social media strategy | Wieting Design

8 Ways To Increase Your Instagram Followers

September 6, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

Are you new at Instagram and doing it yourself?

If you’re a new business and just starting out Instagram will most likely be on the list of social media platforms that you should take advantage of. Posting photos can take a lot of time and can be disappointing when your met by nothing more than a few likes from a handful of followers, it’s easy to get discouraged. Unless your a rocker, movie star, sports figure or selling a hot product it could take time to see an increase in followers and likes. Instagram is not just about posting pictures. If managed correctly it can:

Increase product sales
Drive traffic to your website
Increase brand awareness
Increase customer satisfaction
Attract top talent
Identify and establish relationships with influencers

Here are a few tips that might help the process along when your first starting out with Instagram!

Hashtags are known to help increase followers: depending on the kind of business you have you will want to use hashtags like #interiordesign #homemakeover #homedecor #diningroom or #kitchendesign if you are a interior designer. Think of words that are associated with your business. Look up popular hashtags that are associated with your business.
Like random pictures from people in your target audience. Write a comment. Compliment a project, say how much you love the post, be engaging. This is the most natural way to gain new followers.
With anything quality beats quantity. Edit your account to leave only the best images. No one wants to follow someone with thousands of images of random shots. Be smart and thoughtful of what your putting up.
Make sure your bio is complete. Include relevant keywords and hashtags, and make sure you have a link to your website. You don’t want to be spammy when running a professional business.
Ask questions in the captions of your photos. This is a great way to increase engagement. Once you establish yourself people will respond.
Use geotagging, especially if you’re a local business. When you geotag your photos, others who post photos in your area will see your postings on the location’s page and it will help gain traction for you.
Plan, and prepare ahead. Devise a plan for how you’re going to use Instagram, and a schedule to keep yourself on track. Don’t get lazy.
When is the best time to post on Instagram? Just like the Instagram algorithm, the answer seems to change every year. Here is an article that might help answer this question. https://later.com/blog/best-time-to-post-on-instagram/

Be aware there is a game called “follow-bait”. This is when Instagrammer’s want to gain followers. They randomly follow accounts in hopes to get follows back, (mostly new accounts) once they get the new follower they will unfollow you. After a while, some have thousands of followers but only follow a few hundred back which is a sure sign they are only looking to gain more follows.

Don’t take it personally, the follow-unfollow is popular because, it still works. But as you become more familiar with Instagram and learn the ropes you will know who to follow and not to follow.

You will also discover the improvements Instagram has made to help your business grow like creating photo albums and videos to tell a story or share an event.

If you have any questions please email us or give us a call at 203 414 9692

Wieting Design | Website Design CT

Wieting Design is a full-service, graphic and website design agency based in Fairfield County, CT and serving all of Connecticut (CT). We are committed to sharing our experience and expertise in website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine marketing (SEO), and video production to help build powerful tools and campaigns that work for your Connecticut business. Whether your objective is to grow your reputation, create client loyalty, drive traffic to your website or set up a marketing strategy, we will adapt our approach to get you the results you need with the services we provide.

How to Make Social Media Marketing Work for You

July 8, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

How important is social media marketing to business growth? As we mentioned in our last post, according to Hubspot, 92% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses, while 80% of marketers indicated that their social media efforts increased traffic. With these types of statistics, the benefits of social media marketing can no longer be ignored. While many businesses have some level of social media involvement very few are maximizing its use. Social media is perhaps one of the best means of marketing you can have.

Here are our 5 best tips to make social media marketing work.

1 – Post when your audience is active

There isn’t a single answer for every business regarding the best times to post on social media. CoSchedule compiled a few studies on this subject that can help you get started with your timing, but you shouldn’t rely on it as fact for your business. For example, Facebook posting at 1pm on Wednesdays may work for business X, but posting at 5pm on Thursdays may work better for business Y. The single most important tip to remember is that you need to be active when your target audience is.

2- Choose The Right Platform For Your Business

Every social media platform favors certain kind of businesses more, this fact is trite. If for instance, you run a photo editing and photography business or any business that can be sold with quality pictures, then it goes without saying that Instagram is worth a million bucks in its benefits to your business.

Facebook on the other hand also has an open platform for all kinds of businesses, but it gives more room for text, Facebook Pages are beginning to show equal engagement as websites and more engagement in many cases. Basically, it gives you room to explain yourself better and with the addition of Live streaming, Facebook has stepped up in its importance for literally every business type.

Twitter limits you to 140 characters. It can be quite difficult creating something meaningful in that small space, but it can create a huge and relevant audience quickly. But without the ability to target a group of people, it sometimes feels like you are throwing a message out to a big silent world. Twitter is great at making initial connections which can lead to reliable reach on another platform like a blog or podcast.

3 – Collect Email Addresses

No, e-mails are not old school. According to a survey by Exact Target (now a part of Salesforce) 91 percent of consumers reported that they checked their email every day. Emails are still the preferred channel for customers especially if you are providing value. When you have their emails, then you can almost certainly count on being able to reach them when you need to as opposed to trying to guess when they will be available.

4 – Capitalize On Your Favorite Vocal Customers

People generally trust peer recommendations over branded messaging. When a customer raves over your product or service, ask for a reviews or for them to share their experience on your social media page. There’s a lot more credibility in peer reviews than self promotion.

5 – Connect First, Sell Second

If you truly want to get the most out of social media marketing, you need to be there to communicate in real-time. “It’s one thing to fill up your social media feed with posts, but it’s another thing to actively engage with your audience and turn them into satisfied customers. I see a lot of small business owners posting a couple times a day, thinking that they are doing the right thing when it comes to social media marketing. You can’t just post and walk away. If you do that, you are missing prime opportunities to engage with your audience and convert them. This means engaging 1-on-1 to assist with complaints or show gratitude for praise.

Social media doesn’t have to be a mystery. It’s a chance to engage with your audience and hear what they want so you can adapt your sales cycle. It’s nearly impossible — and almost always ineffective — to be active on every single social media platform. It’s better to start with two or three social media platforms where your target audience is active. Master those, and then expand your social reach as the business grows and more effort can be allocated to additional social platforms. Lastly, make sure you are tracking and measuring everything. The data you collect and analyze can then be used to make changes to your campaign. You must be willing to constantly optimize and test your efforts if you want to develop a truly successful social media marketing campaign

Need a hand getting your social media marketing strategy off the ground? Give us a call at 203 414 9692 for a free consultation or email us

Why Your Social Media Marketing Isn’t Performing

April 10, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

Your goal isn’t to post lots of content or even get lots of likes—your goal is to build engagement and turn followers into paying customers. According to Hubspot, 92% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses, while 80% of marketers indicated that their social media efforts increased traffic.

Are you making one or more of these common social media marketing mistakes?

Posting without a strategy?

You can post funny cat memes all day long, but if your tactics aren’t based on a larger social media strategy—complete with specific, measurable goals—all those likes aren’t likely to convert into customers. It is vital that you have a clear plan before you bring your marketing efforts on social networking sites. You should tackle all points including the goals, expected results, the likely issues that your campaign may encounter along the way as well as a contingency plan that you can carry out in the event that “plan A” fails.

Are you only focusing on your company?

Marketers talk a lot about the 80/20 rule of social media: Talk about yourself no more than 20% of the time, and spend the remaining 80% of your posts sharing value-added content like industry news and helpful resources, joining conversations, and celebrating the interests and accomplishments of others in your network.Have you ever had a friend who can’t stop talking about himself? (You know … that friend.) It’s a major turn off to hang out with someone who’s entirely self-absorbed and doesn’t listen to you. The same goes for Facebook. The more your social content engages your ideal customers, the more likely it is that they’ll move further along the sales cycle to produce a return. Also, Facebook will make sure your followers don’t see your posts if too many of them are overly promotional.

Selling, Not Connecting

Always trying to close the deal? You should always be connecting first and foremost. It’s possible for some businesses to effectively use social media as a sales tool, but it’s primarily a relationship-building tool. Customers on social media generally steer clear of the hard sell in favor of conversation, entertainment and information.

You’re Not Interacting With Followers

Followers and consumers expect to be able to contact you through your Facebook Page. Even if you don’t answer messages right away, make a point of treating Facebook messages like email inquiries and seek to get back to people within 1-2 business days.It’s not just good social media manners; it’s good customer service. If you’re on Twitter, you’ll have noticed that you regularly get tweets from your followers. Some of these will hopefully be positive reviews of your service or product. However, there is a chance that you might get tweeted some criticism or negative reviews. If this happens, don’t just ignore them. Otherwise, you might come across as ignorant and not bothered. Instead, take the time to deal with any negativity to ensure your followers that it was a one-off situation.

Fresh Content

People will get tired of your social media if you don’t regularly update its content. And if you haven’t posted for a few months, your followers might even think that you’ve closed down. So be sure to stay on top of your social media and try to post fresh content whenever possible. This is another great reason why you need a blog. The more you post, the more fresh content you have for social media.

In the end, it all comes back to your audience. What do they want? How did they react to your posts? Did a certain type of post perform better than others? These types of analytics should be leading your marketing plans, strategies, and tactics every step of the way. Success on social media is like search engine optimization – it takes time to build and effort to maintain. You won’t see quick results by investing in this type of marketing, but you will grow a solid base of people and provide a valuable form of customer service – in an era where customer service is the dividing line between successful and failing businesses.

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