The Future Of Still Photos On Instagram

Do you like to see pictures?

I am constantly staying up to date on all things happening behind the scenes on social media platforms.

Yesterday, I watched an IGTV from the head of Instagram, and he said, “Instagram is no longer ‘just a photo-sharing app” and went on to explain how Instagram plans to reintroduce and promote entertainment, videos, reels, and stories.

This statement about taking the emphasis off images is one that I saw coming three miles away, but it still makes me so sad.

While I do love a good video and a crazy reel, I need the still images. And feel that your business needs the still photos.

There are still people out there who need to look at something that doesn’t move from their screen two seconds later. Some people still want to look at a stunning image, study it and read the words in the caption.

The still images in your feed help capture and convey the tone for the atmosphere and ambiance you are trying to achieve when the viewer signs up to work with you or walks into your store. The still images are an excellent way to convey your messaging to your people.

If you’ve been following or been around me for a while, you know that I believe in looking at your feed as a portfolio of your work and that the other neighborhoods of Instagram more of entertainment.

Reels should be looked at as a commercial, a hook to bring the reel viewers to your feed and capture them to follow and stay in touch with you.

Stories are a great place to give that behind-the-scenes footage and access to who you are as a person or team, not just a brand, because, let’s face it, we’re all nosy.

IGTV is for you to put videos of your expertise to listen or watch as we need.

While one of the head people of Instagram is saying that they are working on taking photos, I still believe that is where your business should keep its primary emphasis. With the introduction of Keywords and the SEO implementation on the platform, I feel still photos are not going out of style any time soon.

Trusting Your Marketing In Unforeseeable Times

Each week I chat with my accounts representative at Google about the ads accounts I manage.  For the past two months we have never seen search data as it has been registering.  The peaks and valleys in the search term charts have been pretty unbelievable.  It’s been so unpredictable that even my Google rep also isn’t sure how to comprehend it and scrambling to help.  People will be searching for things in mass one day and then the next day not searching at all.

When 2020 began I was prepared for sharing content for helping you market your business during the chaos that comes with digitally marketing in an election year. The chaos that is social media, not Google searching.  

If you have been noticing that your marketing has not been converting or a significant dip in website traffic, your business is not the only one.  It can be frustrating when your marketing is not converting but this does not mean you should stop all of your marketing efforts.

Marketing your business is a marathon that is based on know, like, and trust.  The way to ensure that you are helping potential clients or customers know, like, and trust you is to keep consistently posting to both social media channels and the blog on your website. 

Each day is unpredictable but remaining consistent in your marketing shows that your business is serious and in this for the long haul. We are going to be in this situation for the foreseeable future, it is time to brainstorm and modify how we do business.

Even Google is having to modify and figure out how to accompany the new patterns of our internet searching. 

Why You Want To Focus Your Marketing On Where The People Are

Imagine Ariel from the Little Mermaid Singing, “I want to be where the people are…”  That song right now has so much context as we are sheltering in our homes.  

As humans, in general, we are programmed to be around people not isolated in our homes, and as business owners, most of us earn our living through in-person human interactions. 

In the last few weeks, we have been asked to shelter in place, practice social distancing, and modify our business to survive in a digital, little or zero actual human contact world.  I can see companies working hard to adapt to the future of a digital world. However, it can be frustrating when you work so hard on crafting the perfect social media posts, complete with a scroll stopping photo, and the catchy caption only to look at your analytics and see that it hasn’t reached anyone. Let alone the intended party of whom you posted to get in front of.

You are not alone in this. In the last few weeks, social media engagement for most industries on Facebook and Instagram has been down. When I first began to notice the dip, I deep dove into client analytics to see where if any traffic was coming from. The first steady stream of conversion was from their Pinterest accounts.

If your business hasn’t leveraged Pinterest yet or even has a presence, you are missing out on crucial conversion right now.  The migration of time spent off of Facebook has been happening for a few years now, but people are also spending less time on Instagram these days. There are a plethora of psychological hypotheses on this one, which is a topic for another time.

The other digital migration that has happened is people have been downloading the Tik Tok app like crazy.  Tik Tok is a great way to escape and watch short, somewhat mindless entertainment. If your business can maintain it entertainingly’s brand on Tik Tok, this is absolutely the time to download the app, create some content, and, if it’s well-received, begin to build a presence there. 

The point of all of this is to keep an eye on your website back end analytics because that golden nugget of data will tell you where exactly your people are.  And where your people are showing up is also where your business needs to be continuously digitally showing up. 

Social Distancing & Your Business

After 9/11, I felt called to help my country. The next summer, I went to New York and worked at a foundation that helped kids who lost someone in the attacks. While this is not the same, I feel a similar calling to help my fellow business owners.

These current unfortunate circumstances have me feeling hopeful because while I have been saying it for years, there is no better time than the present to get to work on the virtual end of your business. We are entrepreneurs, adapting is one of our most powerful personal tools. We looked fear in the eye and started our business; this social distancing thing is yet another obstacle for use to pivot through.

It makes my heart so happy that so many businesses, while closed to the public and limiting their staff, have used their adaptive, creative entrepreneur mentality and started offering local 5-mile delivery or curbside online order pickup. As a personal example, I ordered potting soil from my local ACE Hardware online. I called the store to schedule a delivery because, on their social media, they had marketed that they will deliver your order to a specified mile radius.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my opinion on all of this is it will be the new way that small businesses will have to adapt to survive after we've flattened the curve and can go about our lives a little more freely. If anything is this just going to make that giant same-day delivery service located in Seattle more substantial. Your business will need to adapt now to flourish in the future.

Since I trust my gut on almost every decision that I make, I have decided to offer a few of my services at a significant discount. I've decided to provide this ensures more independent businesses come through on the other side and have a foundation started for what is to come.

Website SEO

Blog posts and back end enrich able SEO could help your business get seen right now. I am offering discounted rates on both of these services for businesses impacted by social distancing.  

Setting up a Virtual Store

I have been shouting from the rooftops for years to move parts of your business online. If you chose not to listen to that message and instead waited for a sign, this is your sign. Your product-based service can not survive today or in the future without having some products available for purchase online.

I am offering a discounted rate on loading an online store onto your Squarespace website or getting gift cards loaded on there for purchase. I also have experience setting up a Shopify store. 

Product Content Shoot

I get it you're not sure how to style your photos for an online store or social media. If your products can ship in a Flat Rate print postage from a home box, I will style and photograph them for you to use in your online store as well as in your social posts.  

I am offering 50% off of any of these packages until April 30th. For more information or to receive a quote, please contact me HERE.  

Maven and Muse Media is here to support you with whatever your digital needs are. We are going to get through this together. 

How Digital Marketing Changes In An Election Year

2020 is quickly approaching, and we are all most likely up to our knees for business planning for next year. One unique thing about next year is that it is also an election year, and election years can throw a wrench is business digital marketing campaigns. 

2020 will be my third election cycle as a digital marketing professional, and up until 2016, everything went pretty much as predicted. Candidates bash each other, supporters of said candidates share opinion pieces about the rival, yadda yadda. However, shortly after the New Hampshire primary in March of 2016, I watched the client’s customer bases leave Facebook with the droves leaving the night and day following when we learned who the nominees were. These people also did not log on or interact again on Facebook until well into 2017. 

At that point in 2016, it was just Facebook where the political advertising warfare was raging among the masses. Instagram was pretty much unaffected by the political advertising machine. Instagram, we were still seeing plenty of dog and latte posts with somewhat positive captions that the masses were even interacting with and again somewhat purchasing from businesses.  

The sales trend for purchasing non-essential products and booking services stayed statistically low, as is predicted during an election year. During election years, statistics show that consumers are more conscious of how they spend their money and are more apt to think twice before purchasing because the outlook financially for the next four years is uncertain.  

However, once Facebook jumping began, marketing plans were altered, and email marketing, SEO, and Pinterest became the focus. Which with these changes, businesses’ monthly marketing statistics stayed consistent as non-election years. People are not going to leave the internet because we live here now. People are, however, going to avoid places on the internet that suck for them. 

If Facebook and Instagram are the only marketing platforms that your business is focusing on, I’m sorry to tell you, but in 2020 they could let you down hard. Facebook has already said that they will not filter and will allow all kinds of political ads to be run. Since late September, I have already seen a dozen or more political all sorts of ads popping up on Instagram. This makes me believe that once the Iowa caucuses happen, Instagram will also become penetrated with ads, influencers, and those dogs and lattes photos we all love will be captioned with political comments. At which point, the cycle of leaving and logging off of social media until November 2020 will begin. 

With all that said, the key to running a successful digital marketing campaign during an election year is to be prepared for anything and focus on areas of directly connecting with customers via their inbox and their searches. What worked well for one month could very well not work the next month or as soon as the news cycle is updated. If this election is anything like 2016, we are all going to be opening up our apps to the wild world wide web together. 

Without The Likes, How Will I Know How My Social Media Post Is Performing?

The news of Instagram removing likes is mainly old news now. When the news first broke that the likes were going away, I surveyed my stories asking how people felt about it. Were business owners ecstatic that the like factor was going away, or were they upset that the likes would no longer be visible? To my surprise, it was a 50/50 split on how they were feeling.

The buzz around the likes was happening as I was sitting down with clients to discuss 2020 digital goals, and I kept getting asked the same two questions in different ways. Since you might have versions of the same issues, let’s discuss them now. 

“Without the likes, how will I know how my competition is doing?”

This is a loaded question because the likes on a social media post are not a direct correlation to how your competition is performing financially. I’ve said it before, and I will keep saying it, popular does not always pay the bills. I have known businesses whose accounts do not have the coveted 10k + following and are killing it in their bank accounts. And I also know businesses accounts with thousands of followers who are struggling to make ends meet. Tracking how your competition is doing based on the follower counts or likes on their social posts is irrelevant. You can never honestly know how your competition is doing or if they are financially your competition without seeing their profit and loss statements. From a marketing standpoint, stick to analyzing how your content is doing. Track your analytics and mindfully share more of the content your audience is telling you that they want from you. Your only actual competition should be striving to be better financially than where your business was last year at this time. 

“Without the likes, how will I know how my post is performing?”

The public might not be able to see your like count, but as the account owner, you still can while likes are one of the last things that should concern your marketing efforts I completely understand why they are essential to you. It feels good to know that people took the time to double tap on your post; however, to track if your marketing efforts are truly effective, you need to focus on conversion. The important statistics to you should be the conversions from social media to your website, sharing your post on their feed, or the conversion of someone reading and commenting or sending you either an email or direct message. Consider this, when you are out networking or selling your product in person, you are primarily marketing yourself. At these events, you can hand out all the business cards that you own, but the only way to be sure that someone ever really “sees” or “hears” you is if they convert that information and reach out to you on the contact information on your business card. 

Fighting an algorithm day in and day out is frustrating and exhausting. I completely understand that, however, the removal of post likes is not the end of the world. Likes have never paid your bills. Sure, clients/customers have liked your posts, but what made them a client/customer was clicking on your website to purchase a product or sending you a message to book your services. Look back at which post-converted them to click and be in direct contact with you, and keep doing more of that.  

Continue putting your best stuff out there, and remember that these are FREE platforms to use. We could all still be in a time where to be known or seen we would have to pay for an advertisement in a magazine. However, that’s a topic for another time.  

The Struggle To Write A Social Media Caption

Every time I meet one-on-one with a business owner, a consistent struggle comes up one way or another, the effort to write a caption for social media.  

Many times I have heard, "I write something I hate it, I delete it, I write again and delete it. Get frustrated and don't post at all." OR "I'm afraid that whatever I post is going to screw everything up."

I get it; I'm right there with you, and I want you to realize that you are not alone in this. Somedays I also struggle with what to write on my social media because I'm so inundated in the updates on social media that somedays it is the last thing that I want to talk about. I realize that you are all here for those tidbits that you otherwise don't know and how to make those platforms work for you and not against you. Just like your clientele does not know everything about your industry or your product, they are looking to you to educate them on what you have to offer. 

You aren't going to screw everything up unless you write something hurtful to another person that gets shared and goes viral. Does anyone remember the tweet that blew up Justine Sacco's life? Writing things like that is what is going to screw everything up for you. 

Here are a few tips to help you through the captioning anxiety:

1. Remember that people read your captions in their tone, not yours. The tone confusion can happen if you are not posting a video, or they have never interacted with you in person to get a grasp on how you communicate IRL.

2. Learn how your target market communicates both on and offline and work on ways to communicate with them that way.

3. Findings have found that our attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish. Get to the point quickly or risk getting scrolled past. Write what you want then go back to edit to make sure you've gotten to the point.

4. Tweet how you want to be tweeted at or about. Every post you put up and comment response is a reflection of you and your business's customer service culture.

5. Be yourself. Write in a way to the person that if you meet a follower or customer IRL, they feel like they already know you once you begin talking.

Finding your business's voice takes some time, effort, trial and error, but I am confident that you can do it. 

Why Keeping Your Social Media And Digital Marketing Up To Date Is Important For Your Business Health

One of the accounts I work with is a user-generated content account where I repost content from paying community members, as an additional way to market for them. Right now, these accounts are smack dab in the middle of their busy season. They aren’t keeping their channels updated because they are so busy running their business. Not updating is entirely understandable. You, as a business owner can not wear all the hats, run the business, write content, and post the content all while taking care of themselves, their families, and their other personal commitments. Something has to give, and most of the time, I have noticed that it’s their digital marketing that gets put on the backburner.

While this is an understandable situation, I am here to advise against this happening too often to you. There are inexpensive and even free resources to keep your accounts up to date; it just needs some planning in advance and setting aside a few hours during the week to update the scheduling applications.

In this day in age, we all as customers have become accustomed to interacting and engaging with a brand on we feel like we know them in real-life level. We think of brands as a part of us and the smaller ones we might even feel a personal connection with the owner.

The flip side to this is that it could be attracting other new people to your feeds via locations, hashtags, and search terms. If these new people visit your feed, see that you have not posted in months or longer, they may scroll right past you and choose to do business with someone who is keeping their feeds up to date and current.

Both of these situations are not ideal for your business because, in a world where our attention span is about three seconds, a society we are continually fed content from every direction existing and customers could forget that you even exist if you are not staying at their top of mind.

A few suggestions to avoid this situation from continuing to happen to you, invest in either a free or a paid social media scheduling platform, schedule time on your calendar to write and schedule your posts. Or hire out the workload to a social media manager.

Every single business has a busy season. The trick to keeping existing customers as well as enticing new customers to conduct business with you is to maintain your social media presence.

Five Ways To Successfully Instagram Story For Your Business

During one of my latest speed marketing sessions, we were chatting about Instagram Story Highlights and how some stuff is better left off of them. If you’ve met with me or heard me talk you already know that your Instagram Highlight buttons should be where you put work that you would want on a portfolio or that you want to live permanently in your feed.  

You’ve also heard me say that your Instagram Stories should also showcase a more personal version of your business, highlighting the person and people involved in doing the business. The stories should give a behind the scenes of the person that is engaged in the business for 24 hours.  

Stories could include slides of your dog, cat, kiddos, camping trip, etc. However, these slides should not necessarily make a permanent home on your highlight reel if they do not have anything to do with what your actual business is. The more candid stories that relate to your business should live in your highlight reel if you love them and fit into the themes of one of your bubbles.

I’ve flipped my way of storying and started thinking of Instagram stories as “trailers” to grab the attention of the viewers to click your name and check out your entire feed. Since I started experimenting with this method on my feed, and a few clients, feed their stories, views, and profile visits have skyrocketed. It’s insane, stories that used to get 20 pictures or so have quadrupled! I’ve been testing this on my feed for 30 days, and while my likes and engagement are down, my website, clicks have quadrupled as well.  

A few simple ways to create a “trailer” for your feed:

1. Make use of the quiz, survey, and question stickers.

• Erase the “Ask Me A Question” statement on the question sticker and ask your audience a question you want their answer to. 

• The survey sticker is a great way to do a market research of your target. A few times, I did a survey asking if people would prefer speed marketing during happy hour and the response was overwhelming that they did. Therefore, I’m going to try a few sessions during the happy hour. 

• The quiz sticker is a cool interactive sticker to see who in your audience is paying attention to what you are putting out there and an excellent way for your audience to get to know you better and for you to be more personable. 

2. Don’t always be trying to sell and talk about your business. Show what your life looks like, messy desk, no makeup and all. You also want to show who people are going to get in real life when they sign up to meet with you.

3. Make sure that your highlight bubbles are categorized including services that you offer, reviews, and any other page that is also on your website. 

4. If you are selling products and have them in your feed, shoot those posts also to your stories. 

5. Try to keep up to 4- 6 slides on your story in a 24-hour time frame. Any more than that and people are going to swipe away from your account. This is extremely important if you are doing a video story. Please be conscious that you are saying everything you want and getting to the point in ONE story slide. If your video goes for multiple slides, you’re going to get swept next. Longer video can most definitely live on your IGTV channel. 

The story neighborhood seems to be the hip place to hang out these days. If you are not storying, consider giving it a try, and if you need help with ideas sign up for one of the Speed Marketing Sessions. 

How To Effectively Pay To Play On Facebook

The other day listened to a podcast that said that the 2020 presidential candidates were spending on average $75 on a Facebook ad to get 1 $1 donation. All of this information leads my brain astray with googling thoughts. 

Since all I’ve been obnoxiously reading and seeing these days are complaints about “how you have to pay to play”. I would fill you in on some data.  

I began by researching what the average cost per click was for a Facebook ad these days. 

The following Cost Per Click data is via Sprout Social:

Apparel: $0.45

B2B: $2.52

Customer Services: $3.08

Real Estate: $1.81

Retail: $0.70

Travel & Hospitality: $0.63

Remember the cost per click is to get someone to click on your ad and get to where you are sending them. There are other objectives that you can set up on your ad, such as getting Likes or having them complete an action ie, downloading and installing an app. 

I want you to keep in mind; however, also that the time of year that you are running an ad is incredibly important. For example, if you are a retail business and are planning out your Q4 advertising campaigns realize that your costs will be higher because you are going to be competing with so many other ads, and your ad is going to get lost. 

It was difficult for me to understand while I was listening to this podcast how candidates had to spend $75 to get one $1 donation, but then it’s the time of year. We are still over a year away from the election, and the masses aren’t fully paying attention yet. By this time next year, if the metrics and studies are correct, a $75 ad should be getting them more than one $1 donation.

If you are in need or wondering if your business needs a digital marketing strategy, know that it does.

For more information on how to effectively run a Facebook ad read THIS.