Social Media

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Digital Marketing

YouTube is Social Media Too!

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Most people use only Facebook, Twitter and Instagram when developing a social media strategy and miss opportunities to have success with other platforms. YouTube is not usually thought of as a social media platform, but it is one with a lot of potential to drive success for brands.

Read on to learn why YouTube is awesome for marketers and how to best use it to achieve your goals.

How is YouTube Related to Success?

Video marketing is increasingly driving results:

  • 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
  •  Landing pages with videos have higher conversion rates compared to those without by up to 80%.
  • Almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store.
  • Online shoppers who view demo videos are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-viewers.

YouTube is the biggest hub for video content online:

Why are these figures important?

Bringing epic success to companies, YouTube has proven to be effective for driving clear figures that are used to measure success, such as conversions. Trends of YouTube use are also on the rise, and as a modern business you’ll want to stay ahead of the curve:

  • 48% of marketers plan to add YouTube to their content strategy by the end of 2017.
  • 43% of marketers said they’d create more video content if there were no obstacles like time, resources and budget.

At Treefrog, if we are not creating and leveraging video content to meet clients’ goals, we risk putting them at a disadvantage because their competitors may do this first. However, if their competitors are among the 43% who are concerned about resources, there is an opportunity to bring them epic success by leveraging YouTube before they do.

How to be Successful on YouTube (Best Practices)

As is the case with other social media websites, some people are killing it on YouTube and others are not seeing the results that they want.

Here are qualities of incredibly successful YouTubers (measured in subscribers) that are important to consider when trying to use YouTube to achieve your goals.

1.  Post consistent & relevant content:

  • Just like with blogging, you will attract a larger and more engaged audience if you post frequently and if your content is tailored to a specific audience.
  • Jenna Marbles (17.5 million subscribers) posts a new video to her channel every single week, so her viewers know when/how often to visit her channel.

2.  Go for an angle:

  • Have something that sets you apart from YouTube channels run by other companies in your industry or niche.
  • Tastemade’s YouTube channel (900 thousand subscribers) is not a generic cooking channel; it combines cooking and travel by focusing on locational pieces (“Crispy Rice in Brooklyn”) that set it apart from countless other YouTube cooking channels – including the Food Network’s channel (which has 300 thousand subscribers).

3.  Produce videos with good production value:

  • Make videos as high quality as is possible within your budget.
  • Nigahiga (20 million subscribers) is successful because his videos have high production value that is also unique (he can draw an entire video and often edits videos with special effects).
  • Resources might restrict production quality, but at the very least you should have good camera quality, sound and lighting.

4.  Be entertaining:

  • Maintaining a certain level of professionalism is important, but consider delivering your brand’s message through some form of entertainment (gags, parodies). Entertainment is the most popular reason that people watch YouTube videos in the first place.
  • Super Cooper Sunday (TmarTn2) is entertaining because the hosts share the life of their dogs, even though they talk about mundane, ordinary things.

5.  Be genuine & relatable:

  • Successful YouTubers usually appear ordinary, relatable, authentic and engaging, which is the difference between popular YouTubers and carefully created brand videos.
  • Try making videos that look candid and natural. Try taking risks by displaying a sense of humor that would not typically be shown by certain companies and in certain industries.
  • KSI (17 million subscribers) has candid looking videos that are often filmed in the first person, which creates an intimate viewing experience for people.

Getting Social on YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website and therefore a social media website (to share is to be social!). Luckily for businesses, it is possible to build and engage a relevant community on YouTube as it is on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Here’s how it’s done:

  • Subscribe to other relevant channels and interact with their content (share, like, comment).
  • Interact with users using your own videos (as you would on any other social media website).
  • Leverage your other social media followings by directing them from other social media websites to your YouTube channel (YouTube accounts can be connected with other social media accounts. If you have video content on YouTube, why not use it on your other social media profiles to drive engagement?).

By leveraging YouTube for clients, Treefrog delivers smarter and more complete social media experiences that drive successful branding results for businesses like yours. Get in touch with us at 905.836.4442 to learn more today!

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Digital Marketing

15 Post Ideas for Social Media

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Ensuring the success of your social media presence involves consistent effort – from posting interesting content to engaging with your audience. However, for those who post frequently, it’s quite easy to find yourself in a creative rut.

Here are 15 content ideas to inspire your next post:

1.    Take Your Audience Behind the Scenes

Sharing photos from the office, such as sneak peeks of work in progress, is a fun and easy way to humanize and get people interested in your brand.

2.    Run a Contest

People love participating in contests, making this idea an easy way to boost engagement on your page. Offer a discount on a product/ service or give away something for free.

3.    Ask a Question

Asking your audience questions is a great method for getting valuable feedback on existing or new products/services!

4.    Fill-In-The-Blank

Boost your engagement by asking your audience to fill-in-the-blank! Example: “Fill in the blank: My favourite thing to do after a long day of work is ____.”

5.    Conduct a Poll

People love sharing their opinions, and what better way to leverage that than conducting a poll?
The multiple-choice nature of polls makes it easy for your audience to participate.

6.    ‘A Day in the Life’ Post

Here’s another great way to humanize your brand! Feature one of your employees and have them post for a day, highlighting what they do.

7.    Take a Trip Down Memory Lane

Share photos of old events or company moments on a Thursday with the hashtags #ThrowbackThursday or #TBT.

8.    ‘Caption This’

Post a funny image and ask your audience to caption it in the comments below! Comments increase post visibility, and you’ll likely see some hilarious answers!

9.    Create an Infographic

Infographics are great for sharing important statistics or information about your company while keeping it easy to read and understand.

10.    Celebrate Milestones

Celebrate the accomplishments of your company and any exciting employee milestones. You can do this by remembering to take and post photos and videos!

11.    Weekly Round-Up

Create a slideshow of the exciting moments that happened over the week! This round-up can be anything from pictures of a delicious pie an employee shared at the office, to videos of an event that your company attended.

12.    Share User-Generated Photos

Ask your customers to share photos of them using your products. As a bonus, request that they include a branded hashtag so that you can search and see them all!

13.    Influencer Take-Over

Collaborate with an influencer in your industry and let them take over your social media for a day or a week! The influencer will likely post on their own social platforms, informing their followers that they will be taking over your social accounts, resulting in an influx of new eyes on your social profiles!

14.    Inspire with Quotes

Quotes work well because people can easily relate them. Easy to find and source, quotes get liked and shared frequently.

15.    Introduce New Employees

Show off some of the new faces at your company. This will humanize your brand while also making your employees feel valued and celebrated!

Decorative illustration of "#Hashtag"
Digital Marketing

Instagram Hashtags 101

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Is your brand on Instagram? Your answer should be a big ‘Yes!’ Otherwise, you’re missing out on the chance to potentially reach up to 700 million monthly users!

Instagram is a photo-sharing mobile platform that allows users to share photos and videos, individually or as a set. Getting ahead on Instagram involves following some common best-practices which include posting high-quality visual content, making a list of accounts to @mention and tag that relate to your content, and creating the perfect schedule to post.

However, one aspect of Instagram that arguably isn’t being used to its full potential is hashtags.

Instagram hashtags are one of the best ways to grow your account. Did you know that posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6% more engagement than posts without any hashtags.

PetaPixel words it best: “Think of hashtags as a pipeline to the rest of the world.”

Using the right combination of hashtags in the captions of your Instagram posts (and Instagram Stories) can help you expose your brand to large and targeted audiences. In fact, your chances of attracting new followers, gaining more likes, and increasing engagement are massively improved by the use of hashtags! However, if you’re not choosing your hashtags strategically, your posts will not get in front of the right people.

How Instagram Hashtags Work

Every Instagram post can be accompanied by a caption and up to 30 hashtags. These hashtags help categorize photos and videos, which supports the process of content discovery and optimization.

For example, Luxy Hair, a hair extensions brand, posts images of intricate hairstyles with hashtags like #hairideas, #hairgoals, #hairtutorial, etc.

Due to these hashtags, any user searching for hashtags about #hairideas, #hairgoals, or any of the other hashtags used, may come across this post.

Branded Vs. Community Hashtags

There are two types of hashtags that are commonly used in conjunction with regular content-related hashtags: Branded Hashtags and Community Hashtags.

Having a general understanding of the different types of hashtags (and their corresponding audiences) can help you develop a more effective Instagram strategy.

Branded Hashtags

Branded hashtags are unique to a brand or campaign. It could be as simple as your company’s name, tagline, or the name of one of your products or campaign. These hashtags can also communicate your brand identity or lifestyle messaging.

For example, Herschel Supply Co. uses a few branded hashtags, including #HerschelSupply, #WellTravelled and #CityLimitless. The hashtag #WellTravelled was created for a campaign to encourage customers to share travel photos featuring Herschel products. Now tagged in more than 2.57 million posts, it is often cited as one of the most popular travel hashtags on Instagram.

Like Herschel, you can create a branded hashtag for a specific campaign, contest, or to simply showcase your company’s culture, products, or services.

If you’re running an Instagram campaign or contest, having a brand hashtag will help drive participation and engagement. It will also organize all the posts that are tagged with it on a hashtag page. This is helpful if you’re using the hashtag to collect entries for a promotion or contest submissions, or looking for content to ‘re-post’ onto your brand’s account.

Use branded hashtags to get your most loyal followers and customers to engage, and to improve your overall online brand awareness.

Community Hashtags

Community hashtags connect like-minded users around a specific topic. These hashtags are more general and don’t necessarily have anything to do with your company or brand.

Some examples include #instafood or #dogsofinstagram. These hashtags are widely used and aren’t specific to any one person or brand.

For example, the photo above from @white_coffee_cat_ uses multiple community hashtags including #catsofinstagram, #catstagram and #weeklyfluff.

The benefit of community hashtags is that people actively search for these common word sets, so, if your brand’s photos and videos show up in the search results, you’ll get instant exposure to a new audience.

However, you need to make sure the community hashtags are relevant to the content you’re posting. If @white_coffee_cat had used hashtags like #instafood or #ootd in the photo, it wouldn’t have made sense.

The best way to figure out which community-oriented hashtags are right for your brand is by researching which hashtags your audience or competitors are already using.

How to Find The Best Hashtags For Your Account

If you are not being strategic with which hashtags you are using, your posts will not get in front of the right people. The first step to figuring out which hashtags are best for your brand is to put yourself into the shoes of your ideal audience.

For example, if you are a real estate agent serving the city of Hamilton, you ideally want to target potential homebuyers looking to move into a house in the Hamilton area. Logically, some keywords that the target group may search for include #HamiltonHomes and #HamiltonLiving. It is then important to further develop this list and to investigate what else the target market may be interested in.

Next, create a list or home buying hashtags that are directly relevant to your company, brand, and include the location that you serve. For example, if your company is called ‘Hamilton House Hunters’, one of your hashtags could be #HamiltonHouseHunter.

As a real estate agent, the obvious industry hashtag is #RealEstate, but you can narrow it down further to the specific location that you are serving: #HamiltonRealEstate. Some other hashtags could include #RentalProperties, #Hamilton, #GTAHomes, and #HouseHunter.

Finally, make a list of the hashtags that your top competitors and ideal audiences are using. This involves some research, but it is well worth it if it means you’ll be attracting potential clients to your business.

Once you have your list of hashtags, do a search of each hashtag on your list to ensure that the content that pops up is relevant to your brand, is appropriate, and has a good amount of users using the hashtag.

Additional Tips

  • Instagram currently limits the number of hashtags you can use per post to 30. Many users avoid using more than 5-10 hashtags simply because it looks like spam. One way to avoid the unprofessional, ‘spammy’ look of using many hashtags is to post your main brand hashtags in your main caption, and the rest of the hashtags as a comment. This will ensure that your post still falls under each of your hashtags, but avoids viewers from seeing all the hashtags at first glance.
  • Keep your main hashtags typed out in a note on your phone, which you can easily copy and paste into your Instagram posts without having to re-type them each time. This will save you a ton of time!
  • Make sure you update your hashtags every 3-6 months! Hashtag trends are always changing, and some may become blocked by Instagram due to inappropriate content.

Using the tips and strategies you’ve learned here, you’ll be well on your way to growing your audience on Instagram.

Want to learn more about how your business can leverage the benefits of Instagram and other social media platforms? Give us a call at 905.836.4442 and let our social media specialists strategize your next Instagram campaign!

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Digital Marketing

Why Social Media Works

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Many business owners enter the world of social media marketing believing that it will immediately take their business from zero to 100 in just a few clicks. However, this expectation isn’t realistic. Social media marketing takes time, effort, and a well-developed strategy. Enough momentum also needs to be kick-started and maintained to start seeing a notable increase in ROI.

So, if you’re wondering if you should be leveraging social media marketing for your business, the short answer is ‘yes’. No matter what industry your business is a part of; here are five reasons why social media will work for you:

1. Sophisticated Targeting

The biggest advantage to social media marketing is the ability to target your ideal audience – much more accurately when compared to traditional marketing tactics.

Through Facebook Ad Campaigns, you can target individuals based on age, gender, location, household income, interests, education, workplaces, languages, relationship status, parenting status, and so much more! Sophisticated targeting has proven to be an incredibly valuable tool for getting your ads in front of the right people. Almost 90% of marketers say their social marketing efforts have increased exposure for their business, and over 50% of marketers who have been implementing social media marketing tactics for two years have reported improved sales.

2. Real-Time Feedback

Social media marketing allows businesses to receive feedback on their products and services in real-time.

When you put out a new product or service, you can immediately start tracking how well it’s doing based on how many people are talking about it, what is being said, and what comments and concerns people are leaving. This provides a great foundation for businesses to decide what changes or improvements to make.

In addition, real-time feedback provides great insight into ad campaigns. In traditional marketing, once you put out an ad in a newspaper, there is no way for you to stop the ad from running or to make any changes. However, with social media marketing, you can pause or completely stop the ad campaign if you notice that it is not doing as well as you hoped. You can then make changes to the ad or create a new ad campaign. Being able to edit your posts will save you a ton of money and will ensure that your marketing dollars are being spent wisely.

3. Build Relationships with Customers

Social media has the power to transform big companies into organizations of everyday people through humanization.

Through social media, you are able to share the ‘real’ side of your company, from photos and videos of company events or employee milestones, to simply having a conversation with a customer in the comment section of a Facebook post. Not only will this make your brand more relatable, it will also improve customer loyalty.

Loyal customers who feel valued, listened to, and appreciated are typically more willing to share what they love about your company online. Loyal customers are also more likely to try out new products or services (when you release them) and leave a positive review – which will help to build your brand awareness.

4. Brand Awareness

Brand awareness refers to the extent of which customers are able to recognize a brand – which is central to purchasing decision-making.

Creating brand awareness is one of the key steps in promoting a product, and social media gives your business the perfect opportunity to show off your brand to the right people. Through sophisticated targeting and real-time feedback, you’ll get an idea of what type of content works best for your target audience. By building brand awareness using this knowledge, you are also able to increase brand loyalty and build better relationships with your customers.

5. Know Your Competitors

If you analyze the social media efforts of other businesses, you’ll find insights to improve your own social media marketing.

Chances are, your competitors are on social media. This is your opportunity to directly see what types of content they are posting and what’s working and not working for them. You can search the interests of people who like your competitors Facebook pages, analyze their twitter audiences, monitor keywords, identify industry influencers that your competitors are taking advantage of, and discover the best hashtags to use with your posts.

Are you ready to use social media to your advantage?

Request a free quote or give us a call at 905.836.4442 today!

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Digital Marketing

It’s Time To Get On Board With Facebook Advertising

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With 40% of users actively deciding what to buy based on what they have seen on social media platforms, Social Pay-Per-Click (S-PPC) advertising is now more important than ever!

Get a Free Social Pay-Per-Click Quote

Ever researched something on Google and then, while using Facebook or Instagram, you suddenly see advertisements for the exact thing you had been searching for prior?

Ahhhh… the power of social media advertising. It seems to just follow you everywhere, doesn’t it?

Facebook and Google are the two key players in marketing and advertising today, and as Social Media Manger Laurie Baker puts it, “Anyone that’s doing PPC, should also be doing SPPC”.

Social Pay-Per-Click Facts

  • Facebook advertising grew by 50% between 2015-2016.
  • Facebook has more than 3 million active advertisers and over 50 million business pages.
  • Social network ad spending is expected to reach $36 billion in 2017.
  • Social advertising represents 16% of total digital ad spending worldwide.

“40% of users are actively deciding what to buy based on what they have seen on social media platforms, including reviews and recommendations, and this is only set to grow”. – Stuart Kerr

It may seem overwhelming to wrap your mind around how this new wave of advertising is designed and implemented, but in the ever-changing landscape of social media and SEO, it’s time to get on board with social advertising.

What is SPPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click, an advertising model in which marketers use the Internet to get the word out about a service or product. What’s different about PPC advertising is that marketers must pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked on by a potential online customer. In other words, you’re paying for successful leads.

S-PPC stands for social pay-per-click; pay-per-click with a focus on placing ads through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The ‘S’ is for social – get it?

To break down the reasons why it’s time for your business to start investigating options for Facebook and social advertising, we sat down with our very own Social Media Anthropologist, Dr. Laurie Baker, to get the full SPPC scoop.

What We Learned About Social Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Leveraging The Personal

Facebook is unlike any other advertising platform in that the advertising you produce leverages your friends and personal Facebook connections for dissemination and visibility. Facebook also uniquely receives different types of queries than Google.

For example, someone on Facebook is more like to search specific products they’ve heard about and then engage with the company by liking or following them – an action that cannot be performed on a basic website.

These actions generate a following and help to build your social brand awareness as your connections can “share”, “like”, and help to promote your brand to their own friends.

Social Proofing Is On The Rise

More than ever before, having a lively social profile is extremely important when securing a lead. No longer do consumers just Google a company to find their website or location. Consumers now also want to check out brands on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – to see if their own interests and values align with a product they’re interested in. If potential customers like what they see, they’re more like to make a purchase, follow your accounts, and interact with you across multiple social platforms.

Online Marketing Is Editable

Unlike print advertising, online marketing is editable on-the-fly. Should you place a Facebook ad online and not receive the results you were hoping for, you can simply alter the message and re-visit your strategy, or just turn it off. Designed with business success in mind, SPPC marketing allows for seasonality, flexibility, adaptability, and peace of mind (that you can fix your message or adjust your budget) – just in case!

Advanced Target Marketing

Social advertising surpasses all other forms of advertising in its advanced targeting capabilities. For example, Facebook allows marketers to target their ads to extreme specifics in the following categories:

  • Gender
  • Marital Status
  • Age
  • Political Leanings (specific regions)
  • Location
  • Occupation
  • Income (specific regions)
  • Interests
  • Upcoming Celebrations

An example of how specific you can really get with Social Media Advertising:

Newly married parents, between the ages of 30-35, who have a newborn child, both work in IT, make a combined salary of $120,000, live on Davis Drive, like French bulldogs, shop at Walmart, and have a relative or friend with an upcoming birthday.

Crazy, huh?

Advanced targeting is also cost effective, as these ads don’t just show up on Facebook; they can be seen on various apps (such as Instagram), and on websites!

Consult The Social Advertising Experts

Lost? Our specialized Treefrog Social Media team has strategized and executed countless successful social media ad campaigns for businesses just like yours. By completing a full competitive analysis and identifying what other key players in your industry are doing, our team can design an SPPC strategy that can take your online social presence to the next level.

Ready to get started with Social Pay-Per-Click Advertising? Request a free quote or give us a call at 905.836.4442 today!

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Digital Marketing

Dear Snapchat, You’re Losing Influencers

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Dear Snapchat,

You’re losing influencers.

Fostering long-lasting relationships is an important aspect of any brand or business’ long-term success. This is especially true for mobile apps, which rely on consumers to keep using their product.

When it comes to social media, many brands and businesses have turned to leveraging ‘influencers’ for their marketing, rather than traditional ads. They’ve also turned to social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram to reward their top influencers with special features and assistance to further their careers. These popular platforms thoroughly understand that interesting individuals with large followings and content creation skills can attract more consumers and keep them on the network longer.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Snapchat.

When Instagram released their stories feature, the social media realm was filled with memes and articles ridiculing the fact that the platform had copied Snapchat. Yet, according to TechCrunch, Snapchat Story views dipped by 15-40% after Instagram Stories launched.

To add to the fire, Snapchat did nothing to foster relationships with their influencers. In fact, many influencers expressed feeling like they had received a cold shoulder when attempting to reach out. Instagram on the other hand, invited influencers in with open arms and enthusiastically helped them out with whatever they needed.

Snapchat’s disregard of influencers may stem from a business decision that aims to maintain control over advertising by having companies pay them directly, rather than paying influencers. Unfortunately, this technique may not be doing Snapchat a favour. It’s no surprise that influencers began moving their audiences to other platforms like YouTube and Instagram. And where influencers go, brands may follow.

In fact, MediaKix, an influencer agency, tracked Snapchat’s top 12 influencers (all of whom have close to 100 million followers), for 30 days, to see how often they posted on various platforms. The agency found that the top Snapchat influencers posted 25% more on Instagram Stories than on Snapchat, an intriguing result.

So why are influencers leaving Snapchat?

  1. An influencer’s primary goal is to grow their audience. This requires them to be able to be found. Unfortunately, Snapchat’s search function makes it much harder to find and follow someone when compared with Instagram.
  2. Another advantage that Instagram has over Snapchat is the ability to share links, use searchable hashtags, and tag people in their stories. The ability to link viewers to their YouTube channel, website, or store is a MUST for influencers!
  3. With more than 700 million monthly active Instagram users, the potential reach on Instagram is much higher than on Snapchat, which only has around 300 million monthly active users. Snapchat also lacks the robust analytics features that Instagram and other networks offer, which has proved to be an incredibly useful tool for influencer marketing.

So, the question is:

Will we see Snapchat wither away like Vine?

Or will we see them make a comeback in the tech world with new and exciting products?

Only time will tell.

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Digital Marketing

5 Tips for Instagram Success

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Instagram. Odds are you’re using it, your kids are using it, and heck – maybe even your mother is using it. With over 500 million active monthly users, Instagram has grown out of humble beginnings into one of the most popular mobile apps of all time.

According to Forbes, an average of 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram per day, and there are now 8 million business profiles and 1 million advertisers leveraging the social platform. These numbers sound impressive, but if you’re a new brand just starting out on Instagram, it might also be a bit intimidating.

Providing your audience with quality content is just the tip of the social media iceberg. Other questions you need to be asking yourself are: How will you stand out and get noticed? And how will you attract new clients to engage with you?

To help you get started on your Instagram journey, check out Treefrog’s five tips for improving your Instagram presence and building a loyal following:

1. Post Regularly

For optimal results, you need to keep your account active. No matter how great your content is, if you are not actively posting on a regular schedule, your followers are likely to lose interest. Try posting at least 2-3 times a week, and no more than 1-2 times a day. Consistency is key.

2. Mentions & Tags

According to a study performed by SproutSocial, Instagram posts with @mentions in their captions earned 56% more engagement. In addition to mentions, you can also tag other users in your photos. However, you should not mention or tag accounts that are completely unrelated to your posts. This action is considered spam and can get you blocked.

3. Hashtags

So, you’ve made a list of accounts to @mention and tag that relate to your content, and you’ve created the perfect schedule to post. Great! But how do you get your content seen by new people? Hashtags. 

PetaPixel words it best: “Think of hashtags as a pipeline to the rest of the world.”

When choosing which hashtags to use in your post, ensure that they relate directly to your content and what you do. Put yourself into the shoes of the people you want to reach and think about what they would most likely search to arrive at your content. Instagram allows you to add a maximum of 30 hashtags per post – chose strategically.

4. Engage

Interact with your followers and the people you are following through comments and likes. If someone leaves a comment on your post, reply to it. Even if it’s just a short thank you or an emoji, your response shows that person that you are paying attention to their comments. Also, keep in mind that people love getting comments. So leave messages on other people’s posts and make them genuine. Find something interesting to say that relates to their post rather than the generic “nice photo” or a thumbs up emoji. Not only will they appreciate your comment, but they might also click through to take a look at your profile, and if they like what they see, you might get a new follower!

5. Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories is a feature that allows you to publish a photo or video that lasts for only 24 hours. It’s a great feature for businesses and brands because it allows you to get personal with your followers. You can use Instagram Stories to make short vlogs, live Q&As, promo videos, behind-the-scenes footage, process footage, show off your office/team/workplace, or simply take a selfie to say ‘hi.’ Your options are endless, and the best part is that it’s gone in 24 hours. So take risks and be creative!

Want to learn more about how your business can leverage the benefits of Instagram and other social media platforms? Give us a call at 905.836.4442 and let our social media specialists strategize your next Instagram campaign.

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Digital Marketing

Picking The Right Social Media Platforms for Your Business

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With over 2 billion active users, popular social media platforms have become marketing giants, offering businesses valuable data about their customers. However, with so many options, how do you figure out which social media platforms are right for your business?

Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social network on the web, with nearly 2 billion active users! Considering that Facebook has a wealth of options for any organization, it’s a great starting point for your business, regardless of your industry. Facebook can be thought of as the “social hub” of your business, where people can go to leave messages, browse through products and photos, or chat with you online.

Twitter

Twitter averages about 328 million active users worldwide and is an effective channel for marketing your business and handling customer service. With Twitter, you can share short text updates (of 140 characters or fewer), along with videos, images, links, polls and more. As with Facebook, Twitter is more effective when it is a two-way platform in which you respond to and engage with followers.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is right for you if you are B2B or are in another industry or role in which you can provide useful insights to people who are thinking about their work, looking to make business connections, or who are exploring their next career move. Most users are in work mode on LinkedIn, so it is optimal for peer networking and industry-specific information.

Instagram

Instagram is a mobile-only visual social media platform based entirely on photo and video posts. The Facebook-owned network has more than 700 million active users, many of whom post about food, art, travel, fashion, and similar subjects. More artistic niches tend to excel on Instagram, so it’s important that the person running your account has a good eye for detail and some basic photography skills, so the photos and videos posted to your account are high quality.

Pinterest

Pinterest, another highly visual platform, is popular among women, so it is the place to be if that is your target audience. Every pin includes an image or video, and it is fairly low-maintenance in terms of post frequency. However, keeping your boards organized and search-friendly can be time-consuming. Popular categories on the site are DIY projects, fashion, exercise, beauty, photography, and food.

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Digital Marketing

Reaching Moms on Social Media

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This past Mother’s Day got us thinking about what it means to connect with mom on social media. Much to the dismay of her kids, mom is part of a growing audience of parents on social, proving every day that no one will ever be truly free from the watchful eye of mother. Keeping tabs on her children isn’t the only thing mom is doing online though; social media continues to open up new and exciting opportunities for mom to get on board with brands she likes, and join the online parenting conversations taking place worldwide. Check out our infographic for some highlights on mom as your consumer on social media.

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Digital Marketing

Leveraging Reddit for Paid and Organic Advertising

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What if I told you that there is a social networking website that could potentially get you 20x the reach of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? It sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong! The website I’m talking about is called Reddit.

So what is Reddit?

By definition, Reddit is an “American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website” where members can submit content such as text posts, photos, videos, or direct links into sub-categories of Reddit with specific themes and topics (these are called subreddits). The content posted to these subreddits by members is then voted up (up-votes) or down (down-votes) by other members, determining the position of the post. Posts with more up-votes stay at the top of the subreddit, while posts with less up-votes, or posts with lots of down-votes are pushed down towards the bottom of the subreddit. Essentially, just like any social networking and discussion website, posting high quality content will result in more shares, likes, comments, and maybe even conversions.

Numbers Don’t Lie

So far in 2017, Reddit has been bringing in approximately 542 million monthly visitors, 234 million of them being unique visitors, making it the 7th most visited website in America, and 22nd in the world. If that wasn’t enough, in 2015 Reddit reached 82.54 billion pageviews, 73.15 million submissions, and consisted of 853,824 subreddits.

Now that we know what Reddit is, and why it has such great potential from a marketer’s point of view, I am going to share with you my favourite tactics for leveraging Reddit for organic and paid advertising.

Paying For Targeted Ads

Although I don’t have actual experience with targeted ads on Reddit, I’ve seen them in action and I know they work. Reddit offers advertising options where you can actually advertise in specific subreddits, giving the advertiser an opportunity to target specific users with a super relevant ad. This is great because when a user sees a relevant ad in a relevant place, they are more likely to click through and convert. For example, when I was on the /r/adops/ subreddit earlier today, I found two paid ads that would be very relevant to the /r/adops/ community.

The first is a native looking ad at the top of the subreddit, disguising itself as a normal post:

The second ad, featured on the right side of the webpage is not a native ad. It is still however a high quality ad that is very relevant to just about anyone visiting the /r/adops/ subreddit:

How Much Does It Cost?

In order to advertise on Reddit, advertisers must be willing to spend a minimum of $5 per campaign, and a $0.75 charge per thousand pageviews. Currently, Reddit only offers CPM (cost per thousand impressions) as a cost model, and like Adwords, the CPM price you pay depends on a variety of factors, like targeting, bid, and competing ads. Reddit also allows advertisers to purchase up to 3 months prior to a campaign, so plan ahead!

Organic Marketing

Another form of advertising that I like on Reddit, and one that I have personal experience with, is organic marketing. One tactic that is arguably the easiest is to position yourself as a thought leader within the subreddit you are trying to advertise on. Let’s say that you are working for a landing page optimization company, and come across a user in the ad operations subreddit looking for information on landing page optimization. You could answer the user’s question and also provide a backlink to the company you work for. Doing this (well) would provide you with authority within the subreddit, which will benefit you should you decide to keep posting, and will drive traffic back to the website you have just linked to.

Organic marketing is trickier to pull off successfully than paid advertising, because like most people on social networking websites, people on Reddit hate ads, even more so when the ads are low quality, intrusive, aren’t relevant, or are ads disguised as regular posts. Failing to follow the rules, or “reddiquette”, you may find your content getting downvoted, and you getting banned. Having said that, there are a number of ways to organically market on Reddit without pissing off all of the people who could be potentially clicking on your ad.

Things To Avoid

As I mentioned above, Reddit users hate ads and being deceived into clicking on them. There are some things that every company should avoid doing, whether you’re marketing for Starbucks or a local coffee shop.

The big no-no is posting memes. Just don’t do it. If this is the only take away you have from this article, you’ll have still learned something valuable. It’s a risky move that few brands (if any) have managed to pull off without looking incredibly desperate.

One cringe-worthy example that demands a discussion is when Pilot posted a series of memes to various social networking sites in an effort to try to promote their new line of pens. The memes featured slogans like “The only pen that matters” and “I will not lose any of these” that make you want to put your head in your hands. Once they found their way to Reddit, users weren’t happy, and felt betrayed by the user who originally posted the memes, and maybe even by Reddit as a whole. One user even went on to say “Even if he’s [the poster] not paid by the company or an advertising agency, I don’t really want people who are just fans of some brand making accounts just to post about that product. What would Reddit be then?”

I’ve managed to track down a few of the original memes, and have attached my personal favourites. I truly hope you find them as horrible as I did.

In conclusion, marketing on Reddit is not easy or for the faint at heart. It’s a lively community that offers a huge potential for marketing. If you aren’t afraid of criticism, and are targeting certain niches – there’s really no better place to be. If done correctly, you could be on your way to tapping into a valuable goldmine of targeted traffic directly to your website, while increasing brand awareness at the same time.

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