White Paper

White Paper

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  of1 8 WHITE PAPER OPTIMIZINGYOUR REACH IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA AGE A Guide for Using Instagram to Build a Professional PR Brand ____________________________________________________________________________ Allyson Altman University of Central Florida MMC3630 Professor Dodd March 6, 2016
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  of2 8 To besuccessful on social media, one must establish and maintain a social media presence. This all starts at the foundation of Instagram: generating a strong fan-base. According to Sprout Social, “success for brands on Instagram takes more than publishing attractive images — it is a product of a thought strategy, a well-defined brand identity grounded in visual creativity and effective community management.” With a constant increase in consumer base and ongoing usage from previous users, brands have the opportunity to engage with their fans on a whole new level. In fact, Instagram posts generate an engagement rate of 4.21% per-follower. That’s 58 times more per-follower engagement than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter. Throughout the course of this paper, Instagram’s presence in social media marketing will become evident. In addition to providing a how-to guide for using Instagram to build a professional PR brand, readers will learn the do’s and don’ts of posting for consumer engagement. Readers will see how optimizing their reach can be done at the tip of their fingers with Instagram’s mobile app. See how businesses of all sizes are inspiring people around the world with their stories on the Instagram for Business blog. Background Information: With one million users nearly two months after its launch, Instagram was set to be a success story. How is this possible? Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, invested in Kevin Systrom’s and Mike Krieger’s $1 billion idea of a photo app. On October 6, 2010, Kevin Systrom signed into his Apple App Store control panel and released Instagram to the world. The buzz of the new photo-sharing app built fast and within just hours, Instagram’s mobile app attracted over 10,000 users. In 2011, Instagram established a sense of credibility and received the award “iPhone App of the Year.” Not even two years after its launch, the mobile app was released to Android users and it’s consumer base skyrocketed to 80 million users. To this day, Instagram is ever-changing and consistently improving. Instagram went from being recognized as a photo-sharing mobile app to an end-to-end advertising solution. Instagram drives real business results with the ability to share their stories in a high-quality, creative environment. Standing firm as one of the world’s largest mobile ad platforms, Instagram holds a community of more than 400 million. Getting Started: Unlike Facebook and Google Plus, it’s difficult to differentiate the difference between professional and personal account on Instagram. Because Instagram tends to be more relaxed, people often manage multiple accounts depending on their purposes. Many in-the-making PR professionals are torn between the concept of separating their personal accounts with their business accounts. According to Jenn Herman’s blog post on social media management, “it’s important to remember that your business Instagram account is for your audience. In contrast, a personal account is usually for yourself.” So, if your personal account is typically displaying images of your friends and family, it’s best to keep this account private and strictly for personal use. On the the other hand, if your posts are representative of you and your brand, you may be able to mark your territory as a PR professional, especially if your audience is used to connected
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  of3 8 with youlike this. To transition from a personal account to a PR business, you should set this account to public and link it to any other social media handles you want to be professionally recognized on. For those entirely new to Instagram, constructing an account for your business is fairly straightforward. Like any ordinary user would do, create an account that’s similar or relative to your business and other social media handles. However, if Instagram is your starting point or the first account you’re creating to become professionally recognized, here are a few things to keep in mind: • Establish a username that’s representative of who you are and what you hope to convey as a PR professional. • Likewise, simplicity is key when it comes to a profile picture. Stick to your brand’s logo or symbolic graphic and keep in mind that this image will be cropped into a small circle of 150 x 150 pixels. • Start off strong by playing an active role with your community through engagement with comments, questions, hashtags and shared locations. These location tags and Photos of You will help strike conversation on other community members’ posts about your brand. Language: Instagram offers so much more than a simple photo-sharing platform. It allows businesses to connect relevant information to an image, video or ad. With a high enthusiastic audience, businesses and PR professionals can extend their reach. We, as advertisers and consumers, want to interact with that post; however, none of this would be possible if we don’t understand Instagram’s terminology. • Mention — When someone comments on your Instagram post or when your username is mentioned in someone else’s image. This can be done by typing the @ symbol before the user’s name. • Like — When someone double taps your photo or clicks the heart button on the bottom left corner underneath the image. • Tag — Before sharing (or after with the edit option), you can tag another account. Start by clicking where they are located in the image and then enter their username. • Geotag — Data collected from the GPS in your phone (if granted accessible to Instagram) connects the longitude and latitude of your current location with the image, video or ad. • Hashtags — Expand the size of your potential audience by making your post searchable. Hashtags can be used when adding the # symbol in front of key terms in your caption. (Social Concepts: Social Media Consulting).
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  of4 8 Content Strategy: Whetheryou’re entirely new to Instagram, converting you preexisting personal account to a business account, or creating a new account to become professionally recognized, content strategy is crucial. Instagram for Business agrees that “businesses do best on Instagram when they share well-crafted content that’s on-brand and driven by a clear objective.” 1. Start with a simple goal and original concept. • Instagram’s most powerful ads have a strong concept that’s tied to a clear goal. Ensure that you’re creating concepts that align with your campaign goal. 2. Brand your ads & maintain consistency. • This can be done by establishing linking certain elements together throughout your images and videos, such as an well-known color palette. 3. Focus on skill. • Ads do best when they’re artistic and interesting to look at. Similarly, how you represent yourself as a PR professional should draw people’s attention and keep them wanting more. As part of a community of over 400 million users, businesses use Instagram as way to visually showcase their products and services. Building a professional PR brand starts with the ability to visually express yourself. Mobility: Mobile devices, such as iPhone’s and Androids are playing an increasingly large role in society. With that, media consumption is becoming part of our daily routine. In 2014, Statista, a statistics portal that collects studies from more than 18,000 sources, noted that social networking was among the first activities to become mobile. The chart below shows the proportion of time users of social networks spent on mobile devices and desktop PCs.
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  of5 8 Instagram —more than any other social media application — is most commonly used as a mobile app. As one of the leaders in this scope, Instagram’s mobility allows you to take pictures and videos that can be directly posted for viewers within seconds. Not only does the ability to track and follow different accounts from around the world provide entertainment for some, but for PR professionals it can help establish credibility. 6 Ways to Attract More Followers: Keeping credibility in mind, there are numerous things you can do to better establish your brand as a PR professional on Instagram. Blogger Pamela Vaughan proves that there is a direct correlation between your social media presence and the outcome of your reach. Additionally, an increase in reach is constant with the potential to generate more leads. Through diligent research and my own practice, I have provided six helpful tips to attract more followers and maximize your reach in the Social Media Age. 1. Improve and Establish Your Social Presence: Optimizing your presence should be your initial priority. This includes tweaking minuscule factors, like your bio and profile, to make sure that they provide clear and concise descriptions of your brand (e.g. company logo and website URL). Following this, it’s important to promote your social presence everywhere. This meaning, link all of your social media accounts together. 2. Share Significant, Useful Content: Yes, promoting your presence should be your priority; however, it needs to be something worth following in the first place. Sharing valuable content includes posting particularly what’s relative and engaging to your goal-audience. Avoid product-focused content, and instead provide your audience with educational-content. People follow brands on social media because they want to see if it’s beneficial to them, not necessarily how great your product or service is. 3. Allow For Your Content to be Shared: Similar to how you should promote your social presence everywhere you go, you should also ensure that your profile has been made public. Allowing your content to viewed publicly gives your audience or any visitors the opportunity to repost your content. Any reposted content may potentially increase your reach to a broader audience that extends beyond your direct connections and preexisting followers. If those people then enjoy the content that they’re being exposed to, they may be inclined to directly follow you too. 4. Build Relationships with People In Your Field: Start by following accounts that may be beneficial, influential, or are relative to your industry. A mutually beneficial relationship can be built by engaging in conversations and discussions online. This relationship may even go so far to create a partnership, or it may simply lead to someone in the same field as you reposting your image/video. This would again, spread your content to a new, and similar audience that could potentially expand your reach. 5. Diversify Your Ad Formats: Instagram for Business allows for posts to be photo ads, video ads, or carousel ads. Photo ads offer a clean and creative canvas that tell their businesses story through imagery. With video ads, the same visual quality is created, plus the option to include sound and motion. Carousel ads give an additional layer of depth to photo ads; your audience can swipe to see more images and a call to action button transfers them to a related
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  of6 8 website tolearn more (note: the four dots directly below the carousel ad are used to view the additional images on that one post). All three of these Instagram ad formats allow for suitable message association and increase awareness, respectively. 6. Interact With Your Followers: It’s important to engage in conversation with your audience — ask questions, participate in discussions. This will help create a social media presence worth following! Simple discussions with your audience may give you insightful feedback on things you may need to improve on too. Joined Together with Facebook: On April 9, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, took a leap of faith in purchasing Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock. However, he quickly addressed the rising issue that both companies will still run as independent services. In fact, he made a post on his Facebook profile confirming that Instagram would continue to work with rival social networks. That will allow users to post on other services, follow users outside of Facebook, and to opt out of sharing on Facebook (NY Times). Given this information, the ability to maximize your reach in through social media just got greater. Selecting to advertise across Facebook and Instagram will optimize delivery across their combined audience. Furthermore, ads running across both platforms provides better performance for website clicks, conversions, views and mobile app installations compared to separately running ads on Facebook or Instagram. Instagram for Business has provided multiple examples in which they ran campaigns together on both platforms. To illustrate, it only took the eCommerce business one, quick set up in Facebook’s Ads Manager to advertise MVMT Watches across the two platforms. Results proved that MVMT Watches had a 20% lower cost per
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  of7 8 conversion andcost per action when running these ads together. Ad Manager at MVMT Watches says, “We use Instagram as another placement on Facebook, not a separate channel, because it allows us to scale our campaigns quickly by reaching more of our targeted audience.” Like Instagram, Facebook consistently exceeds all expectations. Advertisers have been granted even more flexibility when running ads on the two platforms: they can choose to either use the same photos and videos for both platforms, or select individual campaigns for each medium. With the example stated before and the image to the right, it’s clear to see that fusing Facebook and Instagram for advertising purposes will help businesses to expand to a larger audience. Also, this solution gives PR professionals the opportunity to extend their brand to a new platform. Thus, optimizing their reach. Conclusion: Being part of the Social Media Age means that we as consumers and advertisers must keep up with trends. In the past decade, social media has made an appearance and everlasting imprint. The ability to use social media as a way to build a professional PR brand is something that seemed so far-fetched at it’s initial break-through. Fortunately, Instagram has granted people with this opportunity at their fingertips. This mobile app has established it’s own unique language, content strategies, and methods to ensure credibility. After fusing with Facebook, Instagram for businesses has been taken whole new level. Businesses and PR professionals have been granted the opportunity to share campaigns at an even larger, more diverse scale. With all that’s been said, it’s of utmost importance to tell your story through captivating images and videos with unique captions that can build a professional PR brand and maximize your reach.
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  of8 8 References: Instagram forBusiness. (n.d.). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from https://business.instagram.com/ How to Create an Instagram Marketing Strategy | Sprout Social. (2016). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-marketing-strategy-guide/ 26 Tips for Using Instagram for Business : Social Media Examiner. (2013). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/instagram-for-business-tips/ Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Founders of Instagram. (2012). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http://www.inc.com/30under30/2011/profile-kevin-systrom-mike-krieger-founders- instagram.html The Complete History of Instagram. (2014). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http://wersm.com/ the-complete-history-of-instagram/ How Many Instagram Accounts Should You Have? - Jenn's Trends. (2014). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http://www.jennstrends.com/many-instagram-accounts/ Humphreys, J. (n.d.). How to Build a Successful Instagram Profile. Retrieved March 5, 2016, from http://socialconceptsconsulting.com/how-to-build-a-successful-instagram-profile/ Infographic: How Mobile Are Social Networks? (n.d.). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from https:// www.statista.com/chart/2091/mobile-usage-of-social-networks/ Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion. (n.d.). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http:// dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instagram-for-1-billion/