Using Instagram video as an effective marketing tool

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth more—which is why many social media platforms are starting to foray into video sharing to boost their subscriber base. One of these video platforms is Instagram, whose popularity has grown exponentially as that of social media platforms where it is supported.

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Instagram video as an effective marketing tool is an understatement, considering that the social media platform has a base of more than 130 million users and its format facilitates sharing to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, which have also seen profound growth.

Instagram offers up to 15 seconds of video recording, compared to its nearest competitor, Vine, which offers only a maximum of 6 seconds of video recording. It also has video editing features that support the same high-quality filter sets for still photos, which are the very novelties of Instagram.

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Here are some ways marketers can capitalize on Instagram’s powerful new video-sharing feature:

• Product demos, including how-to videos and product features;

• Visual portfolios, highlighting work done for previous clients;

• Special offer promotions and events, using hashtags to track conversations about the product or brand;

• Brand humanization and real-life engagement between the brand and its customers;

• Increase community engagement on Facebook

Videos can help build customer engagement and increase sales in a way photos can’t: the latter can only showcase the aesthetics of a product and caption its functions, but the former can truly demonstrate how it works and changes lives.



Video Source: bulletpointbranding.blogspot.com

John Bohan founded Socialtyze to help empower brands through the power of social media. More information can be found at this website.

REPOST: Facebook Finally Lets You Place Photos Directly In Comments, But Still No GIFs

Facebook made a new tool that allows users to insert photos directly to comments. Read this article by Alexis Kleinman of The Huffington Post.

Image Source:  huffingtonpost.com

Finally, Facebook is making a change that everyone can agree is an improvement. On Wednesday, the social network added a little camera button on its comment boxes, allowing users to insert photos directly into comments. Before, users were forced to copy and paste links to photos into comments.

Facebook provided The Huffington Post with the following screenshot that demonstrates how the new photo sharing system works.

Image Source:  huffingtonpost.com

The feature is being gradually and globally rolled out starting today, Facebook told The Huffington Post, so if you don't have it yet, don't panic. The new tool was built at one of Facebook's many hackathons.

As far as we can tell, the new photo tool doesn't support the use of GIFs, some Facebook users' favorite mode of communication. GIFs take up much more bandwidth than photos, and supporting GIFs could slow the site down considerably. We both dream of, and dread, the day when GIFs are embeddable into Facebook comments.

John Bohan has  over 12 years of experience in crafting smart media campaigns, managing online communities, and building engaging applications. Visit this Facebook page for more information on how to make social media work for online marketing campaigns.

REPOST: New Google Tool Helps Businesses Deliver Better Online Ads

How will "The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" - a new tool launched by Google - help online businesses? Read about it from this Entrepreneur.com article.

When customers visit your website with the intention of making a purchase, do you always know how they arrived there? Were they directed to your site from a display advertisement on another site? Did they click on a link emailed to them by a friend? Did they find your product or service through an online search? And which is most effective for driving sales online?

These are questions Google is trying to answer with a new tool called "The Customer Journey to Online Purchase," which allows users to explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions impact online sales -- from the first time customers interact with your marketing to the moment they buy something. Released today, the tool draws on data collected from more than 36,000 Google Analytics business clients.

Image Source: Entrepreneur.com

For instance, customers typically click on display ads early in the online purchasing process, but in industries such as travel and auto, customers tend to click on display ads closer to their purchasing decision, according to Google. "The data shows that every industry is different," Google said in an announcement. "The path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path for an online supermarket in Canada."

The idea, Google says, is to help marketers design advertising campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment. Business owners can use The Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool to look at typical purchasing trends in their industry, and then reference their own Google Analytics data to determine how and where different marketing channels influence customers to make purchases so they can adjust their budgets and programs accordingly.

The Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool is free to use and is available starting today.

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Are you interested to learn more about search engine marketing? Visit this John Bohan blog site for more related articles.

New Google+ update: Focusing on people instead of tools

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2011 was the year Google decided to unleash its take on social networking, seeking to overthrow Facebook as the largest social networking platform. Known as Google Plus, G+, or Google+, the site has recently overthrown Twitter as the world’s second largest social networking platform, with over 343 million active users worldwide, which amounts to around 25 percent of global Internet users.

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Its recent update pushes a modern design, support for multiple devices, and a lot more. One reason why Google+ used a minimalistic approach, as opposed to what Facebook did with its user interface, is that it believes that technology is at its best when it gets out of the way, leaving tools, charts, complicated menus and options in the background, and letting users just focus on having fun, all while creating unique content that is fresh and exciting. Another problem that the update seems to fix is the need for a robust universal communication platform that will work across all devices and operating systems, mobile included. Google Hangouts combines the ease of universal messaging via the Web, photo sharing, and video calling in one sleek, modern package. SMS messaging is currently not supported, although that functionality will be added in future updates to the platform. The update also gives the power of Google to photos uploaded to the social networking site, giving people less time to worry about how their photos look and more time to make memories.

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One thing is for sure: With the new Google+ update, it is clear that Google isn’t content with its social media platform staying second to Facebook; it wants to be number one.

More industry-related news can be accessed at this Twitter page for John Bohan.

Bringing Facebook's structured status updates to the mobile experience

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Updating a Facebook status used to be simple: One would just type something in the status update box—a myriad of stringed words ranging from “Today is a very nice day” to “I feel very cranky today, please don’t hang around me”—whatever reflects the user’s current emotions, activities, and whatnot. But with Facebook’s extremely dynamic nature, this simplicity was bound to change. True enough, by the start of 2013, the world’s largest social network introduced structured status updates, a more visual and organized way of letting other people know whatever users are up to.

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With structured status updates, users find a drop down menu that presents them several options such as “eating,” “feeling,” and “watching” which will then be appended to the status update. This new feature is considered to be a clever strategy which can be indexed in the graph search and later on leveraged to gather data for ad targeting. Unfortunately, this feature is exclusive to web and smartphone app users, thus leaving behind a sizeable number of mobile users which make up a great number of the Facebook user population.

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Facebook, greatly aware of the significance of the mobile demographic, tweaked its system to make sure mobile users don’t lag behind. Now everyone can get to enjoy the convenience of “structured updates” regardless of the device being used.

This move shows Facebook’s sensitivity to the growing mobile market, portending the social network’s future concentration with their constant system updates.

Social media marketers, such as John Bohan, keep abreast with whatever changes Facebook rolls out to ensure that they leverage these features toward greater customer satisfaction. More information about Mr. Bohan may be found at this Facebook page.

The importance of spending time for social media

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Social media has effectively changed how companies communicate with and disseminate information to their customers and audiences. What was once the role of newsletters, advertisements, PR releases, and company websites is now being replaced by social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, which are arguably better communication platforms as they allow the companies to interact directly with their customers.

However, although social media has gone mainstream, not all companies are getting in on the action; there are those who probably think that social media marketing is just all-hype and is actually ineffective. However, that line of thinking will only be true if social media marketing efforts are not properly integrated into other business processes—if they lack strategy.

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SocialMediaToday.com lists the following social media workflow and the amount time needed for them to be more effective so that companies can use or integrate them in their social media strategies:

• Updating social networks (4 hours).

• Planning, writing, and publishing blog posts (7.5 hours).

• Researching and planning internal and external content to share (4 hours).

• Curating and sharing content (2.5 hours).

• Engaging with the community (4 hours).

• Monitoring brand mentions online (2.5 hours).

• Developing campaigns, such as promotions or contests (2.5 hours)

• Promoting community growth (2.5 hours).

• Performing strategy management and adjustments (2.5 hours).

• Analytics reporting (2.5 hours).

• Allotting contingency time for damage control or unexpected problems (4 hours).

Social media is not just about scheduling tweets and replying to mentions, but rather a living process that demands proper care and management.

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John Bohan created Socialtyze to assist companies with their branding needs by harnessing the power of social media. Visit its website for more information.

Facebook Home: Is user privacy a concern?

With the announcement of Facebook Home for Android and the HTC First, HTC’s Facebook phone, people now have a chance to use the widely popular social networking site in a whole new way. They will be able to send messages to their friends and check their News Feed directly from their phone’s home screen without even opening the Facebook app.

Image Source: mashable.com

While the new Android launcher’s features may eventually win over avid Facebook users, tech experts, especially those who attended Facebook’s April 4 event in Menlo Park, California, think that Facebook Home is only a gimmick and that, knowing Facebook, there might be privacy problems that can crop up in the future, such as GPS location tracking services that passively and continuously run on the phone in order to send location-based advertising to users.

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However, that fear may be unfounded, as Mashable.com reports that Facebook has confirmed that Home will not be actively tracking users’ GPS location, even on the HTC First, where the launcher is built right into the phone’s operating system. Furthermore, data on the activities of other applications, such as Foursquare check-ins, will not be seen by Facebook. Still, location-based ads can and will be offered to users if they use Facebook to check-in to a location.

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Despite some privacy concerns, there are people who believe that Facebook Home is a powerful software that can potentially disrupt the telecom industry.

Socialtyze is John Bohan’s answer to branding and social media marketing issues. Visit its website for more information about its services.