Instagram is a phenomenon of our time. The photo-sharing app has 7.7 billion users by now (and counting).

One billion people use Instagram every month and 500 million use the platform every day. Its engagement is also 10 times higher than that of Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest’s, and 84 times higher than Twitter’s.

All kinds of businesses ranging from your teen neighbor making earrings to huge corporations and media are on Instagram. And for a good reason — 80% of Instagram accounts follow at least one business.

[Screenshot taken from the Instagram Business homepage]

At times when Facebook is becoming more and more Messenger-based and Twitter revolves around politics and social issues, Instagram stands to be the platform for friends, strangers, and brands alike.

It’s no surprise we’re so serious about Instagram marketing and the tools that help us with it.

Below is the list of such tools which covers everything from filters to analytics.

19 top Instagram marketing tools

1. Grum

Grum is a scheduling tool that lets you publish content (both photos and videos) on Instagram. You can publish from multiple accounts at the same time and tag the users. You can do that right from your desktop.

Price: Starts at $9.9/month. Offers a free trial for 3 days.

2. Awario

Awario is a social media monitoring tool that finds mentions of your brand (or any other keyword) across the web, news/blogs, and social media platforms, including Instagram. By analyzing mentions of your brand on the platform, it tells you who your brand advocates and who the industry influencers are, what the sentiment behind your brand (positive, negative, or neutral) is, as well as the languages and locations of your audience. It also analyzes the growth and reach of your mentions, and tells you how you compare to your competitors.

Price: Starts at $29/month. Offers a free trial for 14 days.

3. Buffer

Buffer is another scheduling tool. However, it includes Instagram among other social networks rather than focusing on Instagram alone. With Buffer, you can schedule content to be published across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can publish the same or different messages across different platforms. You can also review how your posts are performing in terms of engagement, impressions, and clicks.

The tool can be used by up to 25 team members, and you can assign them the appropriate access levels.

Price: Starts at $15/month. Offers free 7-day or 14-day trials depending on the plan.

4. Hashtags for likes

Hashtags for likes is a simple tool that suggests you the most trending relevant hashtags. Knowing the most popular hashtags in real time helps brands keep up with trends, bandwagon on the news, and ultimately grow followers.

Price: $9.99/month.

5. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a social media analytics tool that works for Instagram and Facebook. It shows you the metrics on content performance and engagement as well as on your followers. You’ll discover the best times to post and understand your followers better. The tool also analyzes Instagram Stories.

Besides analytics, you can schedule posts, monitor tags and comments about your brand.

Price: Starts at $39/month. A free 14-day trial is available.

6. Canva

Canva is a design tool that is a great fit for marketers and companies that don’t have an in-house designer. Among other things, Canva helps create perfect Instagram stories. Stylish templates and easy design tools ensure that your Story stands out, which, again, isn’t easy in the world of Instagram.

Price: Free

7. Shortstack

Shortstack is a tool to run Instagram contests. Contests are huge on this platform, they cause loads of buzz, increase brand awareness, and attract new followers. They are a practice loved by marketers.

ShortStack gathers all user-generated content, such as images that have been posted on your content hashtag, and displays them. It also keeps track of your campaign’s performance, showing your traffic, engagement, and other valuable data.

Price: Free up to 100 entries. Paid plans start at $29/month.

8. Soldsie

Soldsie is a handy tool that helps you to sell on Instagram and Facebook using comments. All you have to do is upload a product picture with relevant product information. Users who are registered with Soldsie can simply comment on the photo, and Soldsie will turn that into a transaction.

More expensive Soldsie plans are also integrated with Shopify.

Price: Starts at $49/monthly and 5.9% transaction fee.

9. Social Rank

Social Rank is a tool that identifies and analyzes your audience. You can identify influencers among your followers, see who engages with your brand and with what frequency. You can sort your followers in lists that are easy to work with (for example: most valuable, most engaged, and others).

You can also filter your audience by bio keyword, word/hashtag, and geographic location.

Price: Available on request.

10. Plann

Plann is an Instagram social media management tool. It allows you to design, edit, schedule, and analyze your posts. For example, you can edit the Instagram grid to look just as you wish. You can rearrange, organize, crop, and schedule your Instagram Stories. All exciting stats, from best times to post and best-performing hashtags to your best-performing color schemes are available. And you can also collaborate with other marketers to run your Instagram account together.

Price: Free, paid plans start from $6/month.

11. Social Insights

Social Insights is another platform that offers many important Instagram marketing features, such as scheduling and posting from your computer, identifying and organizing your followers, and analyzing followers’ growth, interactions, and engagement. You can add other team members without sharing your Instagram login.

Price: Starts at $29/month. A free 14-day trial is available.

12. Instagram Ads by Mailchimp

If you’re already using MailChimp, its Instagram Ads feature might come in handy. The tool lets you use MailChimp contact lists to create Instagram campaigns. The whole process (creating, buying, and tracking results of your ads) is, therefore, in the familiar place and powered by data.

Price: No extra fees if you’re using MailChimp.

13. Unfold – Story Creator

Unfold – Story Creator is an iOS app that makes lifestyle, fashion, and travel content more professional-looking. The app offers stylish templates, advanced fonts and text tools, and exports your stories in high resolution so that you can share them to other platforms besides Instagram.

Price: Free

14. Picodash

Picodash is an Instagram tool that finds target audiences and influencers on the platform. It lets you export your and your competitors’ Instagram followers and following lists, users that have used a specific hashtag, posted at a specific location or venue, commented or liked a specific post, as well as tagged users. You can also download any account stories or highlighted stories.

Price: Starts from $10 for a Followers/Hashtag Posts export. You can also request a sample of 100 for free before you order a full export report.

15. Wyng

Wyng is an enterprise-level platform that finds user-generated content with a specific mention or hashtag, exports it, and gets the rights to this content. This is very helpful for running contests. Instagram is, however, a tiny fraction of what the tool covers.

Price: Available on request. A free 14-day trial is available.

16. Afterlight

Afterlight is the iOS/Android image editing app that makes your content look more professional and refined. It offers plenty of unique filters, natural effects, and frames.

Price: $2.99

17. Sendible

Sendible is a popular social media management platform that lets you run accounts on different social media platforms, including Instagram. It’s integrated with some other tools that are useful for Instagram, such as Canva. The tool does scheduling, monitors mentions, and tracks the performance of your Instagram posts. You can also team up with other marketers and work together on your Instagram marketing (and other) goals.

Price: Starts at $29/month. A free 14-day trial is available.

18. Olapic

Olapic is an advanced visual commerce platform. It collects user-generated video content in real time, publishes it to your social media channels (including Instagram) makes it shoppable, measures and predicts which content will perform best. It goes far beyond Instagram and even social media. What is more, it obtains rights for the content for you so that you’re able to use it across your advertising, email, and offline channels.

Price: Available on request.

19. Pablo

Pablo (made by Buffer) is a platform that lets you easily create beautiful images for your Instagram marketing purposes. You can choose photos from Pablo’s own library which includes more than 500,000 images, add text (25+ stylish fonts are available) and format. The resizing option for various social platforms, including Instagram, will ensure your image fits perfectly.

Price: Free

Conclusion

As you can see, there’re plenty of tools to choose from. Check them out, spot the ones that you need, and take your Instagram marketing to a whole new level.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at .

Read next:

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https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/15/top-nineteen-instagram-marketing-tools-to-use-for-success/

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Social media gives businesses that otherwise have a hard time finding their voice a place to experiment.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/329985

Among all social channels, Facebook is the one that has the most monthly active users, 2.23 billion.

This means more than 20% of the world’s population is active on Facebook every month.

Can you guess how many Facebook pages exist? 50 million? 60? 70?

Not correct.

As of May 2018, there were more than 80 million Facebook business pages.

And we as marketers have to try to be more unique than the other 79,999,999 marketers. Yeah, probably that sounds something impossible. Well, instead of being different, let’s try to give the best value we can to our audience.

Eight effective tips to help you as a marketer to get the most from your Facebook business page for 2019

1. Get rid of promotional content and make more educational, fun content

When people start complaining that their page posts are not getting enough engagement, I just take my phone, search their business name on Facebook and start analyzing their latest posts.

Post number 1: Promotional

Post number 2: Promotional

Post number 3: Promotional

And I’m like, well, you really think, that the people who’ve liked your page are interested in seeing only promotional and sales oriented posts from your page? And they’re like, “Hmm, what else should we post, if we just want to get new sales for our business by using Facebook?”

In such cases, I start explaining to people that users really don’t like seeing such kinds of posts because their feed is already filled with so many ads, that advertisers put on Facebook for promoting their products or services.

Promotional content isn’t something, that will engage your customers and make them hit the “Like” or “Share” buttons. It’s something, that will make them scroll down through their news feed or even browse your page and unlike it. 

Source: WritersWrite

And the reason why so many pages on Facebook fail, is the fact, that we want to get value from someone without giving it. Not fair, is it?

Promotional/sales oriented content isn’t valuable in most cases. The good thing is you can promote your product or service and at the same time provide valuable content for your audience.

They love to hear your company story more than what you are trying to sell to them. So, get rid of the promotional material from your page. Instead, start educating them with valuable and entertaining content.

Renderforest reports, that 86% of marketers are satisfied with their video marketing results and consider them successful. This means that you can use lots of videos in your content marketing strategy and have success in it. What about starting to produce videos right away?

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2. Only use Facebook ads for selling your product or service

You read it correctly.

We’ve already talked on the first point, that you shouldn’t put any promotional content in your organic posts. People hate that.

Instead of it, you can run engaging ads on Facebook and get new users/sales for your product or service.

Of course, I agree that lots of small businesses might not have budgets for Facebook. But well, if you’ve started a company, then you should have at least $100 for testing Facebook ads.

And you may want to read carefully as I’m going to tell you an easy trick on the next line for not wasting that $100 on Facebook ads.

Let’s split the $100 into two $50. What’s your business about? Do a little research or analyze what ads your competitors currently run, if you can’t come up with an idea.

Think of that content and create content for two ad campaigns. Once you’re finished, start running the promotion at least for a week for each campaign.

Seems easy, right? Wait, you’re not done. Instead of sitting and smoking a cigar, while your ads run, start analyzing how they perform.

After your ad has been in the process of running for several hours, you may start optimizing it. By optimizing and measuring your ads every 24 hours, you can at least get your invested money back after the campaign ends. You can do this several times while you find out which ad type works the best for your product or service.

And this whole idea means that you don’t have to invest thousands of dollars to start Facebook ads. All you need to kick off is $100.

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3. Conduct webinars and provide valuable information to your audience

Webinars can help you to:

– Stay connected with your current customers

– Make announcements about your products or services

– Talk about niche related topics

– Connect with a wider/new audience and tell them about your services

Webinars are a little bit underrated among Facebook marketing, but they can become a huge weapon for increasing your engagement and driving more sales.

And here comes a question. How to start conducting webinars? Well, the first step is to choose a topic, that can bring value to your audience.

Let me tell you some interesting webinars topics that might be interesting for any audience:

• Invite experts in your industry and conduct QA sessions with them
• Do a QA session by yourself during which the viewers can ask questions
• Announce new product updates and introduce why you made it and how it can help your customers
• Pick interesting news in your industry and go deep with it

These are really basic ideas that you can start with, and then you can make your webinars a big part of your digital marketing strategies.

After deciding what topic to choose, you have to think about the environment and the time you are going to shoot it. Be sure to make everything in high quality: Setup lights, camera, and voice.

There are lots of tools, which will help you stream your webinar in a professional way on your Facebook page.

After setting all these things up, it’s time to go and create an event for your webinar. Write an engaging description, pick an eye-catching title, create a beautiful cover pic or cover video for your event. Don’t forget to choose the right time. You have to understand your audiences’ timezone and pick a time that will be convenient for them to participate in your webinar.

Source: RightMixMarketing

4. Use Facebook insights wisely and make decisions based on your data

Make the most of the data that Facebook Insights provides about your right audience for targeting and marketing. Here is a short list:

• Page views, reviews, likes, reach, recommendations, post engagements, and followers.
• Audience behavior, buying patterns, demographic, and geographic locations.
• Posts reach for both organic and paid strategy. Here you can also add custom timing, to better understand post reactions.
• Traffic source like Google or your website.
• Activity details such as “get direction clicks”, “website clicks”, and “action button clicks”.
• Post engagements and shares.
• If you often hold events, it will show “people reached”, “event page views” and more.
• Videos’ performance and engagements.
• There are also other statistics that you can find when going through Facebook Insights in order to make better marketing decisions.

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5. Use Facebook polls and get feedback from your audience

Conducting polls is a very interesting way of engaging your audience. Why?

Let me give you a quick example. People love playing games everywhere. And why not think about a game idea and give your customers something each week?

Why will it work?

• It’s fun. People like to have fun on social media, and you can give them that opportunity by conducting one for them.
• They’ll get something in return if they win the game. You have to think of interesting rules of your game.
• Engagement rate for polls is really high. And if you make the content of your polls interesting, you really have chances for getting good results from it.

Facebook gives you the opportunity to create polls with texts, photos or GIFs. You can publish them in your story or news feed. They’re a really cool way to increase your page engagement rate.

Source: HubSpot

6. Build a Facebook group in your niche and discuss interesting topics there

Facebook groups are a little bit underrated nowadays. But I can’t really find the reason why.

WordStream reports that more than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook communities. Why not build another great community on Facebook who can ask questions, discuss some topics, and gather an active community around your brand name?

People love communities. They love to meet new people on social media and discuss their problems, ideas with others. And also they love to hear what other people talk about their minds.

And you can build that emotional relationship between them. And when your community will become a little bit bigger, you can do other cool things, including the following:

• Conducting meetups with your community and sharing information with them
• Gathering them and discussing how your product could be better
• Doing an event and giving awards to the most active members of your community

This list can last long. I just want to give you the idea of how you can use the community for making a stronger emotional connection with your brand. It will also help you to get your brand name more popular on Facebook.

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7. Reply to any activity on your page positively

Whatever happens on your page you must react promptly before any other person․ Any activity should be under your control.

In the past, where bots or automatic answers weren’t available in Facebook, it was a little bit harder to react to all the activity happening on your Facebook page in a short time.

But now you can set chat-bots and automate the whole messaging process of your page.

We have to realize that people who live in the 21st century, don’t like to wait even a minute more. They want their issues to be solved ASAP. If you can’t give the best experience to your users, then the chances are high that you’ll lose your customers. Just be with your customer whenever they need you.

You can set an auto-reply for any recommendation you’ll get for your product. If it’s a positive recommendation and your customer is happy, thank him/her and tell them something awesome.

If the recommendation was negative, don’t mess up. You have to find out the reason why the customer is angry with you and left a negative review on your page. When getting negative feedback for your company, you must dig very deep for finding out the real reason why your customer isn’t satisfied. Maybe someone from your employees did something bad to him/her? You should know about it.

Even if it is the worst feedback about your company (in a professional way), don’t remove or ignore it. If someone else comes and sees bad and unanswered feedback from someone, that can hurt your business a lot. Also, you can’t remove negative feedback, so you have to answer as clear as possible, for not negatively impressing others.

8. Always analyze your competitors and keep an eye on them

Do you know what’s the ranking of your page among your Facebook competitors? There are several tools and ways that you can use to analyze your competitors for generating new ideas for your page.

If we start from the beginning, the first thing to analyze is the kind of posts your competitors making on their page.

You can use the Facebook “pages to watch” report and add your competitors there.

Source: Buffer

What about the ads they are running? You can see that information publicly by checking their ads and info section. By doing this, you’ll know where and how your competitors target their ads. And it can give you lots of ideas for your next marketing campaigns.

If you do this analysis twice per month, it will be complete enough for knowing everything about your competitors.

Conclusion

Facebook marketing tips haven’t changed a lot since the last year. Usually, marketers underrate some tools Facebook provides, such as groups and polls. If you understand how you can bring value to your audience by using these tools, they’ll be effective for you.

Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest. He can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

Over 600 million users visit FB business pages every day. 52% of consumers have discovered a brand there. Why and how to optimize for Facebook local search.

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Webinar marketing has grown in popularity for loads of reasons. One way it’s quite useful is for reputation management. Here are four tips for how to do it.

As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

Eight tips to get the most from your Facebook business page in 2019

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Does social media have an impact on your SEO? Do retweets, shares, and likes of a page actually boost that page in search engine results?

Studies like this one by HootSuite have suggested that there’s a correlation between social media shares and higher rankings. You might have noticed that yourself: content that ranks well on Google often also has a lot of shares, retweets, and likes.

Most experts agree, though, that rankings aren’t directly affected by social signals. (And that’s what ex-Googler Matt Cutts said on the subject a few years ago, too.)

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Google+, which once included the promising Authorship markup, is soon going to be shut down.

So what’s going on? Why do posts that get shared a lot also tend to be posts that rank more highly?

Social media and SEO: Correlation, not causation

While social media shares might be correlated with better rankings, that doesn’t mean that the social media shares cause better rankings.

A piece of your content could get shared thousands of times on Twitter without necessarily budging at all in Google’s search engine results.

Instead, when social media appears to be causing a boost in ranking, this is what’s happening:

• Content that gets shared a lot gets seen a lot.
• Content that gets seen a lot is more likely to get linked to from other websites.
• Those additional backlinks are the cause of the better rankings.
• The improved rankings also lead to increased social media activity.

As AJ Kohn puts it, “It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity.”

And, back in 2017, Simon Ensor suggested here on Search Engine Watch:

“We should not be worried about whether links from social media platforms are valued in the same way as a link from a high quality and highly relevant website. Instead we should look at the benefits of utilizing social media to help boost ranking signals that we know search engines care about.”

In that post, Simon took a look at the impact of link earning, co-citation and co-occurrence and brand authority and CTR – it’s well worth a read if you want to dig deeper into why social media tends to have an impact on SEO.

Here, though, I want to focus on the practicalities: what can you do to harness the power of social media?

#1: Create content that’s worth linking to

If your site has very little content, or if the content is poorly written or uninteresting, why would anyone feel moved to link to it from their site?

A common culprit here is self-promotional content: standard web pages that advertise your services or products, or tell readers all about your company. These are important for your site – but they’re not likely to get much traction on social media.

Instead of producing more of the same on your blog, focus on creating content that’s more informational and less salesy. Maybe it’s a tutorial helping readers to do something, a collection of useful tips, a well-designed infographic, or something else that people will want to share with their audience.

You don’t need to invest a lot of time in this (though if you do have the time, it’s well worth mapping out a full content marketing strategy). Simply having a couple of really good in-depth blog posts, or some interesting and useful data, can give you the opportunities to get not only lots of shares but also links from influential websites.

#2: Don’t try to build links on social media

If you’re thinking about “building links” on social media for SEO, you’re thinking about it wrong. 

Yes, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn themselves are authoritative – but links from personal accounts on those sites tend not to be.

Firstly, most links from personal accounts are “no-followed” which means that they don’t strictly pass search engine reputation.

And secondly, from a search engine perspective, even if they did pass reputation, it would likely be from the personal user and not the social media site (so it wouldn’t be worth a lot unless that user was very influential).

On top of that, links on social media tend to get buried deep into a news feed within minutes or hours – they don’t stay visible like links on websites.

Instead of approaching social media as a way to build links, then, you need to think about it as a way to build a following. That doesn’t necessarily mean going after as many people as possible, though.

#3: Build (the right) social media following

Having a huge social media following probably won’t hurt, but it may not help as much as you’d imagine, either.

Instead of focusing on the sheer quantity of people following you, think about the quality of your following.

Being followed by just 100 people can be better for SEO than 10,000 if it includes the top 5 influencers in your industry who publish content on a regular basis.

To get noticed by these people, it’s a good idea to:

• Avoid pestering them for links: take the time to build up a relationship, and you want to think in terms of (as Michael Keating puts it on Business.com) “a partnership that lasts rather than a one-off engagement”.
• Share their content. Don’t just retweet it or share it without comment, but craft your own tweet or post where you talk about how good their piece is and why people should read it. This will make far more impact on the influencer than yet another retweet.
• Help them with their link building by linking to them from your guest posts on large blogs. As Darren Rowse from ProBlogger explains, “A  few years ago now, a blogger I’d never heard of before wrote an article for a large business publication that sent me a huge amount of traffic. It definitely got them on my radar.”

If you want to harness the power of social media to – indirectly – help your SEO, try creating valuable and interesting content, building the right following on social media, and helping out your followers (without expecting anything immediately in return).

You’ll likely see that you naturally gain valuable backlinks – and that your content, and site as a whole, begin to rank better as a result.

Related reading

The most important steps to focus on for your customers when trying to improve your UX for SEO. Search query, design, navigation, snippets, content, etc.

Fuzzy Lookup is an Excel add-in that can be a clever solution for automating SEO tasks. Here’s how you can use it for 404 and site migration redirects.

What exactly agencies need when it comes to website audits and what to look for in choosing a tool. Five specific recommendations, screenshots, examples.

All you need to know about using APIs for better, more productive SEO tasks — content curation, keyword analysis, link monitoring, site performance, etc.

https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/social-media-how-does-it-affect-seo/

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Joe Laresca, founder of media agency Noise and co-founder of Serhant Media Group, shares his views on connecting with high-profile influencers and provides practical social media advice for real estate agents.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/329999