Instagram Tactics: Most Brands On Instagram Post Content Daily

Instagram Tactics: Most Brands On Instagram Post Less Than Once Per Day

Some interesting data from the Social Media Benchmark Report about how often brands are publishing content across social networks.

While brands publish the most often on Facebook (0.97 posts per day) compared to Instagram (0.7 posts per day), and Twitter (.86 posts per day).

It is Instagram however, where brands are seeing the most engagement at they are seeing the most engagement at 1.60%.

Higher Ed dramatically outperformed other industries on Instagram again, while brands in other industries saw a slight drop: last year’s median engagement rate was 1.73%.

What is Working On Instagram?

More isn’t necessarily better on Instagram (or anywhere else, really): with the exception of Sports. Teams, the industries with the highest per-post engagement rates post less often.

It's All About The Pictures

Sports Teams are seeing great engagement on Instagram, and are taking more advantage of highengaging carousels than many other industries this year.

Eight Steps To Creating The Best Instagram Post In 2022

How To Create An Effective Instagram Strategy

Instagram Ads

While the majority of ad impressions on Instagram are from feed posts, 42% are from Stories. Reel ads also offer an opportunity for increased reach and engagement.

Instagram Vocabulary

Feed Posts: The original post on Instagram, “feed posts” are photos, graphics, or videos uploaded to your profile’s grid, or main page.

Carousels Carousels are up to 10 photos or videos gathered together in a swipeable post, which often generates more engagement on Instagram.

Reels Reels are vertical videos of up to 30 seconds that are shared into a separate Reels-only feed on the platform.

Stories Stories are photos or videos that expire in 24 hours and are able to be saved permanently as a highlight on your profile.

Instagram Takeaways

Some takeaways from the the Social Media Benchmark Report that you can use to grow your social media presence on Instagram.

More is not always better. A general statement is that posting less frequently on Instagram will engagement with followers.
Instagram is the most visual of the social media platforms, so it is not a surprise that pictures far outperform any other type of post. This hold true across all industries.
Hashtags are still important in the discovery phase for Instagram so companies need a strategy around what are the best hashtags to use and own.

If you need help amplifying your website content via social media, contact Braveheart Digital Marketing. We’re a social media agency in Manchester NH that can help you reach your target audience and achieve your marketing goals. Contact us today to learn more!

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on LinkedIn

A strong LinkedIn presence is essential for every company—not just those involved in B2B marketing. To build an effective brand presence on LinkedIn, consider the following LinkedIn assets:

LinkedIn Company Profile Page

Your company profile page (like the Evernote sample below) is where a user lands when he or she searches for your company or clicks on its logo from another user’s profile. Company profile pages are a free LinkedIn service that provide business owners a venue to showcase his or her brand.

Because this is your company’s primary landing page on LinkedIn, it’s very important to insure the images and messages you choose properly represent your brand.

LinkedIn Page Logo

The logo informs users about your company in a small thumbnail, which is attached to almost any action that you make across the platform—from posting a job opening to sharing a corporate news announcement.

LinkedIn Header Image

Larger than the logo, the header sits at the top of your company profile page and offers companies more real estate to showcase creatively. Your header image can include brand messaging, campaign promotions, product images, or your staff (as the above image from Luxottica demonstrates), and it can also be frequently changed to reflect exciting and seasonally relevant company updates.

About Us Section

The about section beneath the header is your opportunity to describe your company, providing other LinkedIn users and potential clients insight into your company’s products and mission. Consider Microsoft’s Company Page below:

Microsoft’s profile details the company’s goal (to empower other people and organizations with technology), how that goal is currently achieved (through collaborative ideas), and what the company provides to potential employees (an outlet to answer curiosity, passion, and ambition with quality tools, a resourceful community, and flexibility).

If you can provide detailed answers about your company to potential clients, then those clients will know exactly what your company does and how it can help them achieve their personal and professional goals.

Posting On LinkedIn

Like Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms, LinkedIn allows your company the ability to share posts. Posting on LinkedIn is a key way to build followers and fuel your paid advertising efforts. These posts can include text, images, links, non-native videos and slide decks.

The image below demonstrates L’Oreal’s social prowess; the company links to content on flipboard.com and Youtube.com within its LinkedIn posts.

Because LinkedIn is seen as a professional network, your content mix and tone should be professional and engaging. Additionally, we have found that educational posts perform very well on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Growth Opportunities

Most active companies post frequently on the Company Page, and here are a few content tips that will make a critical difference in your company’s posting success:

Leverage Employees

30% of engagement on LinkedIn for a company comes from its employees. Consider your employees as a primary audience for content when deciding what to post, and use the “notify employees” feature occasionally to notify them about new posts from your page.

Video

We expect to see tremendous growth in video usage on LinkedIn in 2022. According to a recent study, 68% of video marketers say they will include LinkedIn in their 2022 strategy, a 5% increase from 2021.

Tagging

Tagging members on LinkedIn and using hashtags in your posts on LinkedIn can increase reach, engagement, and website traffic. Posts with links performs 45% better than posts with no links.

Ready to enhance your company’s LinkedIn presence? Contact us today to increase your sales, customer base, and more!

State of Marketing: Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media was the #1 channel used in marketing in
2021. Social media use overall is at an all time high.
In November of 2020, the Baby Shark Dance video
(you know the song — do do doo doo do do … sorry in
advance for getting that stuck in your head) became the
most viewed video on YouTube with over 7 billion views.

8 in 10 companies invested in social media
marketing in 2021 according to the Hubspot State of Marketing 2021 Report.

Over the past year, companies have had to rethink their
entire strategy — many hired chief customer officers
to support the customer experience. Marketing and
leadership teams turned the mic over to their customers,
listening to how prospects and clients feel about their
interactions with the brand.

In 2021, the primary tactic for social media marketing was
social listening. By establishing a direct relationship with
your social media audience, you’ll learn exactly how to
support, engage with, and convert them into loyal brand advocates.

Braveheart Social Media Process

Successful social media marketing has matured from simply getting “likes” to acquiring new customers and increasing sales from existing ones. Four out of five marketers today view social media networks as critical distribution channels for their content.

We develop strategies that put your content on the platforms that your customers use.

Audit of your existing social media efforts
Creation of social media strategy
Establishing a social media calendar so that your team knows what will be published and when
Implementation of social media best practices
Providing analytics and performance reports so that you can measure the success of your program

If you are looking to grow your following on social media and turn those followers into customers, contact us about our social media marketing services.

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How To Improve The Performance Of Your Facebook Business Page

A recent article by Neil Patel on quicksprout.com titled How to Steal Your Competitor’s Facebook Fans highlighted one of my favorite Facebook analytics tools, Fan Page Karma .

Fan Page Karma allows you to analyze any Facebook business page as well as compare any two Facebook business pages head-to-head. The software offers tremendous insight into what is working and what is not working with a company’s social media marketing strategy.

When we first meet with clients to talk about their current Facebook business social media strategy they usually have two main concerns:

The first step in analyzing the performance of a Facebook business page is to compare it to a competitor’s. When we do that with Fan Page Karma, this is the type of data that we get:

What I like about the data from Fan Page Karma is that it gives me a high level view about what is working and what is not. What is the growth rate of the fans? Are they engaged with the content? Is the company interactive with fans or are the interactions one-way?

From those results, I can dive further into a more in-depth review. For example, one of the things we analyze is the type of posts that clients make on Facebook?

For example, the data tells me that the client (bottom right) mainly posts pictures on Facebook, while its competitors post a lot more links and status updates.

So what type of content is right? To answer that question you need to know what type of content has the highest level of engagement.

This is a familiar four-section quadrant with the upper right quadrant being the most desirable one. From looking at the engagement level it is clear that pictures (red) do provide the highest engagement levels while video (green) and links (yellow) have the lowest level of fan engagement.

Based on this data, one of the recommendations to our client was to continue posting pictures and to cut back on posting videos and links as their fans were not as engaged with that content.

To find out more about how you can produce more engaging content on Facebook, contact us today.

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on Twitter

For many businesses, Twitter is an underutilized asset. Companies lacking strategic, lead-generating plans for Twitter miss the opportunity to access a huge user base and to showcase themselves in a socially savvy and relevant way.

Users who elect to follow your company on Twitter demonstrate an active interest in your brand, what your company does, has to say, and what it will continue to do. To retain this high level of user engagement, it’s necessary to maintain an active brand presence on Twitter with:

The Appropriate Twitter Handle

The Twitter handle is the name that users will use to address and talk about your company. When a user directly tweets your company, they attach your handle to an “@” symbol and send it your way. Encourage users to contact you more frequently and talk more about your company with a short handle that doesn’t use too much of the capped 140 characters of a tweet.

A Succinct and Informative Bio

In 160 characters, succinctly describe your company, its products and services, and its relevance. Would a potential client find your company’s bio interesting, informative, or purely self-promotional? As an example, Virgin America uses its bio to link to its blog and website and provides a link to fliers who want to complain about services (potentially avoiding publicly tweeted complaints):

An Evocative Photo

This image shows Twitter followers who you are. For brands this is often a logo. This image sits next to your tweets so other users can visually identify you as the source. Profile Picture Size: Recommended dimensions are 400×400 pixels. See Oreo below.

Header Image

This is a background photo that sits behind your profile photo. Most images are resized to automatically fit the dimensions, but Twitter also offers the image parameters on their website. This is the opportunity for you to be creative and share an image that expresses your brand, campaign, or any other relevant visuals in a larger format.

The Patagonia header for example is publicizing a campaign they currently have running. Note the use of the hashtag #KeepJumboWild in the header. Profile Header Size: recommended dimensions are 1500×500 pixels

Build Your Following

Building your following on Twitter is one of the key activities to driving success on this social network. There are a variety of techniques marketers can use to build their following, and here are 7 tips to make your tweets more searchable, shareable, and readable on Twitter:

Use Hashtags (#)

These symbols have become synonymous with Twitter and are used to tag tweets by topic.

The hashtag allows you to follow the discussion and easily participate in it. For example, Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) built a whole campaign in 2015 around the hashtag #AskGaryVee:

Use @Mentions

@mentions are a way for you to engage other Twitter users in your tweet. If you’re posting a tweet that you think is relevant to specific followers or thought leaders, tag them at the end of your tweet with a @mention as this will call their attention to your tweet and possibly the attention of their followers.

For example, Zack Wenger put together this video that featured Mark Cuban. Wenger only has 1,000 followers, but by mentioning @mcuban in his tweet, he brought it to Cuban’s attention. Cuban retweeted it, making his own 4.3m followers aware of it, not just Wenger’s 1,000.

Your social presence should help connect you with your target audience in a thoughtful and meaningful way—i.e. share content and craft messages of value, like Darren Rowse’s post below:

When leveraging Twitter to update the marketplace on company news and disseminate brand messaging, your social presence could be negatively impacted if used only as an advertising tool.

Quality, Not Quantity

When it comes to followers, companies often get caught up in the numbers game. But it’s important to remember that the quality of followers is just as—if not more—important as quantity.

Columbia Business School Professor Olivier Toubia sums this point up nicely in a conversation with Business News Daily:

“You could have a company with 10,000 followers, but half of them are not even real or not even relevant to your company. This will make your CEO feel good because they feel they have a big footprint on social media, but there isn’t really a lot of impact because they either aren’t real people or they are people who don’t care about your company.”

Professor Olivier Toubia

Columbia Business School

This is especially relevant for B2B companies offering niche services to a specific subset of clientele.

Repurpose

Twitter is a perfect medium to re-share content. As Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Marketingland said:

Twitter is the “live TV of social media…which means that if you’re not tuned in to catch a particular tweet live, then you’ve missed it.”

Danny Sullivan

Let’s say you share an article on a Monday morning. Consider sharing it again on Tuesday afternoon prefacing the new tweet with a qualifier like, “in case you missed it.”

What are you missing on Twitter? Do you have a large following truly interested in your posts? Are you succinctly expressing relevant and engaging text? And is the platform connecting you with your fans and connecting them with your goals?

Let us help you use Twitter to your advantage. Contact us today to effectively tweet for more quality followers, greater sales, and greater visibility!

The Three Traffic Sources For Startups

I was recently re-reading Randall Stross’s book, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups. Inside is a quote from Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham about growth rates for start-up

A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you’re doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it’s a sign you haven’t yet figured out what you’re doing. A 5%-7% weekly growth rate is extremely aggressive but if you want your start-up to get traction in the market, it’s a good growth number to aim for..

Paul Graham

Y Combinator

The big question then is “how do you do that”?

There are three sources of website traffic for a startup. In order to be successful and meet Paul Graham’s growth target you need to master at least one of these, if not two of these traffic sources.

Rented or Paid Traffic

The first traffic source that most start-ups use is paid traffic. Paid traffic gives you time to allow your other traffic channels to grow and evolve. It allows you to get product market fit, find those those first customers and find out if you have product market fit.

The most common paid traffic sources are Google Adwords (PPC), Facebook ads, display ads, retargeting, paid influencers and paid content promotion.

With paid traffic you are able to contribute content and engage with the audience. You might be able to control the conversation, but you do not own anything else (data, relationship, creativity, etc. etc.). Hence the name rented traffic.

Without the initial steady stream of visitors from paid traffic, you might never get enough data to growth hack your way to success. That is why paid traffic is the most important traffic source for many startups. Over time, that might change, but it is rare to see a startup succeed who does not buy their initial visitors.

Owned Traffic

The second most common traffic source is owned traffic. Owned traffic is traffic from properties that you own. You own the customer relationships. You make the decisions around content, creativity and evolution. The more owned properties you have, the more chances you have to drive traffic to your website.

Examples of owned properties are websites, blogs and customer forums. Social media properties like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter can also be considered as “owned sites”.

One of the most overlooked owned traffic sources is your email list. You have total control over the timing of the messages you send to your subscribers. And when you click “send,” your messages get delivered straight to them.

The challenge for start-ups is that owned traffic takes time. It takes time to organically grow a following via social media or build an email list. That is why owned traffic is usually the second traffic source that startups tackle.

Earned Traffic

The third traffic source is Earned or influenced traffic. This traffic is online word of mouth, usually seen in the form of mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, or content picked up by 3rd party sites.

It is traffic source that you cannot directly control. For example you cannot directly control whether people will “Like” you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, and then visit your website and become your customer. Nor can you control whether a a piece of content you have produced goes viral.

Earned traffic also includes organic traffic from search engines. Traffic from organic search is considered earned traffic as you cannot control how much traffic the search engines can send you. But like other influenced traffic you can impact this by following SEO best practices.

The challenge for startups with earned traffic is that it is too difficult to predicate, especially in the early stages. You cannot build a growth strategy hoping that you make it to the front page of Hacker News or Business Insider. That is why this is usually the third traffic channel that startups focus on.

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

A new report from Bizible analyzed more than 480,000 leads through its Salesforce marketing analytics platform and the data showed that Search does a better job of generating leads than any other marketing channel.

A Hubspot report last season showed that SEO provides the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel, and the Bizible study reinforced that data. There is a subtle difference between the two reports as the Hubspot report was able to track both SEO and PPC separately. In the Bizible study they combined both organic and PPC under the single search umbrella.

The Bizible data showed that when looking at first touch, Search drove 56% of leads generated. When looking just at last touch, Search accounted for 41% of the leads generated.

Not a surprise then that the combination of Search first touch and Search last touch was the most productive channel for lead generation, accounting for 37% of all leads from first/last touch combinations.

For those marketers who believe that search will not work in their market, Bizible refuted that. The data showed that Search was the leading channel for 9 out of 10 of the industries measured for generating leads by first touch. The software/SaaS sector was the only sector in which search did not drive the majority of first touch leads.

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Social is a market that has really matured into a valuable inbound marketing channel in the last year of so. When Bizible looked at the percentage of closed deals that were won by first touch in each channel, social impressively came in third with a 30% win rate, despite driving just 5% of leads. Social impact on lead generation is a not widespread yet because the social leads were concentrated among two industries; Education and Finance.

Note that Direct and Search had the two highest closed rates at 56% and 40% respectively with Display having the worst at only 12%.

Social shortens the length of the marketing cycle. When Social was the first touch, the marketing cycle was 30% shorter than average.

Takeaways

Search is the most popular first touch channel for lead generation accounting for 56% of all leads acquired. Search, especially organic SEO, has to be a part of your company’s inbound marketing strategy. Whether your market is B2B or B2C, Search generates more leads, more cost-effectively.

The Bizible report shows that the last touch severely undervalues the top of the marketing funnel and does not account for the buyer’s decision journey. Companies need an inbound marketing analytics program that allows for Multitouch attribution.

You can’t ignore Social in B2B marketing; it has a 30% shorter marketing cycle than the average inbound channel. Social is not just for posting statuses anymore. It is also a valuable lead generation channel.

The full paper “Multi-touch Attribution for Companies with Sales Teams” is available for download here.

We’re offering a free inbound marketing assessment. We will evaluate your current website, and show you the most direct ways you can get more traffic and leads from your website.

Click here to receive our FREE Inbound Marketing Assessment.

SEO Provides The Best ROI Of Any Inbound Marketing Channel

I built my first web site in 1996. In those days I just needed to update a meta keyword tag in order to have a site rank highly in the search engines.

Today’s search engine algorithms are very sophisticated and you’ve got to have deep knowledge and well-honed skills to win at SEO. SEO is still the most productive and economical way to generate qualified leads and customers. It’s also the one that Marketers say is the hardest to execute. As a result, more and more companies are letting their marketing budgets get eaten up by PPC and switching their attention away from SEO to the latest shiny toys like Instagram. SnapChat or TikTok.

Despite the appeal of all these new social channels, one thing remains consistent: SEO ROI provides the best return of any inbound marketing channel.

SEO on average is 12% of a typical marketing budget, but generates 14% of leads. PPC, on the other hand, is generating only 6% of leads, despite having 8% of the marketing budget. If you are spending more of your marketing budget on PPC than SEO then your lead generation program is likely upside down.

It’s not just the number of leads generated from SEO that makes it such an important inbound tactic it is the QUALITY of those leads.

In the same study, Hubspot asked marketers for the average percentage of leads converted to sales by marketing channel. SEO leads inbound marketing conversion rates, netting 15% above the average conversion rates.

SEO continues to deliver the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel. It’s worth more attention from marketers. Don’t let the idea that SEO is hard keep you from winning the online game. The right resources will make it easy for you.

Has your organic search traffic has fallen over the last couple of years? If it has then a technical site audit will uncover why the search engines are not ranking you as highly as they used to.

Instagram Tactics: Most Brands On Instagram Post Less Than Once Per Day

What is Working On Instagram?

It's All About The Pictures

Eight Steps To Creating The Best Instagram Post In 2022

How To Create An Effective Instagram Strategy

Instagram Ads

Instagram Vocabulary

Instagram Takeaways

Recent Posts

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Company Profile Page

LinkedIn Page Logo

LinkedIn Header Image

About Us Section

Posting On LinkedIn

LinkedIn Growth Opportunities

Leverage Employees

Video

Tagging

Recent Posts

State of Marketing: Social Media Marketing Strategy

Braveheart Social Media Process

How To Improve The Performance Of Your Facebook Business Page

Recent Posts

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on Twitter

The Appropriate Twitter Handle

A Succinct and Informative Bio

An Evocative Photo

Header Image

Build Your Following

Use Hashtags (#)

Use @Mentions

Quality, Not Quantity

Repurpose

Recent Posts

The Three Traffic Sources For Startups

Rented or Paid Traffic

Owned Traffic

Earned Traffic

Recent Posts

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Takeaways

Recent Posts

SEO Provides The Best ROI Of Any Inbound Marketing Channel

Recent Posts

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