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How can companies use Vine and Instagram for social media marketing?

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Question added by Lana Oudeh , PR Coordinator , Al Ghanem
Date Posted: 2016/08/18
Ghada Eweda
by Ghada Eweda , Medical sales hospital representative , Pfizer pharmaceutical Plc.

First of all, the two platforms Vine and instagram are quite different  and not just because one is mainly for images and the other for short videos.  However, People use both apps for different reasons, such as visiting instagram to get great product images and going to vine to see the product in action or just for some funny content. Yep!

It's a broad question, but here is the answer.....How to use Vine for social media marketing:

(1) How To Tips

Almost every product can be used in more than one way, from foods, to building materials, and clothing – all of it can be used in more than one way. Create a massive and loyal following on Vine, that you can convert into sales at any time, by creating short videos that show people what can be done with your products.

(2) Have Fun

Social media should be used to interact with your fans about relevant information, tips, and news. However, social media should also be used by your brand in order to help people smile. Smiling improves the strength of your immune system and lowers stress If you can help fans with those two things, why not do that?Vine users open the app to release some stress and get a good laugh. Are you going to be the brand that lifts people up?

 

How to use Instagram for social media marketing:

(1) Start Posting About Your Niche

Ok, great you know your niche, now the real work begins! Now you have to start posting niche related content. How should you do that?Post pictures related to your niche. Again, sporting goods = sports pictures. Anything that you can think of that seems related to your target interest is good. You should strive to post a combination of professional pictures and pictures that you took yourself. Sometimes it is these non-professional pictures that perform the best! When posting a picture, don’t forget to use filters to make it look super cool, like in this picture from Wilson (a company that makes baseball gear).Post videos as well! Sure, the majority of content on Instagram is pictures, but why not use your videos to stand out a bit? A good, niche related clip can be a great way of getting your business’ Instagram page noticed. (Fun fact, Instagram video outperforms Vines!) 

(2) Use Niche HashtagsIf you’re wondering how to make your content more discoverable then you need not look any further than hashtags! Hashtags (the pound symbol #), for those of you that don’t know, are used to categorize content in order to create searchable categories of social posts. For example, if I were to search #baseball, all of the Instagram posts that used that hashtag would show up.By using hashtags that are related to your niche you can reach a much larger audience than just the people that are following your brand. So before posting something, think about a good hashtag that would relate to your industry and to your post. Try not too general though, because then your post might get lost. Instagram suggests using at least three hashtags per post.

(3) Run Competitions Ready to kick your Instagram marketing up a notch? Then you should give competitions a shot. There are many different types of competitions that you could run, but obviously the best kind of competition for Instagram is a photo competition.A photo competition is very simple. You ask your followers to post their best, funniest, or most creative picture about a certain topic. The winner can then be chosen by you, randomly (sweepstakes style), or even by peer voting – your fans will vote for the image they think is the best in order to plan out your competition you should follow these steps:

A) Think of what the goal of your competition is – brand exposure, product awareness, lead generation, etc. It is important that you know what you’re trying to accomplish so that you can give your competition direction, and also so that you can gauge its success.

B) Determine who the competition is meant for. Is it for a target market within your followers, or are you targeting your industry niche as a whole? You should decide this in order to ensure that the theme of your competition is relevant to the people who you want to participate.

C) As a second level of insurance to ensure that the people participating in your competition are relevant to your business, you should offer a prize that only people within your target group would find appealing.

D) Choose a relevant hashtag to identify your competition. For example, if you ask your fans to post their best pictures of them skiing, you could make your hashtag #BestSkiiShots. Before officially choosing your hashtag though you should check to make sure it is not already being used.

E) You can run a competition manually, or you can use one of any number of tools like IconoSquare or Strutta. Both of these can be very useful for designing, managing, promoting, and analyzing your competitions.Tools can be very handy for organizing your competitions as well by giving them a landing page as a hub for the competition. For example, check out Vitamin Shoppe’s photo competition landing page.

Growing your Brand’s Instagram Following  The largest area for your company to grow is through non-traditional avenues like Instagram. In order for us to accomplish this, we have to ramp up your number of followers.  Ideally you need a minimum of 75k followers for this to be successful which will take, at a very minimum, several months to achieve.  One of the most common ways to grow your brand’s Instagram following is by increasing your engagement activity. You increase your engagement activity every time you like a new photo, comment on a photo, or follow a new member.  Otherwise, unless your name happens to be Dan Bilzerian or Katy Perry, users might never find your brand’s profile. Instagram puts daily limits on the amount of likes, comments, follows, and even unfollows you can perform in a twenty-four hour period.  We believe this is done to make it difficult for brands and businesses to grow quickly Chasepedia has developed a proven process which enables clients to maximize these limits on a daily basis.  Using this method, we can grow an account by several hundred followers per day, which is greater than any other program we have scene for gaining “REAL” followers. Another strategy we employ for our clients is by having other “popular” accounts shout out your account.  Shout outs are simply advertisements on extremely popular accounts. It sounds gimmicky, but the results are amazing.  We start by identifying five of the mega accounts within a particular category (mega accounts have 100k+ followers) and begin paying them to shout out your account. Depending on the size of the mega account, advertisements range in price from $5 to $500 per 1-hour post. Below is an example shout out we did in the outdoors category, and then the results for the increase in followers for the account receiving the shout. The 628 followers were gained in one day utilizing both of the above strategies combined.  

 

 This means if we are extremely aggressive in growth strategies, then we could potentially have you to the 75k mark in 90-120 days. The proposed budget for growing through commenting and shout outs is approximately $1000 per month. Obviously the faster you want to grow, the larger the budget must be. Once you reach the 75k mark, then we turn off the growth strategy and transition into MARKETING STRATEGY. Examples of accounts running successful marketing campaigns on Instagram would be Shredz and Salt Armor.  These accounts both have an incredible following and are able to effectively advertise their brands without loosing followers.

 

-Chase!

Samiullah Khan
by Samiullah Khan , IT Support Specialist , Kitopi

Thanks for inviting Miss Lana...

Using Vine and Instagram for social media marketing can be really useful but only if its used with good idea and creativity like on instagram we can go with product photography and good snap nd designs of upcoming inventories of the company etc... and with Vine a vry creative advertisement can be made which wuld definitely attract people towards the product...

Manoshe Ahs
by Manoshe Ahs , Secretary , IAK - International Academy of Kuwait

Actually the easy way to market the products in the companies is social media specially if they use it in good way .

Any company can take pictures and videos to market their products by instagram and vine , they must choose the most attractive thing in their product , like if it's fashion company , they should download the most attractive piceses and the most expecting selling ones then show it in their page , also it's very important to catch a big numbers of followers to increase their selling .

In vine they have to choose very attractive models with right snapshots of the piece .

Abdulaziz Abdelrahman Mohamed Mahmoud
by Abdulaziz Abdelrahman Mohamed Mahmoud , Founder , a1 Engineering

Thanks for invitation.. Actually i don't know!

Murat Yavuz
by Murat Yavuz , ceo , FCB Art Group

Totally depends on your brand and product/service.Visual communication is the core of marketing for the last two decades for sure. Instagram and Vine is being over exploited by some figures to boost their fame and some brands think that using those artificial celebrities is a good way to increase their buzz. But keep in mind that those people care for their own brand, not yours. If you do not have unique, appealing and compelling content to engage with your customer base, do not attempt to spend your money. For any new medium, text or visual or video, content is the king. First invest in content, do spend good on productions than go live.

Most of people uses social media particularly Vine and Instagram in their everyday lives. Companies may use this strategy to market especially when their target audience are teens. 

Tamer Safei Eldin
by Tamer Safei Eldin , Managing Director, Board Member , El Obour for Real Estate Investment

Companies use Vine & Instagram to reach larger segments. It depends on how smart a company is to attract potential customers not through adds but through entertainment which Vine & Instagram where genuinely made for.

Vine: to show clips about all and everthing, they want to promote. Than using social media accounts to spread the clips. Looking for a strong account with many followers of your direction. Twitter, the tweets are running, FB, Instagram they will remain for a while, Pinterest the video will be pinned. I would create at least FB, Twitter and Instagram accounts, of my own. Will take daily some time. Train 3 Staffmembers about # and so on. Ask Staff about good short Ideas to tweet about the job, what happens etc. Post this from time to time, you can use a robot for the time to post. Get a picture pool about your company and funny and cute pics, to add with your tweets. By as honest as your product and do not buy followers, user will realize.

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