Instagram’s spiking popularity has caused artists to flock to it as a primary promotional channel, and amassing an engaged set of Instagram followers has become an essential part of any musician’s online presence. Here we look at tools for increasing the effectiveness of your Instagram marketing.
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Guest post by Nancy Grace
The recent explosion in the popularity of Instagram has captured the attention of marketers everywhere. It has become increasingly important for them to track trends in social media audience building and visual storytelling.
Instagram is now more popular than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest with over 500 million monthly active users. 300 million of these users are logging on daily and are using the platform to interact with other users and brands online. There are currently over 500,000 businesses making use of the paid reach options on Instagram. As a side note: a huge number of Instagram followers is the key to succeeding on social media against competitors.
Instagram is continuously evolving and introducing new marketer tools to cash in on the increased interest. There are also new analytics options such as view counts on videos. Here are 8 tools that can help you improve your marketing effectiveness and stay ahead of the competition.
- Crowdfire
The follow strategy is one most effective ways to drive traffic through Instagram marketing. It involves doing research on which accounts reach your target audience and following their followers. It has been shown that around 30% of the people you follow will follow you back. However, Instagram caps the number of people you can follow at about 6,000. An effective way to gain followers is through Crowdfire, which is a simple app that can help you unfollow the people who aren’t following you back. You can use it to see which of the people you’re following aren’t following you and unfollow them.
- Buffer
It can be pretty exhausting to look for content ideas for your feed constantly. Reposting is one way to tackle this issue. It will give you a break in creating fresh material and also help you connect with other content creators.
Buffer is a useful app that can not only help you schedule posts, but also allows easy reposting. So instead of manually taking screenshots and cropping these onto Instagram, you can easily repost content through the Buffer app.
- ViralStyle
Creating merchandise and promoting it on Instagram is an easy way to improve your marketing effectiveness. ViralStyle is a great website that can help you create branded merchandise with minimal investment and effort. The platform allows you to print t-shirts, mugs and other merchandise on demand. You can use the design tools available to create custom products and make them e-commerce-ready in no time. There are other similar websites like GearBubble and Represent that can help you achieve similar results.
- Pic Stitch
Pic Stitch is an app that allows you to put together collages in a variety of different formats and share them on Instagram. It makes it easy to combine multiple photos into a single image and is an excellent way to display lifestyle shots or products. You also have the option of adding customized photo borders and even music to the collage. You can choose from 15 different photo aspect ratios and 245 different layouts.
- Boomerang
This is a free app that has taken the platform by storm. It helps you create one-second long videos that play in an endless loop, forwards and backwards. This feature was designed by Instagram and is well supported. It is great for capturing attention and catching the eyes of followers. It is simple to record short videos and make basic edits. You can even create videos from a series of images.
- VSCO
VSCO allows you to add high-quality filters to the photos taken on your smartphone. This app can transform your images and give them an entirely new effect or mood. This app regularly features in the list of Top 100 Free Apps on iTunes. It offers more filters than Instagram’s own collection and can really make your images stand out. It is a great app to rejuvenate tired looking photos or give your pictures a uniform look.
- Iconosquare
Iconosquare is another useful tool if you’re viewing Instagram via the web. Through this app, you can search for posts using hashtags and respond to comments. It allows you to check out who your friends are following and study what type of content is getting the most comments and likes. There is also an interesting feature to help you conduct contests and a host of unique analytics like post distribution and talk rate.
- Font Candy
Font Candy is one of the best text editing tools out there. It is a photo editor that allows you to insert text in a wide variety of styles and fonts. It can make your content stand out and appeal to your target audience on Instagram. Using this tool, you can overlay stylized text to add a new dimension to images. You can also import logos in PNG format to use on your photos. This easy-to-use typography app also comes with spot-editing tools that allow you to explore your creativity.
Final Thoughts
Given the rising interest in Instagram, marketers need to do everything they can to stay ahead of the competition. The 8 tools mentioned in this article can help you take your marketing effectiveness to new heights by maximizing your on-platform efforts.