Instagram is a very popular photo sharing mobile social platform.  The Instagram app is transforming the way people share experiences.  There are currently over 100 million registered users worldwide, only two years after its October 2010 release on the iOS platform.

Here are some tips from Vanessa Au of Spring Creek Group on using Instagram to bring your brand closer to your customers.

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With today’s emerging technology, smart businesses should consider kick starting their business on Google+.  Google+ is Google’s main social platform, and it integrates seamlessly with other Google properties, such as Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.  The collaborative search results make it possible to actively search for the types of people interested in your products/services by using the same Google search terms.  Google+ also provides real time social engagement and interactions to support its social efforts.

Google+’s Hangouts on Air use audio and video to show live streams as a form of communication via social media.  Hangouts can be streamed publicly to your Google+ profile, YouTube channel and website.  With Google Hangouts, businesses have a unique and engaging way to communicate with their customers.  Hangouts are also a cool way to deliver and share information. Businesses can include different communities and bring community into content creation itself.  The way that users communicate, behave and participate with others is unique to Google+ and great for businesses.  With Hangouts, businesses can both communicate AND listen to their customers.

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Social marketing is becoming increasingly more valuable for retailers.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are some of the social networking platforms that are being used to grow business.  The following are key Social Marketing insights for retailers.

Social Marketing can help build customer engagement and product awareness:

Social marketing can help you increase engagement with your online customers, but be sure to choose the appropriate channel based on your goal.  For example, Pinterest is a must for retailers because it is excellent for sharing product images.  As a visual network, it provides great value to retail brands.  It is also important to reach the right people.  Capture core fans and bring them into your social scape via website, emails, shares, and likes within a social network.  To drive awareness to your brand, optimize content to meet brands by using social analytics.  You can do this by determining which posts are receiving the most engagement and creating more content from that.  Continually manage and keep track of your Likes, Shares, Followers, Retweets, and Comments.

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If you are active on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, you will see that there has recently been a huge shift to visual content.  Businesses are seeing a positive response and increased engagement with visual content sites.  Part of the appeal is coming from our desire to look at aesthetically pleasing images and sharing them with our friends, fans and followers.

It appears that this growing trend toward visual media is also highly influenced by the shifting habits of technology users.  With the rise of mobile, smart phones and tablets make it easy for users to capture moments and to share them via social network sites that are highly image-based, such as Instagram.  Visual communication, for the most part, is simple and not time consuming. Photo sharing is becoming the preference for many to keep others updated about their experiences, or to tell a story.

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If your goal is to grow and engage your audience on Facebook, consider offering contests and sweepstakes.  These types of promotions can help you get more Facebook likes, more leads and more user-generated content in general.

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GraphEffect is an enterprise collaboration platform for social media marketers to organize and synchronize their marketing initiatives and efforts both within and between companies.  Think Facebook, but focused for social marketing communication and collaboration.  With GraphEffect, marketers can collaborate on planning, content creation, analysis, measurement, social advertising, etc. in a single work space.  Early adopters of this platform include big Fortune 500 companies such as American Express, Verizon, Toyota, Clorox, Estee Lauder, Samsung and Marriot.  Just recently, the latest version of the platform has been released and is being made available to the public and developers for the first time.  Now SMBs, consultants, marketers and others can join the world’s largest social network for marketers.

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Links are such as huge part of search engines and the Internet that it is hard to imagine a time when they were not the main component of the Internet. From the great directories of yesteryear like Yahoo Directory to the king of search engines Google, links have been the main currency of the digital world.

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With the rise of social media, Facebook’s ability to sort social information has become just as important as Google’s ability to sort search information. Facebook’s importance as a social search engine must be considered for anyone searching for information.

Similar to Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s social search algorithm known as EdgeRank, determines the importance of content in Facebook’s search results; or in Facebook’s case, users’ newsfeeds. Newsfeeds contain the EdgeRank results of information Facebook considers most important to you. Appearing in your newsfeed are the connections deemed most important to you as well as the content they suggest or create.

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For brands targeting women, Mother’s Day is a day they can’t miss.  Nordstrom, Tiffany, Nine West and many others are jumping on this opportunity.  This special holiday that honors mothers, grandmothers and other maternal figures offers tremendous business opportunities in the world of e-commerce.  It is a peak time period from the end of April to the beginning of May when internet business merchants would be foolish not to focus their marketing initiatives on some type of gift-giving theme.  There are many traditional, as well as innovative, ways to promote selling products/services catering to female end users in the virtual shopping mall.

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In the next few weeks, Google and its Google Analytics team will be rolling out a new initiative with social-focused reports.  Its goal is to help individuals and businesses measure the ROI on social media marketing.

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