As many of you already know, the Instagram Photo Sharing app has taken the world by storm over the past two years. Boasting 30+ million users even without an Android app (which was now just recently released), Instagram has been getting everyone’s attention.  This includes Facebook, who just purchased the company for right around $1 Billion.

With Instagram having been named Apple’s App of the year for 2011, then acquired by Facebook (there may be some big integration plans in the future), and the new addition of the Android app that is continuing to massively boost their user base, it’s important to understand how to utilize the app in intelligent and creative ways to help boost your brand’s relationship with its consumers.  Take a look at these 4 tips that can help get your brand on the way to building a strong Instagram community!

1.  Post engaging content & know your audience

Instagram revolves around one main concept, and one thing that makes it such a huge success: the pictures! People love looking at different photos, and it requires minimal effort to analyze an image (as opposed to reading a body of text).  With over 250 million photos posted a day, it’s important that when posting images to Instagram you are selecting ones that are visually stunning, original, and most importantly ones that your consumer base can relate to in some shape or form. When using Instagram you want your users to react to your image (whether they like or comment on your image) to help spread your photo and build your Instagram network. Red Bull does a great job of posting relevant and engaging content on their feed frequently.

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I have had a certain product break on me four times in the past three months. Each time I didn’t complain, just filled out the warranty, sent the product in and got a new one. Now the fourth time the product broke, I decided to take to social media because, quite frankly, I felt people should know about this and along with that, I really did want to see how they would respond if I posted negatively on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I started by posting a long message on the brand’s Facebook wall, explaining all of the brand’s faults and how ridiculous of a situation I had been put through with their product.  I posted this around 9:00 A.M. with hopes that they would respond quickly (negatively or positively) so I could either make a Facebook scene or in fact escalate this situation to someone at the company who could help me quickly. After posting on their Facebook wall, I took to Twitter and posted a couple of tweets on how bad their product is and the predicament I was in with the product breaking four times on me. I made sure to use @ mentions and keep a period in front so everyone who doesn’t follow both the brand and I could see it.

The following is how the brand handled the situation and what they did wrong/right:

The Good:

The brand crafted a great Facebook response, being extremely apologetic, actually stating the failure rate of the product (only 4.6 out of 100 these products fail at all, but yet I had 4 break in three months) and directing me to email them instead of continuing the conversation on Facebook (smart tactic).

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Google has introduced Real-Time traffic data to all Google Analytics users, allowing you to view all traffic on your site as it’s happening in…real time!

Real-Time Analytics allows you to view who is entering and leaving your site, if they are a new or returning visitor, and most importantly what traffic source they are coming from.

Since Real-Time will define the source of a visitor, this is very valuable for marketers and business owners who want to know how well an ad campaign or social media post is performing. They can now gauge the immediate impact of those marketing efforts. For example, if you tweet about a new product on your site, you can immediately see how many site visitors were driven by that particular content. This will allow you to help pinpoint your  marketing strategy,  by allowing you to find what type of messages are the most effective and what time to post to drive the most traffic to your site.

Make sure you capitalize on this new feature, and use it to maximize your advertising campaigns to their full potential!

Check out some screen shots of the new Real-Time Google Analytics in action below:

Last week I ran a little social media experiment… non-scientific of course. I tweeted and posted on Facebook that for every twitter Retweet (RT) or Facebook Like/Share I got on a specific post I would donate $1.00 to my Movember campaign.

I didn’t really have any goals besides donating some money “humblebrag” and seeing if I could get 100 RTs & 100 Facebook “Likes” in a day, and seeing if it in fact worked.

Below are my findings:

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•  Surprisingly, it was much harder to get Facebook “Likes” than to get RTs on twitter
• Going into this, I thought I would easily get to 100 Facebook “Likes” but that was not the case at all. With the new Facebook feed, there is so much more news being spread and posts get lost in the clutter much quicker if people are not actually sharing the post. It is important for something to be shared and not just “liked” if you don’t want the post to be lost in the clutter
• For any brand to show up consistently on Facebook they will need to either be constantly posting status updates, (spammy and annoying) or pay for advertisements on Facebook
• There is also the option of asking your friends to repost/share your status updates, not just like them, but again, that can come off as spammy
• twitter RTs were much easier to come by. I only have 370 followers (don’t judge) but most people were more than willing to give a RT for a good cause

Social media has become a huge part of every company’s marketing mix, whether you are a local business or a nationwide brand. It is important to have a branded Facebook page and a branded Twitter handle to communicate with your consumers directly. Many companies are utilizing Facebook to its maximum potential, but are you using Twitter to its full potential as well?

According to this article by Mashable, Twitter has over 100 million monthly active users, 50% of whom are signing in every day. That is a HUGE audience. But sometimes just pushing your Facebook posts to your Twitter account doesn’t cut it. So let me share some tips to help you maximize your success in the Twitterverse.

1. Utilize free Twitter tools

There are a lot of free tools that can help you utilize Twitter to its maximum potential. My two favorite are Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. These tools not only provide easy management of multiple accounts or brands, but will also greatly help with the other tips proved below.

2. Set up relevant live searches

When using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck you have the ability to set up live streams of searches using whatever terms you desire.  As an example, lets say you are a hotel in the Chicagoland area. You can set up a search for “Chicago Hotels” in your Tweetdeck account. You will then have a live stream of all Twitter users tweeting about Chicago hotels, hotels in Chicago, etc. So if someone tweets, “What is the best hotel to stay at in Chicago?” you can quickly reach out to him or her directly with a response in a matter of seconds.

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Well, Twitter, congratulations are in order. You’ve got founder Jack Dorsey is back as Executive Chairman, you’re now five years old, and the world is your oyster. An oyster filled with 140 characters-worth of pearls. You win.

Twitter zealously is a familiar story: internet user learns about Twitter, says, “I’d never use that,” decides to sign up for whatever reason, ends up hooked. Yes, that was me. But here’s why:

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We talked last week about the 5 year anniversary of Twitter and the crazy growth it’s seen and will continue to see. The numbers don’t lie–people are on Twitter, and no matter what you may think, those people aren’t just the gum-smacking tween types. While the adolescents are certainly out there in the Twittersphere, the biggest estimated group on Twitter right now is in their 20s and 30s, and there’s a strong representation of users in their 40s. So whatever your target audience, it’s a good chance they’re hanging out on Twitter and that this is a social media platform that needs to be monitored and considered in your business’s web marketing plans.

One challenge of Twitter is maintenance.  While it doesn’t seem so bad to share a few 140-character thoughts every once in awhile, building relationships and making connections on Twitter requires relatively regular monitoring. And building relationships is really what you want to be doing on Twitter. It’s a tool that will give back what you put into it. So with that in mind, here are some thoughts on how to make the most of Twitter and to build your loyal network, even if you don’t have a ton of extra time:

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1. Know what your fans and potential customers are interested in. Follow conversations on Twitter about topics important to you. Search for tweets about products you sell, services you offer, the industry you work in, etc. You can make decisions–both on and off Twitter–about your business based on this information.
2. This is a simple one: know who’s talking about YOU. Do regular searches on your own brand and misspellings of your brand name. If you find people referencing you, talk to them! And follow them! Don’t be shy…but DO, of course, stay sensitive to what it is they’re saying.

5 years ago a small team of people started working on a service that is now known by the world as Twitter. As a matter of fact, the first tweet EVER was posted by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey 5 years and 5 days ago from today, on March 21, 2006.  From the first tweet and the launch of the service came a world to follow with an ever-growing fan base that’s constantly continuing to rise at exponential numbers.  Two days ago, Twitter released some mind-blowing numbers on their blog that could be the cause for some additional celebration (and show some major growth for them in 2011).

Here are some of the numbers:

#tweets

It took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the billionth tweet. (Now there are 1 billion tweets a week)

A year ago, 50 million tweets occurred each day. (The daily average this month is 140 million)

@accounts

This month, Twitter has received an average of 460,000 new accounts each day

Over the past year, mobile users on Twitter have increased by 182%

Those are some great numbers to back Twitter up for their 5^th year anniversary, and it’s impressive to see how much the numbers have been growing this year (especially). Not only have the amount of users increased, but the activity has increased three-fold.

It goes to show that Twitter should be used in everyone’s social media efforts (only using Facebook isn’t enough).  So, make sure that with your next social media push (or ongoing efforts), you keep saying to yourself “let me tweet that”, and utilize said social network to maximize your campaign’s growth, reach, and overall success.

Some may say that 2010 was the year for Facebook, and honestly, who are we to say otherwise? Facebook has grown into something that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself couldn’t have even imagined, and after an aggressive year in 2010 is one of the top dogs (and probably making some other companies a little nervous, Ahem…Google).  Lets take a look at some of the accomplishments Facebook has undertaken this year, and the reason why it seems like we all have the Facebook fever.

When looking at growth for Facebook in 2010 they not only reached the 500 million user mark (yes, 500 million), are worth an approximated $7.6 billion, but (according to comScore) also achieved an increase of 55% in U.S. unique visitors compared to 2009 (topping Twitters 30%), which makes it the second most visited site world wide (only trailing Google). Wow, those are some good numbers, not to mention that the average Facebook user spends about 55 minutes on the site daily. It used to be a Facebook vs. Twitter battle, but now it seems that Facebook has jumped that hurdle and is now on the way to give Google a run for their money. On top of that about 83% of businesses use Facebook, and there are 700,000+  active local business pages on the site.

Oh yea, did I forget to mention that The Social Network is nominated for 6 Golden Globe awards, and to top it all off Mark Zuckerberg was dubbed the 2010 Man Of The Year by Time Magazine (the second youngest to ever win the award). No big deal right?

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Nowadays everyone is starting to realize (if you didn’t already know) that social media is an excellent way to captivate your audience, and with the 500 million strong on Facebook and 200 million more on Twitter you can reach ANY demographic (my grandmother just friended me a couple days ago).  Not only is everyone using it (including my grandma, and probably yours too), but the spaces themselves encourage action and interaction, which can be extremely valuable. Instead of someone talking to their friends in their living room while your 100 thousand dollar commercial spot is running that they aren’t paying attention to, you can reach the same amount of people, get an instant action/reaction from them, and its all for free.

Ok, with that said, its hard enough to create awareness and get people to become a fan of your Facebook page as it is, but the hardest thing of all is keeping them engaged AFTER they become a fan. Do you know how to keep them engaged? Do you want to learn how to keep them engaged? (See what I did there ) Just be conversational with them! Use open-ended questions that relate to your product, relate to your fan base, and drive consumer action. People see plain old’ boring promotions all day long (and trust me they know how to tune them out), but if you tailor your updates and promos to something that not only promotes your product and brand, but also gets the user involved and thinking about your product you will create much more retention amongst consumers.

Oreo is a great example of how to structure that perfect balance of conversation and promotion and utilizing it in the social media space.

Here are some examples of Oreo’s promoting on Facebook that Ad Age so kindly provided for us.

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