experienced dramatic growth; from 90 million monthly active users in January 2013 to 1 billion monthly active users as of June 2018.

Approximately 80% of all Instagram users follow a business on Instagram, so there are plenty of opportunities to connect with customers. Let’s take a look at how to make Instagram advertising work for you.

How do ads work on Instagram?

Instagram is entirely visual. Users upload their pictures and videos with captions that include hashtags to connect with other users and gain traction for their content.

Advertising on Instagram works in the same way. Here’s the great thing for advertisers: At first glance the post appears almost exactly like any other. It’s not always immediately apparent that viewers are seeing an ad. The main difference between an ad and user-generated content is that a small icon will appear in the corner of the image that identifies the post as “sponsored” content. After viewing the ad in their feed, users can click on the post for more details where you can include information about or a link to your products or services.

How does Instagram advertising differ from other platforms??

Facebook

Instagram ads are almost covert compared to Facebook’s more blatant advertising. Instagram users can enjoy a seamless experience that appears uninterrupted by advertising. Any sponsored content that does appear will be in relation to the user’s interests and look like part of their feed.

Pinterest

At first glance, Instagram and Pinterest appear to be very similar visually-focused platforms, but Instagram’s use of hashtags makes it unique in the way that content reaches its target audience. Pinterest lacks this kind of targeting ability. Instagram also offers a more diverse audience.

Snapchat

Instagram has a much larger audience than Snapchat and also offers less expensive advertising and free analytic tools, which Snapchat does not. We’ll admit that Snapchat has those fun filters, but they’re not much use for advertising.

Influencers

Unique to Instagram, influencers have managed to cultivate large followings, and well, influence, on the platform. Advertisers pay influencers to promote or post about specific products, that are then noted with the hashtag “sponsored.” Although this subtle form of advertising can be expensive, it is incredibly effective if influencers are appropriate for your brand.

Instagram’s growing audience and growing influence make it a platform that’s hard to ignore when it comes to social media advertising. Your initial audience research will tell you if this is where your customers are, and if so, make sure to consider Instagram when planning your next advertising campaign.

For a targeted advertising approach that covers the most relevant social media platforms for your audiences, get the expert players at C-leveled on your advertising team. Give us a shout to learn more about advertising strategies and techniques that will have you talking directly to the right people in the right ways.

The post How Does Instagram Advertising Differ from Other Platforms? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Despite months of holding off and constantly debating whether it’s worth your precious time, you’ve finally taken the plunge. You think Snapchat can work for your business and you’re ready to embrace all it has to offer.

You have great ideas and have been cranking out some fantastic stories almost anyone could enjoy. From storyboarding your snaps to picking the perfect geo and facial filters, you’re starting to develop your Snapchat chops.

There’s . . . just one problem.

You don’t have any followers. Your stories are falling on deaf ears.

Snapchat is unlike any other social platform in that it does not have a native search feature. You can’t find other users in the app unless you know someone’s specific username, have their Snapcode, or have their phone number in your address book.

Growing a following on Snapchat can be difficult, but using your current audiences for promotion makes it easier. While you don’t yet have a following on Snapchat, it’s likely you have a social following elsewhere. Leveraging your existing social circles and a few other tactics, you’ll have a Snapchat audience in no time at all!

1. Leverage People Who Already Know You

You saw this one coming, but it is seriously the most important.

You have followers on social because those people find you worthy to follow and something about what you share is valuable to them. Snapchat’s user numbers are growing every day, so you may know quite a few people already using the social platform.

So in these cases, you can try to sort out high-value followers through different methods and then target them with private messages. From here, try to figure out a tactful way to get them to share your Snapchat account details with their followers, and this should give a little boost. Think about why their followers should tune in to your stories and always be polite in your request.

The second way to leverage your existing circle of followers is through email. Your contacts signed up for your email list because they want to hear from your business. They are likely to connect with you on other social channels, such as Snapchat because they’re already your most devoted followers.

In your next email campaign, make sure your subscribers know you’re on Snapchat. Be sure to include your username, a brief description of why your readers should follow you, and what they can expect from your Snapchat story.

2. Share your Snapcode on social media EVERYWHERE

Back in 2009, you could rarely go anywhere without seeing a QR code. Short for “quick response” code, QR codes became popular because of their fast readability and ability to share information by allowing users to open URLs or access bonus content.

But QR codes are so 2009, utterly passe. That is, of course, until Snapchat rose and resurrected the QR code from the ashes. Although QR Codes aren’t as popular as they once were, Snapchat has taken the QR code and made it cool again.

Known as Snapcodes, the yellow ghost images can be used to easily add users on Snapchat. You can find your unique Snapcode by signing into your Snapchat account and clicking on the ghost icon at the top center of the screen.

Tap on the code and choose the download button in the top right corner. This will allow you to share your Snapcode via Message, Mail, Notes, Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks you may have connected to your device. You can also save the image to your photos.

When the user taps on the screen, the app will read the code and automatically add the profile connected to that Snapcode. The user can also save your Snapcode to their photos and add it using the “Add by Snapcode” option. The app will confirm that the user has been added to your friends list with a success message at the top of the screen.

You can also customize your Snapcode in photo editing software like Photoshop. As long as the black dots and hard black outlines are kept intact, any device can read them. You can even change the color from yellow to a more “brand-friendly” color!

By sharing this code on your social networks, adding it as your account profile and header images, you are bringing your account directly to new users and inspiring them to add you with little effort on their part.

But social media is just one place to share your Snapcode. Alternatively, you may want to think about adding it to your email signature or printing out your code on stickers and T-shirts. We certainly don’t condone vandalism, but this where you can get really creative with getting your code seen in as many places as possible.

3. Breathe Life Into Old Content

Stories on Snapchat don’t live on forever, so once the 24-hour window has passed, no one else can watch it. Unless you were smart enough to save it before moving on the next thing.

Don’t think of this short lifespan as a disadvantage since timeliness is one of the great appeals of the platform. Because the app lets you save your stories or individual snaps for later viewing, you’re free to let it live on in other places.

For images, the easiest place to start will be on Facebook, Twitter, but most importantly, Instagram. Just be advised that photos taken within Snapchat can suffer heavy compression and may not like all that great. However, any sketching, text, and emojis are kept intact, so what you see is what your followers on other channels will see.

For the full story or video snaps, consider posting directly to Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Again, this will be touching on your existing followers; however, these videos are easier to share, so you may get a little better visibility beyond your immediate circle.  

4. Add Your Snapchat Username to Your Bio

One of the easiest tips for promoting your Snapchat account is to add your Snapchat username to your social media bios. Keeping your username consistent across all social channel is a great way to make sure your fans can find you easily. However, if you have different handles for your accounts, be sure to address that.

For example, Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, has different handles for Twitter and Snapchat: @Mike_Stelzner and mikestelzner, respectively.

He makes this clear by adding his Snapchat username to his bio.

Even if your social media usernames are the same, including your Snapchat username in your bio lets your followers know that you are on the channel.

Bonus: Snapchat now has a custom URL for every account so anyone on a mobile device is redirected to the app to follow you after clicking on the link. This is so easy, you can add this personal URL to almost any social profile.

5. Orchestrate a Snapchat Takeover

If you’re a true student and heavy user of Snapchat, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with takeovers. When done properly, you can spread awareness through takeovers to an entirely new set of eyes that may have never been exposed to your content in any other way.

Sure, you may be repurposing your content for other channels like Instagram or YouTube but there’s nothing quite like experiencing what you’ve created when users are directly inside the platform. Not to mention that since they’re already in the app, this makes it slightly easier to screenshot your Snapcode or add you by your username.

If you want to learn more about takeovers, here’s a great list of resources on how to do it right:

• How To Pitch Your Next Snapchat Takeover
• The Definitive Guide To Your First Snapchat Takeover

6. Purchase Geo-Filters in Highly Populated Areas

You may not have thought about using geo-filters except in terms of event marketing, but there are a ton of reasons why you should be using them a lot more. Starting at just $5, you can select a specific area that you think is frequented by your target audience.

For example, say you’re a pizza shop and you want to reach more students at a local university. You could target the nightlife areas or even college sporting arenas with a tantalizing filter asking people to give you a follow. The filter may not get used a whole lot, but some will and you’re getting extra exposure than through the other methods mentioned.

7. Joining Snapchat Communities & Directories

Getting new followers without some kind of natural discovery is tough on Snapchat, but everyone else is feeling the same pain. That’s why there are several directories out there that you can join to reach a larger base of people looking to do the same thing you are.

There are various Snapchat directories that can help you find people to follow on Snapchat:

• Snapchat Usernames
• Ghostdir
• AddMeSnaps
• Snapcodes
• Ghostcodes

Simply add your Snapchat username to these directories so that when users search for Snapchat users to follow and connect, your username should pop-up and they may easily follow you. Think about what category your brand might fall under since users are sorted accordingly.

Conclusion

Snapchat isn’t something that can be easily mastered overnight, but then again, neither were any of the social platforms in their early days. If you really believe in the power and relevancy of Snapchat, you’ll want to take the time to understand the ins and outs, and all the little nuances to harness the platform for your business.

The post 7 Ways Any Business Can Get More Followers on Snapchat appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

What we found out in the course of one month while collecting data can be broken down into answering two questions:

What do I post?

When do I post it?

 Testing, Testing, Testing

Test everything. At this point, marketers are beginning to sound like broken records. But really there’s no point in doing anything without at least testing how effective it is and then reviewing your findings to target opportunities for improvement. The same goes for your social media strategy.

If there is one stark advantage that Facebook has over any other social network is the amount of data available. Layers upon layers of data to provide insights on your audience. The normal interface provides a fair amount of information, but this really should be considered as an overview. To get to the real juicy numbers, you need to export information by page and by posts.

The amount of data is so immense that it can be daunting. Before you test anything it’s important to look at all the different data points and prioritize which ones you want to analyze.

Going Deep

Page Data

Page data gives owners an idea of who their fans are based on typical demographic information. In this case you should only use page data to measure changes on a weekly basis by total new likes, unlikes, total post reach, and total number of people engaged.

Sharp week-to-week fluctuations can be compared against post performance to help explain these changes. Keep in mind that Facebook continually rolls out updates that can remove spammy or inactive accounts which can adversely alter your page data.

Post Data

Whatever method you choose to measure performance of your posts, this is going to be the bread and butter of your testing. You can either use Facebook’s current post data, or manually create your own spreadsheet to record your findings. The idea is that for each post, you want to track what day it was posted, the official time, what type of post it is (link, photo, video, etc.), total engagement (comments, likes, shares), and the total organic reach.

What did we find?

With so many resources out there claiming to know the best time of day to post, it’s hard to nail down which is the most accurate or reliable. So we wanted to do our own testing.

Similar to other forms of marketing and advertising a brand might choose to employ, there is no one-size-fits-all. Your success will largely be determined by who your audience is and your industry.

Despite this harsh truth in attempting to understand social media, we still were able to find out a couple things. We can’t guarantee that what we found will work for you, but instead these points are things you might want to consider should you decide to attempt an organic approach on Facebook.

Day of the Week

Everything is cyclical. No two days are identical and very seldom should you consider historical data to be indicative of future behaviors. Testing the time of day is a continual process. For example one week we found that Friday at 4:45PM EST had the best organic reach. But when we posted the same time the following week, reach was significantly less.

The problem here is that trying to find the optimal time of day to post something is an oversimplification of a complex issue. We decided that for us we would test not only post during peak traffic times, but also less conventional times just to see what we would get.

Mondays

Got a case of the Mondays? So does every
one else. Although not the best day for organic reach, you can still post on this day to keep up with engagement. Your best bet is posting between 11:50AM and 12:10PM. Posting after 5PM yielded little success.

Tuesdays

From our experience, the absolute worst day to post on Facebook. Any content posted on Tuesdays should be lower priority. Unless of course something timely is happening on that day (eg. Cinco de Mayo) it’s always a good idea to ride trending topics. You’ll want to aim for posting something before 11AM or after 7PM.

Wednesdays

Not the worst, but still not great. With slightly better reach than Mondays, the “golden” hour will be sometime around lunch (11:30AM – 12:30PM).

Thursdays

Now it gets interesting. For us, Thursday was the day with the highest amount of average traffic. Which might be because the work week is almost over and folks are looking early towards the weekend. It can be argued that a lot of other brands see similar information and want to post as well. Posting on Thursday is definitely a good idea, just realize that everyone else knows this too. Your best content needs to take priority. Best time? Any time after 3PM should be good, but try to avoid posting any earlier than that.

Fridays

Friday will look very similar to Thursday. It was the day with the 2^nd highest reach. Time of day still applies, but this is the day with the highest amount of fluctuations. 3PM is usually best, but photos will be your best bet to post at this time. Stay away from posting after 6PM since Friday had the lowest organic reach during those hours.

Saturdays

While Saturday has the lowest amount of user traffic, you can still reach your audience. There is less competition from other pages and people so you can really get an advantage. Scheduling natively or through tools like Hootsuite will be your friend. However it’s a good idea to check in routinely over the weekend to ensure you’re not walking into a nightmare come Monday morning.

Sundays

Just like Saturday, Sunday is ripe with opportunity. Sunday has even higher traffic numbers with brands only now beginning to capitalize. Soon it might become very competitive, but for now you should keep it in mind when crafting content.

One very important side note for posting on the weekend: Don’t interrupt the user. It’s the weekend and they are likely not thinking about business. So when thinking about what to share, try to go for the lighter stuff or upcoming social events (Superbowl, Mothers Day, etc.).

What to Post

Facebook has become less of an actual social network as it is a point of content distribution. Blogging is incredibly valuable from an SEO standpoint. But the fact is that posting links outside of Facebook pales in comparison to visual content.

Compared to links and regular text updates, photos shared garnered 64% higher organic reach. Not only that, but photos also received a staggering 204.5% more engagement.

This makes sense because if you create something visually captivating and are able to keep a user’s attention for more than a couple seconds, they’ll probably be more likely to engage. More specifically the best performing posts were pictures of our team members. Make your brand more human and your audience will take notice.

Experimentation is Your Friend

Facebook is constantly making updates so what might be good today will be utterly useless tomorrow. Facebook in many ways is just like Google. It’s been successful for the most part because it keeps the end user in mind and constantly doing what they can to create the ultimate experience. Testing will help you identify your weaknesses and get better. Don’t get bogged down in past successes and always be willing to shake it up.

The post Best Times of Day to Post on Facebook for B2B Marketers appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

As popularity grew and more people began to realize social media’s potential, everyone wanted a piece of the pie. In doing so, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become more and more crowded. People are sharing more online than ever and brands are doing their part to get in on the action as well. Twitter has begun to play with a curated timeline (much to the chagrin of its users), but Facebook has been experimenting with its own algorithm to cut through the noise for a few years now.

Let Me Curate That for You

Facebook’s News Feed has been around since 2006 and users were provided an easier method of keeping up with their friends. The creation of the “Like” feature in 2007 was Facebook’s first step towards offering a new dimension of engagement to gauge what users did and didn’t want to see in their News Feed.

But then in October of 2009, Facebook launched a huge update by changing the default sorting order of posts from reverse chronological order to posts by popularity. As far as posting organically for brands, this might be seen as the event that marked the beginning of the end.

Essentially, the News Feed algorithm is Facebook’s method of sorting posts based on a few factors but mainly pertaining to user engagement. This includes likes, comments, shares, post clicks and photo/video views a post may receive. This became known as Facebook’s EdgeRank and although the algorithm has not been referred to as such internally since 2011, the concept remains the same. The more your audience engages with your content, the more likely your future posts will be inserted into their News Feed without dedicating advertising dollars.

Pay-To-Play

Any tweaks and adjustments Facebook makes is always argued to be done in favor of benefitting its users. But many marketers and brands would argue it’s just a way to make it harder to push their content unless you dedicate paid efforts behind it. This is a valid argument, but if Google’s recent mobile-friendly search update has taught us anything it’s that user experience should trump everything.

In recent years, Facebook advertising has been a great tool for advertisers marketing to an online audience. With features like dark posting, users can create content and promote it to an incredibly specific audience with minimal and controlled ad spend. Bigger players on social can definitely justify this kind of strategy, but it does leave smaller businesses with a couple of hard choices.

Continual Tweaking

As of April 21, 2015, Facebook announced new changes coming to the News Feed. It highlights a couple things:

Repeat Content

If you are a newer user or you don’t have larger number of friends or pages you follow, Facebook will now allow you to see multiple posts in a row from the same source if your News Feed doesn’t have any new content to show.

Friend Engagement Visibility

According to Facebook’s survey, users stated they didn’t like seeing users commenting or liking other posts. This minor feature has been deemed as less valuable and will either be shown much lower in a user’s News Feed or not at all.

People over Pages

The change that impacts brands and publishers the most is favoring posts from friends over pages. The concept is sound; people don’t want to miss out on updates from their friends and family. This moves posts from business pages to be pushed down the News Feed even further and in turn lowering organic reach. Facebook has even acknowledged the fact that they believe this will reduce referral traffic from page posts.

Putting Together a Game Plan

Quality, valuable content is currently the best way to connect with audiences, and this doesn’t pertain to just social media. Facebook might not even be the best place for a brand to be when looking to promote itself. This is not to say that posting organically is impossible, but the challenges are only going to increase.

But if you are willing to put in some money, Facebook has tremendous tools to leverage. It all comes down to when you should promote and when you should boost.

When Should I Boost a Post?

For a quick and easy way to get your posts shown to more people you just need to boost it. If you’ve posted regularly from your business page, you might have noticed a blue button in the lower right-hand corner of your posts labeled as “Boost Post.”

When you select to boost, it’s always done after a post has been uploaded. Just be aware that if you are looking to boost an image, make sure it has text taking up less than 20% of the image size itself or Facebook will deem it unacceptable and kick it back. This requirement also applies to promoted posts. Facebook has its own text validation tool or you can use other free tools available online to help with this.

From here you can select to boost the post to your fans and friends of your fans, or general audience by age, gender, and between 4 to 10 interests. Then select how much you’d like to spend and how long you would like your post to be boosted for.

When Should I Promote a Post?

The primary difference between the two is targeting and bidding options. While boosting a post does offer some good basic level targeting, the Ads Manager in Facebook goes even further. You have the option to target people beyond their interests, age, gender, etc. You can select people by behaviors, language, people who travel to a specific location, what apps they connect to, their ethnicity, political affiliations; the list is endless. You can get as specific as possible and get the exact type of consumer you want to reach.

Even further, you have more options in the way of bidding so you can optimize your spending. First, you can schedule your post to show right way or designate the exact start and stop time. After you can select the option that best fits your needs for either post engagement, daily unique reach, impressions, or clicks.

After you set pricing and what you’re willing to spend, you can edit how your post will look in the desktop, mobile, or right rail views. Don’t want to display in the right rail or desktop views? You can remove them and target just mobile.

Creating the best content the world has ever seen isn’t worth much if no one sees it. While the “free ride” may be over, promoting and boosting posts in Facebook can still be a massively valuable tool to engage your audience.

The post Is the New Facebook News Feed Tweak the End of Organic Posting? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.