Social Media Marketing

Social Listening: Best Practices For Growing Businesses

Updated on January 23rd, 2020.

More than listening to what customers are saying about your brand or industry in the social sphere, this one question is important:

What do you do with what your customers and prospects say on social media?

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5 Social Listening Best Practices:

1. Pick a Successful Competitor to Imitate
2. Determine When to Engage an Ongoing Conversation
3. Have Relevant Departments Go All In
4. Carefully Consider Your Choice for a Social Media Listening Tool
5. In the End, How Much is Social Listening Doing For You?

Hearing what customers say on social media is one thing, but understanding how to use their conversations to your brand’s advantage is another.

500 million tweets are sent every day. That’s ~6,000 tweets per second.

And that’s just Twitter.

A prospect could tweet something as simple as “I need a black shoe right now” and get the attention of seventy of her followers engaging with the post.

What would happen, if you as a shoe brand (for instance) chime into that conversation with a link to your black shoe — including a discount coupon?

Here are five social listening best practices that can make a huge difference in your business:

1. Pick a Successful Competitor to Imitate

When you learn from people who are already doing well, you’re in essence skipping the mistakes they made before getting to where they are today. You can avoid most of mistakes they made.

On learning from competitors, PR expert Gini Dietrich says:

“Analyze your competitors’ marketing—see which efforts work well, and understand why stakeholders like them: What is their primary messaging? Why does or doesn’t it work? How do people respond to the company’s overtures online? Is word of mouth positive or negative? Why?”

Businesses perform better at social listening when they ethically learn from competitors who are already doing it right.

Piecing together their strategy is like scoring a free cheatsheet. Visit their platforms to see how they’re doing their social media — responding to feedback, joining industry conversations, and so on.

Fashion company Topshop, for example, is a good brand to learn social listening from. And of course, there are several other brands out there that are awesome at this.

While many other fashion brands only only take advantage of world-renowned events like Valentine’s Day and Christmas, Topshop takes advantage of other smaller festivals or events — especially in entertainment and fashion space.

When conversations about #EEBAFTAs (the hashtag for British Academy Film Awards) were trending on Twitter, Topshop joined in.

Tweet of Topshop during the #EEBAFTAs

Remember, this is an event many other fashion brands don’t value as much as they do more popular events. Well, Topshop decided to participate in the conversation on Twitter and their engagement rate soared; one of their tweets with the hashtag became the most popular on their timeline.

So, when looking for brands to learn your social listening strategy from, companies like Topshop are good examples to learn from. They look at other industry-related events that most of their competitors aren’t looking at and take advantage of them.

There are hundreds or even thousands of other brands you can learn from. Do your research on brands doing social listening well in your industry and see how you can learn from them.

But what if you step into a lively conversation and get a slap in the face? You need to know when to enter an ongoing conversation on social media.

2. Determine When to Engage an Ongoing Conversation

Social media is built on conversations, and consumers want to be talked to, not sold to.

Social media marketing guru Carlos Gil put it more succinctly:

“Talk to your audience, make conversation, build relationships. Consumers are people and they don’t want to be sold to, they want to be engaged so engage them.”

But it’s not just getting into conversations with prospects that’s important, you also need to know when and when not to engage them.

Ever gotten into a conversation and then realized you shouldn’t have? Or maybe your timing was just off?

When to enter an ongoing conversation is crucial.

It determines whether or not you’ll be getting any benefits from your social listening efforts or not. It determines whether you’ll get bashed or praised for joining a conversation. Avoid regret. Pick and choose your times to engage.

Here’s a few examples of typical conversations, and how to engage them:

Customer Service Queries

Customer service related queries require your immediate response.

Customers get angry all the time for different reasons, and you want to ensure they don’t stay angry. Or they need to ask questions before buying from you.

In any case, you want to respond to customer service requests fast.

“Netflix is known for its superior online customer service. That is due in large part to a corporate culture that empowers employees to act quickly”

– Rebekah Radice, Founder at RadiantLA

78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

An Ongoing Conversation About a Government Policy

Trying to take advantage of a social media conversation about a government policy that hurts people is an example of a potentially bad time to enter a social media conversation (depending on your stance).

For instance, following a ban from the US president last year, people from Muslim-majority countries were banned from entering the US. Taxi companies weren’t happy about this, and so they all went down the JFK airport and stopped pickups from working.

Amidst this commotion, Uber saw it fit to join the conversation and advertise their service, in theory helping stranded passengers. The turn out was bad. #DeleteUber became a thing on the Internet with many users posting how they weren’t happy without Uber’s position on the ban:

#DeleteUber campaign.

If you’re not going to sympathize with people who find a particular policy disturbing, it’s best to stay away from conversations like this.

When to Keep Quiet or Simply Apologize

Sometimes it’s best to remain silent — when saying anything at all will make a situation bad on all sides. Depending on the vitriol being spread, you may just want to pretend you didn’t hear a thing.

A smart rule of thumb is to only get involved in conversations when you know you won’t get burned or miss out on significant benefits.

For example, these conversation scenarios are clear enough to know whether or not to chime in:

  • An angry customer is egging people on and you feel you might be baited into a fight – Do not chime it.
  • You feel tempted to speak ill of a competitor’s product. – Do not chime in.
  • You feel tempted to market your Spring bouquets on Christmas Day (making you look like an extraterrestial)- Do not chime in.
  • You will literally miss the party if you don’t get into a conversation on time — like tweeting about Valentine’s Day on February 15 – Chime in!
  • You won’t get burned for marketing your Valentine’s products on Valentine’s Day – Chime in!

These are just a few examples. Think up a few you want to avoid or join.

But it’s still not always this straightforward, right?

Sometimes it can get really dicey and you won’t be sure whether or how to respond to feedback in the sometimes volatile social arena. Everybody’s watching, remember?

And bad news travels fast.

For example, one Clayburn Griffin mentioned Cap ‘n Crunch on Twitter, saying…

Tweet about Cap'n Crunch by Clayburn Griffin

Cap ‘n Crunch probably wasn’t sure what the outcome of their clapback would be. But they took the risk anyway. As it turned out, it worked for them. Cap ‘n Crunch’s tweet clearly got more love than KFC’s.

Cap 'n Crunch's tweet at KFC

Should you do the same if you were in this situation?

Speaking about the reason for their clapback, Andrew Cunningham from Huge (which managed digital for Cap ‘n Crunch) said: “KFC came at us pretty hard, and at that point we had full license to zing them back.”

Sometimes it isn’t rocket science to know when to enter a conversation. Sometimes it is. A smart rule of thumb, however, would be to only respond to conversations that clearly CAN BE handled. And apologize when occasion demands.

Another good social listening practice is to have your social media team collaborate with relevant departments in your organization to provide accurate information.

3. Have Relevant Departments Go All In

Social media is clearly not a secondary channel for marketing anymore, it’s the main channel today.

And if that’s the case, then it’s worth having all relevant departments in your organization collaborating on it.

When an issue is brought up by a customer that your social media team doesn’t have enough expertise to handle, have them link up with the relevant departments that can provide apt feedback or information.

78% of customers say competent service reps play a huge role in a happy customer experience.

Image of customer reps playing a huge role

Service reps can’t be competent if they aren’t fed the right information by relevant departments. So departments in your organization need to collaborate with your social listening efforts.

Customers hate it when they reach out to your customer service via social media and don’t get a satisfactory response. Or when you tell them to send an email to get an issued solved. Nothing beats you giving them the right response right from social media where they contacted you.

“I have for 10 years—long before Facebook was even on the map—called myself a ‘relationship marketing specialist.’ And I love that term because to me it transcends the medium. It’s all about people doing business with people.”

— Mari Smith, Top Facebook Marketing Expert.

And remember, it’s social media — everybody’s watching.

This doesn’t mean your programmers, finance people, and other staff need to abandon their roles all the time to respond to customer complaints on social. But they can play a huge role in assisting your social media managers with the relevant information they need.

An open communication line between the social media team and relevant departments can work wonders here.

That said, your entire social listening effort, however, is nothing without a good social monitoring tool.

4. Carefully Consider Your Choice for a Social Media Listening Tool

Social media listening tools help you analyze what’s been said about your brand and industry on social media.

There are many social media monitoring tools out there, which makes choosing the right one a challenge sometimes. But you need to find the right one for your business anyway.

An inefficient social listening tool will make your social marketing efforts unnecessarily hard and frustrating.

If, for example, your tool can’t help you sort out the different sentiments in your social mentions, it’s going to be really hard to start scrolling through the many mentions you get to get the one(s) you’re looking for.

Want to monitor sentiment analysis for the hashtag you’re tracking like this? Try Keyhole.

Social conversation monitors have different capabilities. Some provide basic functions while others offer more advanced features. You want to pick the one that offers the functions that matter to your business.

5. In the End, How Much is Social Listening Doing For You?

You need to track metrics that matter. Otherwise, it’d be all for nothing. And there are lots of things to track, but you need to spot the ones that really matter to your business.

A few things to track:

  • Sentiment: How many mentions about your brand are favourable or otherwise.
  • Popularity: How many mentions are you getting per day, week or month?
  • Influencers: Who are the influencers talking about you, how many are they and what are they saying?
  • Most engaging topics: Which topics get the most likes, replies and reposts? Knowing this will help you understand where to focus your social listening efforts.

What you do with what you’re hearing about your brand is critical in this age where it feels like social media is controlling the world. Use the strategies in this piece to make the most of what’s being said about you and your industry.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword analysis and hashtag analytics. Get started for free and conduct social listening for your brand.

The Ultimate Facebook Analytics Guide: The Insights You Need to be Tracking

Facebook Analytics Guide

You still haven’t started using Facebook Analytics, have you? 

Could it be because you don’t understand it? Or perhaps you don’t know how to set it up in the first place.

Maybe you don’t see why you should be using another Facebook analytics tool. You have Facebook Insights anyway. 

We totally get it.

But, here’s the thing…

You’re missing out on the huge potential to make your ads more successful and reduce your ad spend, or even make what you’re currently spending bring you more value. 

The truth is, Facebook Analytics will completely change the way you do business.

While Facebook Insights does a good job to help you understand the value of your Facebook Page, Facebook Analytics goes on further to measure actions taken in the News Feed and how they affect actions on company websites, apps, and brick and mortar stores.

No more need for a handful of different analytics tools to monitor your Facebook Page, websites and apps. Now you can access all that data on one dashboard. 

Still feeling doubtful? We’ve prepared this guide to help you understand why you need Facebook Analytics in your life and how to master this powerful tool.

Read on. 

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What is Facebook Analytics?

Facebook Insights vs Facebook Analytics

How to Use Facebook Analytics

Use Facebook Analytics to Inform Marketing Campaigns

What is Facebook Analytics?

Facebook Analytics is the updated social media reporting tool that groups together all your Facebook pages, pixels and apps to give you a complete picture of how users interact with these platforms over time. 

For instance, you can see how audiences on your Facebook page and Facebook pixel overlap or connect.

In other words, you get to see how your Facebook audiences interact with your website as well as how your website audiences interact with your Facebook Page. This is because Facebook Pixel is a core component of Facebook Analytics. 

Facebook Analytics makes it easy for marketers to track the results from organic and paid ads across multiple devices and sessions. It makes monitoring and reporting very easy, which means you can keep improving your Facebook marketing campaigns. 

And here’s the best part; it’s FREE!

All you need is a Facebook page and pixel. 

Facebook Insights vs Facebook Analytics

You’re probably already familiar with Facebook Insights that gives you a report on your Facebook Page performance in terms of engagement and audience demographics. 

Facebook Insights and Facebook Analytics, though both analytics tools, are completely different. 

Facebook Insights is just for your page and lives within your Facebook Page, where Analytics is mainly for paid ads and lives within your Facebook ad account. 

Facebook Analytics gathers micro-level data from your Facebook Page and Facebook Pixel to show you how someone interacts with your page and website over time. 

So for instance, you can see how many people commented on your Facebook post, viewed your landing page and then made a purchase. 

Facebook Insights, on the other hand, relates to Facebook Page reach, post performance, and other micro-level statistics confined to your Facebook Page.

How to Use Facebook Analytics

For most marketers, the hardest part of using Analytics is setting it up. But worry not, we’ll take you step-by-step, and you’ll be a pro by the end of this guide. 

If you’re already using Business Manager, you’re already one step ahead. 

To get started, head over to your Business Manager account. Then navigate to the Measure & Report Menu and select Analytics:

how to navigate to the analytics tab through facebook business manager

Please note that for your Analytics dashboard to work, you need to install the Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel shows you who gets to your website by interacting with your Facebook content.

It allows you to see how your Facebook ads drive visitors to your website and what those visitors do when they get to your website. 

This information is important because it enables you to measure visitor engagement. 

You are also able to compare the number of leads you get versus the cost of the ads for that page, so you’re aware of how much it costs you to acquire a lead. 

It also grants you the ability to see what call-to-action buttons attract your visitors the most so you can use them more. 

The Pixel will also show you the shopping cart activity. Are people leaving items in their carts or completing the purchase process?

To find The Facebook Pixel, go to Ads Manager and click on “Pixels”. The installation process is simple, and Facebook walks you through each step required. 

Once you install the Pixel, give it time to run. Then, your dashboard will populate with your analytics data.

At the top of your dashboard, you’ll see the number of new users, unique users, and your retention rate ie. the percentage of people who return to your site. 

You can see the number of active users you’ve had in the last 24 hours and your best traffic sources under Growth Metrics.

Another important step after creating your Pixel is to customize your Event Source Group (ESG). This allows you to see analytics from all your assets (Pages, websites and apps). 

To create your event source group, choose the option in the top right-hand corner:

Creating a Facebook pixel - create an event source group (ESG)

Next, name your event source group and choose the apps, pixels, and the pages you want to be included in your reports:

Now, this is how your dashboard will look like:

Using Your Dashboard

No matter how amazing your campaign is, you need to analyze your Facebook ad performance so that you’re fully aware of how it’s performing and what needs to be improved. 

Facebook Analytics is the holy grail of advertising on Facebook. The tool will present you with loads of data from your ads. 

To get the most out of Facebook Analytics, there are three main components that you must fully understand.

Let’s take a closer look…

1. Funnel Analysis

The first important insight available in the Facebook Analytics tool is Funnels. 

To see the Funnels dashboard, click Funnels on the left side of the Facebook Analytics page. Then click on the ‘Create Funnel’ button.  

As you add a funnel step, a drop-down menu will give you options including conversations, messages sent, page views, post reactions, add to cart, etc. You can add all the options you think are relevant to you. 

How to conduct a funnel analysis on facebook analytics

For the Funnels dashboard to work, you need to make sure your Facebook events are set up properly in Pixels. 

install your facebook pixel and add what events you'd like to track.

Add all the relevant events. 

Why is Funnels so important?

With this feature, you are able to track your users’ journey from the moment they first interact with your asset until they reach your desired end goal. 

For instance, you can track a user from the moment they like your business page, like a post, click on a link, visit your website, add an item to their cart and finally make a purchase. 

Let’s take a look at the example below:

facebook analytics - funnel conversion example

For this business, 36.9% of the people that commented on their Facebook page went on to view their website. 10.5% of these then purchased their product. So 3.9% of people that commented decided to buy from the site.

Reports from Funnels will help prove the value of engagement on your Facebook page because you’re able to tell if comments and likes on your Facebook page result in users going to your website and ultimately converting.

You can take advantage of what is working within your funnel. 

Say the more people view your Facebook Page, the more they purchase. You can then create an ad to purposefully increase your page views. 

On the other hand, if you have many people visiting your page, but very few of them are adding your product to their shopping cart, then something is missing.

You need to give them an incentive to add items to the cart such as discount codes, personalized product offers, etc. 

You’re also able to see at what point in the funnel are people dropping off. 

Are they not clicking on your links? Maybe you need a better call-to-action. 

Or perhaps they’re leaving immediately after landing on your website. If so, you may need to reassess your landing page content. 

If they drop off after they add the item to the cart, you can create a follow-up email sequence to find out why that’s the case.

2. Customer Lifetime Value Analysis

The second powerful report on Facebook Analytics is Customer Lifetime Value.

To set it up, select Lifetime Value from the left-hand menu, then decide whether to include All Users (anyone that interacted with you) or Paying Users (only those that made a purchase).

Facebook analytics: customer lifetime value report

Why is Customer Lifetime Value important?

Facebook changed its system and now users see more content from friends and groups, and less content from pages. This means that you need to use ads to get more people to see your content in their feeds. 

This has made the ad space very competitive and now costs more to acquire leads. 

Each lead needs to be of high value for you to get a high return on investment.  You want each customer you acquire to engage on the long-term with your brand. 

You also want to focus on warm leads and not just cold leads because warm leads are more likely to convert into customers. 

Most businesses tend to concentrate on new customers and forget existing customers.

A customer may have bought a product from you, but that doesn’t mean their journey ends there. They are still useful to your business. 

There are many ways to increase a customer’s lifetime value to your business.

By looking at reports generated by Customer Lifetime Value, you can see how much a customer is worth to you over the course of several months.

With this feature, you can see how Customer Lifetime Value corresponds to changes you make in targeted ads, promotions, and so on.

Not everyone who sees your ad will become a customer immediately. 

Some people may want to interact with your brand several times before they make any purchase. Customer Lifetime Value allows you to see how a user’s value increases over time. 

With this data at hand, you’re able to tell which users to spend more ad money and effort on because they will bring more value to your business. 

3. Revenue

The third very important Facebook Analytics insight is Revenue. 

To set it up, choose a date range and then click on the Revenue option from the menu:

facebook analytics: revenue

The revenue report is quite great for Facebook audience insights. You can see the number of people who make a purchase and their age and gender breakdown. 

This helps you understand the people who are making the most purchases, therefore, helping you to make your Facebook ads even more targeted.

This way, you are able to make the most out of your ad spend. 

No dollars end up going to waste. 

Create Custom Dashboards

Facebook Analytics allows you to create a customized dashboard so that you can slice and dice your data in all sorts of ways and go as specific or in depth as you want. 

For instance, you can create a dashboard that compares specific events, specific groups of users (by age, gender, lifestyle, interests, etc.), different segments of users, etc.

You can also segment your reports in custom time windows, such as days, weeks or months. 

Custom dashboards allow you to create well-targeted marketing campaigns so that you can achieve your desired goals. 

To create custom dashboards, use the pin option in the top right-hand corner to pin a report and save it to a chosen dashboard:

facebook analytics: revenue. learn how to create a custom dashboard.

Use Facebook Analytics Data to Inform Your Marketing Campaigns

Data is useless if you don’t use it. 

You will only get real value from Facebook Analytics if you use the data you generate to make informed decisions for your business. 

The beauty of data is that it shows you what is working and how to keep it working. It also shows you what is not working and how to turn it around. 

A Facebook ad campaign may not bring you the conversion success you were hoping for. With Analytics, you are able to tell why that’s the case and what you can do to improve the ad campaign. 

You can also use Analytics to retarget people who may not have been convinced to become customers the first time around. 

You can do so by addressing the issues that stopped them from becoming customers and then retarget them with another campaign. 

You also get to see which assets are working the best for you. For instance, most people may be converting after messaging you on Facebook and getting a response. 

Then, you can maximize on this by using Messenger chatbots to automatically engage people who like your page. 

Data is a marketer’s gold mine and it can be the difference between a successful brand and an unsuccessful one.

That’s why clever marketers will use Facebook Analytics and other useful social media analytics tools such as Keyhole to monitor their campaigns.

Take time to explore and understand Facebook Analytics, examine your reports in detail and see your marketing campaigns reach heights you’ve never seen before! 

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides social media, keyword, and hashtag analytics for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Get started for free.

Benchmarking: Analyze Industry Competitors and Enhance Marketing Strategy Using Social Media Benchmarking (+6 Step Plan!)

Learn about social media benchmarking and how you stack up against competitors.

How does your social media performance compare to your competition?

And how do you even begin to answer that question?

In this guide, we’ll cover the metrics and benchmarking tactics needed to judge the performance of your social media campaigns.

What type of success have your competitors seen? Where do you stand relative to them? What type of content will you have to produce to keep up – or better yet – raise the bar?

Asking questions like these through social media benchmarking will help you pinpoint exactly how well your social media campaigns are performing, and where they can improve.

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What is Benchmarking?

What is Social Media Benchmarking?

Why Should You Benchmark?

How to Conduct Social Media Benchmarking
1. Establish Your Goals
2. Determine Your Competitors
3. Pick the Right Social Media Networks
4. Choose Which Social Media Metrics to Measure
5. Write Down Actionable Insights
6. Take Action and Repeat

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is comparing your marketing processes and performance to your direct competitors or to industry standards.

Benchmarking helps you ask the question, “what does success look like?”

Every modern marketer is looking for metrics to predict, improve, and evaluate the performance of their campaigns. And for every campaign, benchmarking is the first step to a strong quantitative strategy.

What is Social Media Benchmarking?

Social media benchmarking is an evaluation of your social media performance against your competitors and/or industry standards.

Through social media benchmarking, you can objectively compare metrics like follower counts, post reach, engagement rates, posting times, and whatever other metrics are most relevant to your business success.

Why Should You Benchmark?

Whether you’re comparing key quantitative metrics or establishing the type of content that performs best in your industry, benchmarking helps you set a target to aim for.

Without benchmarking, you’re operating in the dark—subjectively judging the success of your campaigns without any real grounding in reality.

And more than any other marketing channel, social media can be a bottomless pit of wasted time. You or your competitors may be getting lots of shares, follows, and likes, but is it translating into business success?

Here’s why benchmarking is a great idea:

1. Set Realistic Goals

Social media benchmarking helps you compare apples to apples.

Every brand would love to have millions of followers, but maybe that’s just not realistic in your industry. 

A thorough benchmarking analysis of your most relevant competitors gives you a clear picture of the value social media may bring to your business.

2. Educate Your Strategy

Social media doesn’t just have to be an artform.

You can make it a science too.

By evaluating your own social media successes and the successes of your competitors through benchmarking data, you’ll be able to create a highly actionable social media strategy that’s more based on facts than feelings.

3. Evaluate Your Performance

By properly benchmarking the metrics you’re most interested in tracking, you can more effectively and realistically track your own performance. 

That means less guessing, and more confidence in your strategy. Using benchmarks will also help you prove your worth to your boss or clients, and more easily track the ROI of your efforts.

How to Conduct Social Media Benchmarking (in 6 Steps!)

It may sound cliché, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media benchmarking, just like there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media.

Here are 6 highly actionable steps to help you benchmark your social media success.

Step 1 – Establish Your Goals

To start, you’ll have to determine what you’re trying to get out of being on social media in the first place.

It’s unbelievable how many marketers skip this step! Never “do social media” for the sake of doing social media.

Establish your business goals, and then determine what role social media plays in achieving those goals.

And it’s best if those goals are measurable.

For example, you may be in sports marketing, trying to build an online community around your team’s brand. In that case, you would be more interested in benchmarking engagement metrics or finding the type of content that gets the most reach in your sport.

Snapshot of engagement and social media metrics for the toronto raptors
Snapshot of engagement and social media metrics for the los angeles lakers / LA lakers
You can easily compare quick metrics such as engagement rate, follower count, and more.

In contrast, if you ran an e-commerce business, you’d be more interested in driving visitors to your website to purchase your products. In that case, you’d want to track link clicks or conversion rates.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C will also play a role.

Are you looking to increase your customer base in the form of widespread brand awareness on Facebook and Instagram, or are you using social media as part of a B2B sales strategy on LinkedIn?

Establish your goals, and write them down.

As you work through your benchmarking strategy, every question you ask should relate specifically to these goals.

Step 2 – Determine Your Competitors

Who are your competitors?

This question may be more tricky than it seems at first, as there are many types of competition:

Direct Competitors – Competitors that provide the same services in your same target market.

For example, if you ran a local clothing boutique, your direct competitor could be another local clothing store.

Indirect Competitors – Competitors that provide different services but still compete with you in your market.

Keeping with our local clothing boutique example, this could be a big box store that also sells clothes—like Walmart.

Replacement Competitors – Competitors in a different industry whose products could be a substitute for yours.

For a boutique local clothing store, this could be an online monthly clothing box subscription.

Potential/Future – Future or potential competitors that currently don’t serve your market but likely could in the future.

Perhaps a platform like Amazon will one day allow people to easily purchase local clothing products from your particular market online.

So: in our case of social media benchmarking, take the time to really think out your competition, both online and offline—and how they relate to your business goals.

For example, if you’re a local clothing boutique, you may be indirectly competing with Old Navy for foot traffic, but you may not gain anything from comparing your social media performance to theirs—so it wouldn’t make sense to include them in your analysis.

But if you do have plans to scale your business to bigger proportions, then it does make sense to compare to the larger brand—even if it’s overly ambitious at this point.

Refer back to your business goals and then make a list of your top social media competitors.

Step 3 – Pick the Right Social Media Networks

Next, we want to figure out which social media networks to use in our benchmarking exercise.

And to be clear, we’re not trying to answer the question, “Which social network should my brand use?” just yet. In this step, we’re trying to answer, “Which social media networks should we benchmark?”

Start by using your competitor list. Take note of which platforms each of your competitors is using. 

If they’ve already run campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, all we have to do is measure which accounts and platforms have seen the most success to better educate our own strategy.

And the key here is not to limit your benchmarking to only the platforms your brand is using. The whole point of this exercise is to identify industry standards.

In this step, you should also think about your audience. Are there any networks that your target audience is using that your competitors aren’t yet?

For example, a newer platform like TikTok (as of the time we’re writing this post) may be unexplored territory. Or maybe your competitors haven’t invested in video content on YouTube yet.

Critically think about which platforms you may want to consider using, and include them in your analysis.

Step 4 – Choose Which Social Media Metrics to Measure

Now’s the time to decide which metrics best reflect your business goals we identified all the way back in step 1.

Here, you should also determine if you want to benchmark at the account level or the industry level.

For example, do you want to benchmark the performance of your top competitors, or do you want to do a widespread analysis of an entire industry?

You may need to revisit your competitor list at this point. But that’s okay—this whole exercise is literally a learning process.

Moving along, let’s choose which metrics matter most to you. You may want to consider metrics like:

  • engagement rates
  • reach, impressions, or views
  • follower counts and growth rates
  • content type distribution
  • post timing and frequency
  • top accounts
  • sentiment analysis

For each of these metrics, you may be interested in not only the average or median performance, but also the top performers too.

Related reading: 5 Under Analyzed Social Media Metrics that Matter [+ Tools to Measure Them!]

Step 5 – Write Down Actionable Insights

All too often, marketers gather and look at data because they know it’s what they should be doing, but they don’t take it as far as creating actionable insights from the data.

So now’s the time to create some key takeaways—because we don’t want all of this data gathering to be for nothing.

This step is all about interpreting your benchmark data.

Write your findings down, and make written recommendations as to how they should impact your social media strategy.

Your insights could focus on things like business potential, what types of content stand out from the rest, accounts to follow in your industry, or when to post.

Here are some example insights you could come away with:

“In our industry, videos have 3x the engagement rate of photos. We should incorporate at least one video per week into our social media strategy.”

“Among our competitors, Instagram posts receive more reach than Facebook posts, but Facebook posts receive more link clicks. We should focus our Instagram posts on branding, and focus our Facebook posts more on driving visitors to our e-commerce website.”

“In our industry, posts receive far more engagement at the beginning of the week than at the end of the week. We should adjust our social media content calendar to reflect that.”

“Our competitor, Johnny’s Jeans, has the highest Instagram engagement rate of any of our competitors. They post a mix of user-generated content, in-store videos, and feel-good quotes, so we should aim to incorporate all three into our strategy.”

As you can see, these insights can take many forms. Remember to center them around your business goals!

Tip: To really drive it home, put these insights into a presentation, infographic, or marketing plan. Showing how you’re exceeding your competitors—or how you plan to get there—is a great way to prove your worth.

Step 6 – Take Action and Repeat

Put your insights into action!

Depending on your business goals, you may either want to keep continuous tabs on your key metrics, or perform another one-time audit once you’ve had some time to implement your strategy.

The key is to keep measuring and keep evaluating. Social media changes quickly, so your analysis is never done.

Using Keyhole for Social Media Benchmarking

Keyhole has all the tools you need to make your social media benchmarking efforts simple and painless.

Let’s take a look at a few examples in action.

Example: Benchmarking Engagement Rates

Engagement rate is the average amount of engagement that content in a particular category receives on a particular platform. 

Engagement comes in many forms: likes, favorites, shares, replies, views, clicks—you name it. Here’s a breakdown of what counts as social media engagement on different platforms.

In other words, engagement rate reflects how often people interact with your posts. This is normally seen as a reflection of how well content resonates with an audience.

And you can measure engagement rate as loosely or as fine-grained as you like, dependent on your business goals.

For example, you can measure engagement rates for all posts from a particular account, or engagement rates for a particular type of content in an entire industry, or even engagement rates on a particular day of the week.

Snapshot of engagement and social media metrics for Aritzia
Going back to our local boutique example, you can use the Hashtag and Keyword tracking to compare our engagement numbers with a competitor’s engagement number, being 1,554,082 for the month of September.

Example: Benchmarking Follower Growth

Let’s say your business goal is to create brand awareness.

You’ve already benchmarked your social accounts against your competitors, and you’re already miles ahead in terms of engagement, but you want to be sure you’re also reaching a widespread audience—not just the same small, engaged audience every time.

As a result, you’ve decided follower count will be one of your metrics for success. 

Using Keyhole’s account tracking tools, you can track and benchmark the follower growth of your account vs. your competitors. 

using keyhole to benchmark follower growth
Using our Social Media Account Analytics tool, you can easily see a competitor’s follower growth and follower change over time.

Get Started with Keyhole

The Keyhole Advanced Suite has all the social media listening tools necessary to benchmark nearly any account or any industry, including:

  • Campaign & Event Tracking: Compare your campaigns to your competitors’
  • Brand Monitoring: Track posts, engagement, and reach of any brand
  • Influencer Management: Identify influencers that can help your business goals
  • Market Research: Forecast trends with our AI-driven tools
  • Sentiment Analysis: Compare the emotional responses to you and your competitors

Keyhole is easy to use and free to try. So it’s a great place to start with your benchmarking efforts.

To get started on your benchmarking project, start your free Keyhole trial now!

Hashtag Analytics: 27 Actionable Strategies To Grow Your Business

27 actionable hashtag Strategies

In this guide, we’ll be exploring 27 actionable hashtag analytics strategies.

We’ll also document case studies to show how businesses flourish by implementing these strategies. 

By following the actionable strategies in this guide, you’ll learn how to make use of proper hashtags, hashtag analytics, and hashtag tracking tools.

Before we get into the strategies, let’s refresh our memory on hashtags and the benefits hashtags have on businesses. 

So, let’s dive in. 

Jump Links:

What is a Hashtag?

What Are the Benefits of Using a Hashtag?

27 Hashtag Strategies to Grow Your Business
Hashtag Research Tips
Branded Hashtag Tips
Tips for Using Non-Branded Hashtags
How to Use Hashtags to Identify Influencers
Measure the Success of Your Hashtags

Benefits of Tracking Hashtags

How Using Keyhole Will Grow Your Business

What is a Hashtag?

A hashtag is the use of a hash (#) symbol in front of a keyword in a social media post.

Hashtags make a post discoverable by other users who are browsing or searching for that hashtag. 

Basically, it’s an easy way to categorize your post or associate your post with a trend.

While hashtags originated on Twitter in 2007, they have slowly spread to every other popular social network on the planet—so it’s important to understand all their possible uses.

Related guide: Hashtags: A Beginner’s Guide and How to Use them Effectively

What Are the Benefits of Using Hashtags?

When used effectively, hashtags can boost your business tremendously.

Hashtags are a rare win-win for businesses and their customers.

Hashtags make it easier for users to find content they like, and they make it easier for businesses to get content in front of their customers.

So what’s in it for you?

There are 5 main benefits for businesses from using hashtags:

1. Increase Brand Awareness

By using hashtags strategically in your posts, you can expose your business’s content to new audiences – even if you don’t have many followers. 

Targeting a highly relevant hashtag to your brand can help you garner immediate attention from a very specific demographic.

2. Increase Engagement

Hashtags make you part of the conversation.

By jumping in to conversations on popular hashtags, you can have real-time conversations with your audience, solidifying a personality behind your brand, post by post.

Or, to further solidify your brand to your followers, you can create a brand hashtag to get people talking about you.

3. Learn About Your Audience

Hashtags are a two-way street.

Not only do they help you speak to an audience, they also let you listen in on the conversation.

By listening in on a popular hashtag, you can easily create audience personas for your business.

Find a hashtag relevant to your business and ask yourself:

What demographics are using that hashtag? What are their interests on social media? What type of content do they like?

4. Inform Your Content Strategy

Lacking creative inspiration for your content?

By checking out trending hashtags or hashtags niche to your business, you can learn what content people actually want to consume.

You can take those learnings and apply them to your overall content strategy, both online and offline.

5. Generate New Leads

Ultimately, more brand awareness and higher quality content is going to lead to more website visits or foot traffic to your business.

By using a hashtag analytics tool like Keyhole, you can monitor the success of your brand on social media in real time—ultimately learning what appeals to your customers. 

Now we know what hashtags are and the benefits it has on businesses. So, let’s jump in to the strategies. 

27 Hashtag Strategies to Grow Your Business

Here’s how to carry out a full front-to-back hashtag analytics strategy to bring more leads to your business.

Hashtag Research Tips

The first step to an effective hashtag strategy is to conduct thorough research in advance.

The objective here is to identify existing hashtags that present the biggest opportunity for your business long-term.

Of course, trends can change quickly, but you’ll see the most success with a long-term, adaptable strategy.

1. Choose a Hashtag Analytics Tool

hashtag analytics for: campaign monitoring, event tracking, brand monitoring, influencer marketing, market research

To get started, you’ll need to choose a hashtag analytics tool.

To help you choose, we’ve written a guide to the top 15 hashtag analytics tools.

The two main factors to consider when choosing a hashtag tracking tool are the feature set and—of course—the price. 

For this post, we’ll be featuring our own tool, the Keyhole Advanced Analytics Suite, but this strategy can be carried out using any robust tracking service.

2. Set Up a Hashtag Tracker

If you’re running a social media account, you likely already have a few popular hashtags in mind that you’d like to track.

hashtag trackers that have been activated within Keyhole

Using your hashtag tracking tool, set up a real-time tracker for 2-3 keywords you’re interested in exploring.

Use these starting hashtags as the base for your research.

3. Uncover Trending and Related Topics

Using your hashtag tracker, explore related hashtags and keywords related to your base keywords.

hashtag tracker to explore related hashtags and keywords

Make a list of the hashtags or keywords that are most relevant to your business.

At this stage, don’t be too selective. This is similar to a brainstorming session. The objective is to find out which keywords or hashtags present the biggest opportunity for your brand.

4. Find Your Niche

You can’t just post any hashtag and expect results.

If you post on a top trending topic, you may be drowned out within minutes. If you post on a hashtag nobody uses, your posts will fall on deaf ears.

Find your niche. Your goal is to strike a balance between popularity and potential impact.

Using your list of keywords from step 3, identify keywords that tend to have higher engagement and reach, but fewer posters.

a snapshot of keyhole's dashboard highlighting post number, number of users, engagement rate, reach, and impressions

Using this strategy, choose a handful of keywords that you will use consistently to bring the most reach and engagement for your brand.

5. Identify Top Posts & Content

With your chosen hashtag and topics, use your tracking tool and browse each social platform to identify the posts that get the most engagement.

Note any trends about what makes a good post.

view posts by engagement on the keyhole hashtag tracker

Are they using humor? Are they more inspirational? Are they informational?

Also note the type of media that’s most popular.

If they’re using images, what kind? Are they graphics, animations, or photos?

If they’re using video, what makes the video successful? Are they shorter or longer? Do they make use of captions? Is the video studio-quality or more casual?

And here’s a key piece of advice:

Don’t fight a battle you can’t win.

If the only popular content on a certain hashtag is outside your company’s skillset or budget, look for a hashtag whose content is more similar to what you have the capacity to produce.

But don’t let this scare you away—many top posts are nothing more than cleverly written text.

6. Use Historical Data

Don’t forget to look both at recent timeframes and historical data.

Yes, you want to be on-trend with your content, but you shouldn’t ignore what has worked for other brands in the past.

7. Know Your Social Media Platform

There are subtle differences between how hashtags are used on each popular platform.

And not only are there differences platform to platform, different industries use each platform differently. 

On Twitter, where text is more limited, using 1-3 hashtags results in the highest engagement.

On Instagram and Pinterest, you should use 10-20 hashtags to maximize your reach.

Facebook hashtags aren’t as effective, sure they make it clickable but it isn’t as effective as instagram and twitter. 

LinkedIn has recently introduced the capability for users to follow hashtags, making hashtag use an even better way to boost your LinkedIn content. 

Be sure to research how your industry makes best use of each platform.

8. Track Your Top Hashtags

Once you’ve identified which hashtags matter most to your business, set up trackers in your tracking tools for your chosen hashtags.

Be sure to set up trackers for your branded hashtags too. Don’t have a branded hashtag yet? Don’t worry, that’s next on our list!

Watch: How to Use Hashtag & Keyword Tracking on Keyhole (YouTube)

Branded Hashtag Tips

Having a strong branded hashtag that catches on is an incredible way to boost your engagement.

Here are a few tips for making the most of your brand.

9. Create a Brand Hashtag

To properly brand your business’s posts, you’ll need a branded hashtag.

Here are a few tips for creating a branded hashtag:

Keep it short – Make it easy for your consumers to type.

visit new orleans branded hashtag tweet example

Example: Visit New Orleans’s hashtag, #OneTimeInNOLA, uses the city’s abbreviation rather than the full name.

Make it memorable – The catchier the hashtag, the easier it is to remember.

Example: Nike’s hashtag #JustDoIt uses its already-famous company slogan.

nike just do it hashtag volume

Make it easy to spell – Avoid long words or alternate spellings.

Example: Even though Lululemon’s branded hashtag, #TheSweatLife, is a play on “the sweet life,” it’s still short, memorable, and easy to spell.

Don’t be too literal – Branded hashtags are more effective when they’re not your exact brand name.

Example: Goodyear’s hashtag #MoreDriven. While it’s related to tires and driving, the hashtag is meant to be used by basketball teams sponsored by Goodyear.

goodyear's more driven hashtag example

Make it actionable – Make it obvious to your consumers what they’re meant to do with your hashtag. And make it something that people will actually want to use.

Example: Target’s hashtag #TargetRun encourages consumers to post every time they visit Target.

Research it first – Use a hashtag analytics tool or browse the hashtag on every platform to make sure you aren’t competing with another brand, or accidentally misusing a preexisting hashtag.

Once you’ve chosen your branded hashtag, be sure to use it consistently on every post, and use it in each of your social profile bios.

10. Create a Hashtag for Every Event and Campaign

While it’s key to use your main brand hashtag consistently (as long as it’s successful), you should also use a separate hashtag for each of your separate campaigns and events.

an example of using a unique hashtag for different campaigns and events

Using a separate hashtag for each campaign has two main benefits: it makes it easier for your audience to follow along or participate, and it also makes it easier for you to track the success of each campaign.

Further reading: 5 Best Christmas Hashtag Campaigns with tips on how to run an event hashtag campaign

11. Promote Your Hashtag

Once you’ve established your campaign’s hashtag, promote it! Offer contests and giveaways that encourage your consumers to use the hashtag.

oreo promoting their hashtag campaign on twitter

For example, for Halloween, Oreo started #OreoHorrorStory by parodying scenes from horror movies such as The Shining, The Exorcist, and Frankenstein.

12. Track Each of Your Hashtags

For each of your branded hashtags, make sure you add them to your hashtag analytics tracker.

Watch: How to Set up Advanced Hashtag & Keyword Tracking with Keyhole (YouTube)

Tips for Using Non-Branded Hashtags

Just because you have your own branded hashtags doesn’t mean you should ignore other hashtags. Here’s how to take advantage of popular trends.

13. Post About Real-Time Trending Topics and Hashtags

If you see a trend taking off that relates to your business, engage with it by using the hashtag.

Using trending hashtags gives you the potential to reach a massive audience that may not be familiar with your brand yet. 

using the trending hashtags feature on keyhole

14. Post on Lifestyle and Niche Hashtags

By using hashtags that are commonly associated with a certain lifestyle, you can immediately have your brand associated with a particular feeling, emotion, or vibe.

Explore lifestyle hashtags that are popular with your demographic to find the right hashtags for your business.

For example, using #MondayMotivation would be a great way to associate your brand with the self-improvement trend.

using hashtags to associate your brand with different trends

15. Post Only on Relevant Hashtags

But be careful:

Just because a hashtag is popular doesn’t mean you should use it.

Posting irrelevant content on a popular trend is an easy way to label your brand as inauthentic or trying too hard.

And most importantly: never spam trending hashtags.

Posting a large number of posts on trending hashtags in a short period of time is a recipe for getting your accounts banned.

16. Consider Every Angle Before Using a Hashtag

Even if you have a relevant post for a trending or lifestyle hashtag, consider every angle.

Are there any risks associated with posting on that hashtag? Does the hashtag have a double meaning you may not be aware of? Could the hashtag be considered offensive to your audience?

Always think twice before diving in to a trend.

17. Use a Reasonable Number of Hashtags

As we mentioned above, tailor your hashtag use to the platform. Sometimes less is more.

On Twitter, stick to a maximum of 3 hashtags.

On Facebook – 0 hashtags. It’s not as effective to use hashtags in Facebook even though Facebook makes it clickable. Matter of fact, post without hashtags perform better than with it. 

On Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, posts with more hashtags tend to get more interactions.

18. Use Local or Regional Hashtags

Not every post you make has to apply to a global audience.

using local or regional hashtags like the toronto hashtag to build awareness

If you’re a local business, use your city’s local hashtags to build awareness locally.

Even if you’re not confined to a single market, using local hashtags in your target cities, states/provinces, or countries can be a great opportunity for additional engagement.

19. Post Great Content

Above all else: post great content.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your hashtag strategy is if what you’re posting isn’t interesting, funny, informative, or inspiring.

Make only content that your consumers will love.

20. Interact and Engage

Social media isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it, one-way communication channel.

If people are using your branded hashtags, reply to the posts. By replying, you’re validating your audience’s choice to use your hashtag.

That goes for both positive and negative posts. It’s certainly more fun to respond to positive sentiments, but it’s also important to earnestly respond to complaints with genuine concern. 

And don’t be afraid to jump into conversations on unbranded hashtags too. Participating in real conversation is a great way to show off your brand’s personality.

Bonus tip: This process can be made much easier with a social listening or hashtag tracking tool.

With a social listening tool like Keyhole, you can create real-time feeds of conversations taking place on your favorite hashtags across multiple platforms, allowing you to strike while the iron’s hot.

Related Guide: Using Popular Hashtags To Grow Your Business

How to Use Hashtags to Identify Influencers

Nothing resonates more with an audience than social proof.

Posts from key influencers act as a vote of confidence for your brand, and can spread your reach to a highly targeted audience.

That’s why social media influencers have become a billion-dollar industry.

Here’s how to use hashtag analytics tools to capitalize on the trend.

21. Use a Hashtag Analytics Tool to Identify Influencers

Using a hashtag tracking tool like Keyhole, you can pull statistics on the biggest influencers in your industry.

For any given hashtag, you can see which influencers are posting the most often or have the most reach, engagements, or impressions. 

Using Keyhole’s dedicated Influencers metrics, you can also filter potential influencers based on their location or keywords used in their bios.

identifying potential influencers on keyhole

22. Manage and Track Influencers

Once you’ve reached out to the influencers that present the biggest opportunity for your brand, you can manage your inventory of influencers using Keyhole’s Influencer Management Tools.

Keyhole’s tools let you see all of your influencers on one dashboard, allowing you to measure their individual impact and who is providing the most ROI to your business.

23. Identify Websites and Online Publications

Monitoring hashtags also allows you to identify websites or publications that are most often posting about your target subject.

Using Keyhole, look for relevant content to your brand and look for journalists or authors who may be willing to write about your product.

identifying the most linked websites using keyhole

This is a great way to generate backlinks to your website, boosting your SEO and search engine success.

Measure the Success of Your Hashtags

Once you’ve had your campaigns up and running, it’s time to measure your success and brand influence.

24. Track Your Reach on a Regular Basis

Keep tabs on your typical engagement rate, reach, and impressions. 

We recommend adding a time-slot to your personal calendar to check in on your metrics either daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how active you are on social media.

25. Optimize Your Posting

The success of your posts will depend on when you post them. Keyhole’s social media account analytics tools allow you to track the optimal times and days to post.

using keyhole to determine the best time to post

Over a long enough timeframe, you’ll start to see which times generate the most engagements with your posts.

using keyhole to see average engagements by day

26. Note What Type of Content Works Best

Keyhole will show you your top posts by likes, retweets, or other engagement metrics. Go through your posts and identify what made them special.

keyhole dashboard showing you what the best posts are

Keep an ongoing list of factors that influence the success of a post and consult them every time you’re planning your social calendar.

27. Keep Learning About Your Audience

You may think you know your audience, but how well do you really know them?

By tracking your hashtags and social accounts on Keyhole, you can monitor several different audience dimensions.

You can break your audience down by gender to get a sense of who’s engaging with your posts.

keyhole dashboard breaking down gender insights / audience insights

You can also break your audience down by geographical location.

breaking down your audience by geographical location

If you’re not hitting your target area, consider posting more location-specific content to those regions to try to break in to the market.

Finally, you can also track the overall sentiment of posts related to your tracked brand or hashtag.

using keyhole to track the overall sentiment of posts related to your tracked brand hashtags

Benefits of Tracking Hashtags

By now, you should understand how important it is to integrate hashtags into your social media strategy. 

So what are the main benefits to tracking hashtag analytics?

  1. Measure brand awareness by tracking impressions and engagement on your brand hashtag.
  2. Measure the direct success of events or marketing campaign hashtags.
  3. Manage your brand or industry’s reputation by tracking the positive and negative mentions containing your target hashtags.
  4. Track trending topics in your industry.
  5. Monitor your brands and your competitors in your industry.
  6. Find influencers and potential brand ambassadors relevant to your business.

How Using Keyhole Will Grow Your Business

Let’s look at a few real-world examples of hashtag success in action.

How theChive used Keyhole to track their Branded Hashtags

theChive, a Men’s Lifestyle digital platform, has 20 million people engaging with their brand every month, either on their website or on social media.

Tracking that at a large scale is a monumental task.

For one of their sponsored events, a national beer pong tournament, they needed to track 50 individual hashtags for each state.

“We were tracking 50 different hashtags & figuring out who’s in the lead at each state in real-time. We would update it throughout the week to know who’s most likely to win. Without Keyhole, tracking this many hashtags would’ve been impossible, so that’s where our partnership started.” –

Jill Broek, Director of Brand Strategy.

See our full story about theCHIVE for more details.

How PROJECT 375 Uses Keyhole to Track the Conversation Around Mental Health

PROJECT 375, a non-profit organization focused on reducing the stigma around mental health, uses Keyhole for social listening.

They use Keyhole to track trending news stories, celebrity posts, and new studies focused on promoting a positive dialogue around mental health.

Using Keyhole, they’re also able to track their own success.

“Keyhole is my go-to for all things analytics. Knowing our audience, their likes and dislikes, the kinds of content they prefer and the times they are looking at us is mission critical. I am constantly looking at the data to see what patterns emerge and the different ways we can tweak our strategies to best serve our supporters. Social media is ever-changing and Keyhole gives us the ability to change in lockstep with the latest trends and audience preferences,” 

– Erica Jellerson, Communications & Events Manager, PROJECT 375.  

For the full story on PROJECT 375, check out this full case study.

Related Case Studies:

So Are You Tracking Your Hashtags? 

Once you have a front-to-back hashtag strategy in place, you’ll see far more success out of your social media campaigns.

By using a hashtag analytics tool to track your brand awareness, key influencers, and trending topics, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to create perfectly optimized campaigns—uncovering a new audience and increasing your lead generation.

Ready to get your #hashtagstrategy started?

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Instagram Messages: How Businesses Can Engage Their Audience & Tools to Manage Your Inbox

instagram messages: how businesses can engage their audience and tools to manage your inbox

There are many ways you can capture the attention of your followers on Instagram (and social media in general), but hardly anything is as powerful as establishing a strong relationship with your followers and potential customers via Instagram messages.

In this post, we’ll give you a clear overview of why Instagram messages are important for your business, the different kinds of direct messages (DMs) you can send, and how you can use this feature to grow your brand.

Let’s begin with a quick intro to Instagram messages. 

If you’re already familiar with Instagram messages, feel free to jump to the next section.

Jump Links:

What are Instagram Messages?
Plain Text Messages
Pictures and GIFs
Video Content
Voice Messages
Video Calls
Group Messages
Reactions

Why Should You Include Instagram Messages in Your Marketing Strategy?

How to Use Instagram Messages to Build and Increase Brand Loyalty

3 Tools to Manage Your Instagram Inbox

What are Instagram Messages?

Instagram has its own private messaging feature, which enables you to have one-on-one or group chats with other Instagram users. 

Instagram messages, more commonly known as Instagram direct messages, or DMs for short, take the communication with your loyal followers and favourite influencers beyond your feed and allow you to develop a stronger connection with your network.

In today’s noisy world, being reachable and responsive goes a long way in building long-term relationships and driving competitive advantage.

There are a few types of Instagram messages you can send and receive:

Plain Text Messages

You can use plain text messages to answer questions and provide support, reach out to a particular Instagram user, and to start conversations.

How to create a basic text message within instagram inbox / instagram messages

Pictures and Gifs

Privately send relevant photos with your followers to let them know of a new arrival in your store, announce an event or raise awareness on an ongoing promotional campaign. 

In many instances, our clients will send you pictures to let you know that they’ve received your product or started seeing results from your service.

If you get consent, you can later use these photos as testimonials and share them publicly on your feed or via Instagram stories.

Video Content

The option to send videos can prove to be incredibly useful if you plan to send demos or showcase close-ups of your products and their attributes/functionalities.

Voice Messages

Instagram recently introduced the voice messages feature which allows you to record and send voice messages to your followers.

Brands tend to use pictures and plain text messages more often than voice messages.

What a voice message / audio message / audio note looks like on Instagram

Video Calls

Instagram supports audio and video chat, but much like voice messages, this is a feature that is mostly used by individual users. 

Group Messages

Instagram messages do not have to be a one-on-one thing. Instead, you can create groups of people with similar interests and share information with the entire group at once.

Reactions

When you “react” to an Instagram story, the reaction will be sent as a direct message. This is a great way to quickly show your support, and it can be an effective conversation starter.

Quick reactions to Instagram stories

You can send messages from four different places in your profile.

1. You can enter the direct messages screen (basically your Instagram Inbox) and search for a user that you want to contact – or simply click on a message you’d like to reply to…

Access your instagram direct messages screen / instagram inbox through the home page feed

2. You can search for a user and click the “message” button on their profile…

How to access instagram messages by navigating from a users' profile

3. You can respond to someone’s story by sending a text, a reaction, a gif, or a photo…

Send an instagram message or instagram dm by reacting or replying to their instagram story

4. You can directly share a post as an Instagram message, by clicking the paper plane button under the post you want to send.

access instagram messages on an instagram post by tapping the paper plane icon to send the post to someone

Why Should You Include Instagram Messages in Your Marketing Strategy?

Now you know what types of messages you can send via Instagram.

But you still might be wondering how you can utilise Instagram’s direct messaging feature to drive real business results.

Here are the three ways Instagram messages can help your brand:

Create Networking Opportunities

Instagram Direct is the perfect place to connect with like-minded people and professionals in your niche, or reach out to industry influencers who have an audience that might be interested in your product line.

Improve Brand Loyalty

You can use Instagram messages to answer to any of your potential clients’ inquiries, offer after-sales support, or show appreciation to your fans and loyal customers. 

Being reachable and available will allow you to gain your followers’ trust and connect them on a deeper level, which will ultimately help you drive more repeat purchases and increase your customer lifetime value. 

Increase Personalization

According to Forrester Research’s VP and Principal Analyst, Sucharita Kodali 36% of shoppers want brands to make more personalized offers.

Similarly, a recent Forbes article outlining the findings of a survey by Segment argues that personalization can drive impulse purchases, minimize returns, increase brand loyalty and ultimately – increase revenue.

And what’s a better way to increase personalization than by talking to your customers one-on-one, where they can ask what they want, and you can give them the information they need? 

Next, we’ll talk about…

How to Use Instagram Messages to Build and Increase Brand Loyalty

Answer Messages

A lot of brands focus on creating new content for their Instagram feeds and stories, but don’t pay as much attention to the reactions or questions they receive in their DMs.

Chances are, you have some unanswered messages in your Instagram inbox right now – if you do, we urge you to take a couple of minutes and answer them as soon as you finish reading this.

There is nothing that will repel your potential clients as much as getting the silent treatment from one of the brands they love.

So, whenever a member from your community reaches out to you through a direct message, make sure that you respond to their message and give them the information they’re looking for. 

Sometimes, your followers will reach out to ask you something about your products – be it where they can find them, or if the product they’re interested in is still in stock, or they’ll ask the typical “how much does it cost” question.

Other times they might raise a complaint or share with you how satisfied they are with their purchase. 

Whatever the case, if you wish to be successful in the long-run, you have to make sure that you handle all these messages the same way: with care and in a timely manner.

Show Your Top Fans Some Instagram Love

Every brand has at least a few loyal fans who are constantly engaging with their content.

Constant engagers are impossible to miss – even if you have hundreds of thousands of followers.

They’ll react to your stories, give you a shout-out whenever you post something new or interesting, join your Instagram lives, participate in your polls, and will like and comment on your photos. 

These people? They’re golden!

They’re practically promoting your brand without you asking (or paying) for it!

So, you need to do everything you can to encourage them to continue engaging with your content.

The easiest way to do it?

Recognise their effort.

Slide into their DMs and thank them for showing you continuous support.

If you’re feeling extra generous, offer them a special discount code.

These people have probably bought from you in the past and are very satisfied with their purchase, or they really like your products but have been postponing the purchase for some reason.

Giving them an incentive like a discount can easily turn their virtual engagement on social media into a sales conversion.

Suggested Reading: What is a Brand Ambassador? & How to Launch a Successful Ambassador Program

Reach Out to People YOU Admire and Would Partner With

You probably already know the power of influencer marketing – nowadays an increasing number of brands partner with individual creators with a huge following to spread the word about their products. 

People that follow Instagram creators are inspired by what these individuals do, wear, and consume, so appearing on their feed will likely help you get on the radar of a wider audience and sell more of your products.

However, the best influencers on Instagram are receiving hundreds of messages from brands that want to collaborate with them.

Getting your targeted influencer to commit to your brand before they commit to one of your competitors requires some work. 

That’s where Instagram direct messages come in the picture.

Establishing a direct communication on Instagram after you’ve engaged with their posts and stories gives you a much greater chance of being considered as a potential partner, than reaching out via email.

Engaging with each others' Instagram stories through instagram direct messages

Remember the story “reactions” we mentioned before?

Instagram messages keeps a history of interactions and reactions, so by sending a message, this influencer you’re contacting will be able to scroll back in time and see that you’ve been following their work for a longer period and that you’re genuinely interested in connecting.

This will give an edge over your competitors.

Suggested Reading: Influencer Marketing: An Expert Guide On Marketing’s Next Big Thing

Drive Sales

You can send or direct people to your Instagram messages using clear CTAs in your Instagram posts and stories. 

Suggested read: Instagram Stories: 16 Killer Tips to Stand Out in 2019

According to a 2017 story by Business Insider, a whopping 72% of Instagram users have bought a product that they’ve seen on the app.

Including adding a simple CTA to your content such as “DM me for more info” will do wonders for your business, and especially your sales.

Once people do contact you, you can give them the extra attention and the tailored info they need to turn to convert into paying customers. 

To make it easier for creators and businesses to respond to direct messages and inquiries, Instagram has rolled out a quick reply feature for its business and creator accounts.

As the name suggests, quick replies save you a lot of typing, by allowing you to use a shortcut in order to load a pre-saved message.

This works well if there is a campaign you’re currently running, you’re launching a new product, or you’re organizing an event – anything where you would need to write a lot of repetitive information, and things that people would like to know the details of.

Here’s how you can add a quick reply.

Step 1. Enter “settings” in your business or creator account.

instagram navigation bar. creating a quick reply.

Step 2. Click “business settings” or the “creator” tab in the menu.

Tap the instagram creator tab in the menu

Step 3. Select ‘Quick Replies’.

Tap quick replies

Step 4. Create your quick reply and add a shortcut.

How to edit a quick reply on Instagram

Remember to include only the repetitive info as part of your quick reply – you’ll still want to personalize your messages by greeting the person who is writing to you in the beginning and adding an appropriate CTA at the end.

Let’s say you’re launching a new organic skincare product. 

In this case, your quick reply should sound something like this:

ORGANIC PRODUCT is a premium blend of INGREDIENT, INGREDIENT, INGREDIENT, which are all known to reduce the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines. ORGANIC PRODUCT is clinically tested and completely cruelty-free.

And then, let’s say someone has sent you a message asking for the ingredients of this product once you announced it on your feed. 

Here’s what you’d do:

Hi Jane Doe! Thanks for contacting us. ORGANIC PRODUCT is a premium blend of INGREDIENT, INGREDIENT, INGREDIENT, which are all known to reduce the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines. ORGANIC PRODUCT is clinically tested and completely cruelty-free. (Add by typing the shortcut) Are there any other questions we could answer for you?

Accessing the quick reply feature on Instagram through instagram direct messages
Accessing the quick reply feature on Instagram through instagram direct messages

3 Tools to Manage Your Instagram Inbox

An even easier way to manage your Instagram messages is by using some of the following tools:

The Native Instagram App (Desktop Version)

Using the native Instagram app will allow you to easily track and respond to messages using your desktop computer. The native Instagram app is free and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store.

IG:dm

IG:dm has the same functionalities like the desktop version of Instagram, and some other useful features like quoting messages, disable ‘read’ receipts and viewing unfollowers. IG:dm is compatible with Windows, Linux and MacOS. The basic version of the app is free.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a convenient inbox management platform that allows you to manage all your social platforms’ inboxes using a single dashboard. Agorapulse’s plans start at $79/month.

Final Thoughts

Even though Instagram messages are an effective way to engage Instagram users, a lot of brands don’t take full advantage of the Instagram DMs feature.

This is due to several reasons, including: not knowing what Instagram messages are best used for, thinking that one-on-one engagements with followers consume a lot of time, or simply focusing too much on other marketing tactics.

By allowing you to privately contact Instagram users, Instagram messages enable you to tailor your messages to cater to every follower’s interests and their stage in the buyer’s journey.

With DMs, you can create a sense of exclusivity and build stronger relationships with your audience.

Of course, you can expect positive results from your direct Instagram messages outreach if you take the time to tailor the messages. Sending copy-pasted, generic messages doesn’t have any impact – or, worst case scenario, could lead to negative consequences.

Happy DMing!

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Using Twitter Advanced Search to Diversify Marketing and Increase Engagement

using twitter advanced search to diversify marketing and increase engagement

With 335 million active users, Twitter is undeniably the home of amazing opportunities, especially for brands that want to engage with their fans and followers.

From finding leads to providing customer support to free PR and media mentions, the marketing opportunities are endless. 

Before you get too excited, there’s a but. 

The more users join Twitter, the harder it gets to find these opportunities as they get mixed up with more than 500 million tweets sent each day.

Thankfully, Twitter knows its stuff! 

To help you get as much value as possible out of Twitter, the platform offers Twitter advanced search. 

This powerful tool will let you find exactly what you’re looking for without having to scroll through thousands upon thousands of tweets.  

The Twitter advanced search tool is a goldmine for marketers as well as business owners. 

In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to use this tool as well as powerful ways that you can use it to grow your brand exponentially.

Let’s get this show on the road. 

Jump Links:

What is Twitter Advanced Search?

Why Use Twitter Advanced Search?
1. Use Keywords and Hashtags to Find Potential Customers
2. Understand Your Target Audience
3. Reputation Management
4. Find Relevant Industry Influencers
5. Keep Track of All Your Mentions
6. Be the King of Customer Service
7. Find Media Opportunities

How to Use Twitter Advanced Search:
The Parameters:
1. All of These Words
2. This Exact Phrase
3. Any of These Words
4. None of These Words
5. These Hashtags
6. Written In (Language)
7. From These Accounts
8. To These Accounts
9. Mentioning These Accounts
10. Date Range

Getting More out of Twitter Advanced Search

What is Twitter Advanced Search?

Have you found yourself looking for something on Twitter all day to no avail?

You are pretty sure that it’s in there somewhere but you’re now cross-eyed from scrolling through all those tweets. 

The advanced search tool is your saving grace. 

This tool has turned Twitter into a social search engine. The tool allows you to narrow down your search results to specific words, date ranges, people and more. 

This makes it easy to find specific tweets.   

The Twitter search tool is available when you’re logged in to twitter.com either on the mobile app or web browser, via the platform’s toolbar search field by clicking on the choosing Advanced Search. 

You can also access it directly by heading to twitter.com/search-advanced.

From here, you can use the specific parameters available to comb through billions of tweets.

Why Use Twitter Advanced Search?

Now before we get you confused with the technical aspects of Twitter Advanced Search, let’s first understand why you should be using the Twitter advanced search tool. 

1. Use Keywords and Hashtags to Find Potential Customers

With billions of people using Twitter daily, the likelihood of finding people interested in your product or service is high. But it may be difficult to find these people if you don’t have a proper way of doing it. 

One way to do this is by using keywords related to your business. These are the words that your target audience are likely to use while searching the platform for products. 

Say you sell yoga pants. You can use keywords such as ‘buy yoga pants’, ‘I need new yoga pants’ etc. You’ll then see all the people who have used these keywords in their tweets. 

Hashtags are another effective way of finding new prospects. Hashtags have really evolved since their inception and people today unconsciously use them as part of their vocabulary all the time. 

So as a yoga pants business owner you’ll be interested in popular hashtags such as #iloveyoga #yogapants #ineednewyogapants, etc. 

Once you’ve found a list of potential prospects, reach out to them, start a conversation and build a relationship with them before you sell them your products. 

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Enough emphasis cannot be placed on understanding your target audience. To reach more people you need to understand who these people are and what they want. 

Twitter’s advanced search is a great way to learn about your target audience’s likes and dislikes.

Whenever you search a related keyword you will be able to see what people are saying about products and services related to your business.

Are they excited about them? Is there a need for them? Are they complaining? Do they need more variety? 

Armed with this information, you can then craft a marketing strategy that offers them the kind of information they are craving for.

You can even go further and create the type of product or service that your target audience wants. 

The bottom line here is to understand your target audience’s needs so that you can offer them value. 

3. Reputation Management

Every brand should be aware of what people are saying about them. 

It’s important to be aware of both negative and positive talk about your brand.

Positive talk lets you know what you’re doing right so you can keep doing it. Negative talk allows you to know where you are failing so that you can do better. 

Advanced search allows you to filter tweets to just those that mention your brand. You can also use emoticons such as “:)” and “:(” when searching your brand on Twitter to find out people’s sentiments about your brand.

The emoticons will let you know which users are happy or sad whenever they’re talking about your brand. 

For best results, exclude your Twitter username from search results so that you’ll be able to see tweets that mention your brand, but haven’t tagged you directly.

4. Find Relevant Industry Influencers

Influencers are the word-of-mouth of social media. 

You most certainly want the who is who in your industry talking about your brand and your products and services. 

But how do you get to know who these influencers are?

Easy. Use the Twitter advanced search tool. 

Use hashtags to find influencers on Twitter and take your influencer marketing to the next level. 

However, not all influencers are equal. You want to use only those influencers have a direct influence on your brand. 

For instance, going back to the yoga pants example, you want to use influencers who at least have an interest in yoga pants, not just anyone who has a large following on Twitter. 

People are more likely to be interested in people who have similar interests to them. 

5. Keep Track of All Your Mentions

You’ve probably been managing with keeping track of your brand mentions via Twitter notifications. But did you know that not everyone talking about you on Twitter will take the time to tag you?

This means you are missing out on lots of information regarding what people are saying about you just because they didn’t mention your Twitter handle in their tweets. 

Search Twitter for brand mentions using queries which include your brand name, common misspellings and your website. 

6. Be the King of Customer Service

Twitter is particularly popular as the place where customers go for customer support. 

Long gone are the days when your first instinct would be to pick up the phone and call the company for assistance. Now we all run to social media. 

Can’t complete a purchase? Ask for help on Twitter.

Your WiFi is not working? Complain on Twitter. 

Being on top of such complaints will give you the opportunity to offer instant help before things get out of hand. It’s always good to be known as the brand that offers effective customer support in seconds. 

Find complaints and fans’ issues using advanced search queries including your Twitter handle and terms such as “help,” “support” and service. 

7. Find Media Opportunities

Journalists and PR companies are always on the lookout for brands they can use to interview or feature as case studies. They will use Twitter to find such brands. 

Media mentions can go a long way in promoting your products and services, creating brand awareness, improving your brand reputation and most importantly, it’s free advertising for your products/services, events, campaigns, etc. 

Search Twitter for such opportunities using hashtags such as “#journorequest” and “PRrequest.” Remember to include your niche or industry in your search eg. #Journorequest yoga pants.

How to Use Twitter Advanced Search

You’re already in love with the advanced Twitter search tool, right?

Now let’s get down to how to use the various parameters. 

When you first land on the Advanced Search Page you may get a little overwhelmed. 

But don’t panic, it’s not as hard as it seems. 

We’ve broken down each parameter to help you understand how to use them so that you can harness the full power of this tool. 

First things first, a quick reminder of how to access the advanced search tool: 

Enter a search term in the toolbar search field then click on the Advanced Search feature. 

click through to twitter advanced search through search filters on the right hand side of the page.

You can also access it directly by heading to twitter.com/search-advanced.

The Parameters

Twitter advanced search parameters.

1. All of These Words

The search tool will search for tweets that contain—in no particular order—all the terms you enter in this parameter. 

If you want to search for a phrase instead of individual words use quotations (e.g. “buy yoga pants”). 

This parameter is helpful when you want a broad idea of what people are saying when they use particular words.

Sometimes you may not be sure what you’re looking for, so starting broad is a good idea.

Here’s an example of a search with all of these words:

Twitter advanced search parameter: "all of these words"

As you can see, it returns results that include any or all of the search terms (buy yoga pants).

2. This Exact Phrase

If you want to search for a specific phrase, this is the best parameter to use because you don’t have to add quotations around your phrase—it does that for you. 

This parameter is great when searching for quotes or full names.

Here’s an example of an exact phrase search: 

Twitter advanced search: exact phrase search

See the difference? Results are refined to tweets with that exact phrase and not individual words as with the ‘all of these words’ parameters. 

3. Any of These Words

This parameter separates each word or phrase you enter with an “OR” when the search query is performed. 

For instance, if you want to search for brand mentions you can add your brand name, Twitter handle, hashtag and website. Twitter will then give your results containing either of these search terms. 

Here’s an example using the brand Hootsuite:

twitter advanced search: any of these words

4. None of These Words

You may not give this parameter much thought but it’s also important.

It’s very helpful if you truly want to narrow down your search results.

For instance, when searching for yoga pants, you may want to exclude results of yoga poses which are very popular. 

It’s also a good filter to add if you don’t want to see tweets that contain a competitor’s name or customized hashtag. 

5. These Hashtags

This is the parameter that you use to search for tweets using your custom hashtags or industry-related hashtags. You don’t need to add the hashtag symbol in terms listed in this field.

6. Written In (Language)

Find tweets that are written in the language of your choice. 

There’s no point in having tweet results show up in other languages if they are not applicable to your brand. 

twitter advanced search: find tweets in the language of your choice

7. From These Accounts

This parameter allows you to find tweets by specific accounts. You can add usernames of one or more accounts here with or without the “@” sign. 

This is a good parameter to include when you are monitoring your competition. 

Let’s use the Hootsuite example again. As you can see, the results are only tweets from Hootsuite. 

twitter advanced search parameter: from these accounts

8. To These Accounts

Again, if you’re monitoring your competition and want to see what people are saying about them, just enter their usernames here. 

Here, the results are all the tweets sent to Hootsuite:

twitter advanced search parameter: to these accounts

9. Mentioning These Accounts

Want to see your competition’s mentions? Enter their usernames here.

NOTE: You can find people’s emails on Twitter by searching for their usernames and the keyword “email” or phrase “email address”. 

twitter advanced search parameter: mentioning these accounts

10. Date Range

Use this parameter to search for Tweets either before or after a date. You can find tweets that are between two dates.

Getting More out of Twitter Advanced Search

While the Twitter advanced search tool does a pretty neat job to help you find the information that you’re looking for, there are still many ways to narrow down your search even more.

In addition to getting well-filtered results, you need a tool to help you organize these results into useful information.  

In doing so, you ensure that you get high-quality results that will better inform your marketing team so they’ll be able to craft an effective marketing strategy. 

Keyhole is an advanced social media analytics tool that will help you conduct effective social media listening, brand monitoring, influencer marketing, market research and more all from one dashboard. 

Check it out for a chance to unlock your social media potential. 

The Twitter advanced search tool is a gateway to a world of marketing opportunities for your brand. So start taking full advantage of it today and get the most out of your Twitter Advanced search queries.

Get searching!

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Broadcast and Media Companies: Improving Performance with Social Media Analytics

broadcast and media companies - improving performance with social media analytics

Social media has changed the dynamics of marketing, reshaped the way people consume information and revolutionized the way brands and organizations communicate with their audience.

In a world where information is available in real time and content is accessible on-demand, broadcast and media companies have to keep pace with changing audience expectations.

Below, we will explore the ways social media can be used in broadcast and media to create a more compelling programme and increase audience engagement. 

We’ll also discuss a couple of case studies and ultimately show you how you can use social listening tools like Keyhole to automate the task of turning raw data into actionable information. 

Without much ado, let’s dive right in.

Jump Links:

Why do Media and Broadcasting Companies Need Social Media Analytics?

Your 4 Step Social Analytics Plan
1. Social Listening
2. Data Refinement
3. Goal Setting
4. Sustainable Strategy Creation

What Metrics Can You Track?
Public Sentiment
Influencers
Competitive Analysis
Hashtag Campaigns

Case Study:
How theCHIVE Uses Unique Hashtags to Engage their Follower Base

Why is it Important to Measure Your ROI?

How to Use Keyhole as a Tool for Media and Broadcast Companies

Why Do Media and Broadcasting Companies Need Social Media Analytics?

Before we get to the “how”, we first need to make sure that the “why” is clear. 

Here are some stats that illustrate the importance of social media in the modern consumer’s everyday life as well as how social media relates to broadcast and media:

  • According to a 2018 Nielsen report, 45% of consumers almost always use a second screen when watching TV. 28% of consumers sometimes use another digital device simultaneously, while only 12% of consumers never use another device when watching TV. The numbers are significantly lower for audio content.
Simultaneous usage graphs between tv and digital, and tv and audio
  • The same Nielsen report shows that most of the consumers that are second screening do so to look up information related to the content, express their opinion on the content, search for a product after they’ve seen an ad, or read other people’s commentary on the content they’re watching.
Digital usage while watching tv and digital usage while listening to audio table.
  • Similarly, a 2015 Fortune report showed that in 2014, there have been more than a billion TV-related tweets, with 85% of users who use Twitter during prime-time tweeting about the content they’re watching.
Statistics of people tweeting while watching television

Source: Fortune.com

These stats clearly show that most modern consumers are second screening – and are doing so to look for or provide extra information/opinions on the content they’re exposed to.

Instead of competing with real time and on-demand content available online, media and entertainment companies need to work with social media and leverage the wealth of data from multiple sources to optimize their strategy and operations.

This takes us to our starting question: Why do media and broadcasting companies need analytics?

Social data can help companies to:

  • Understand audience preferences and activity patterns to optimize content and ads
  • Find out what causes viewership spikes and drops 
  • Analyze audience sentiment on a weekly basis, about each episode, season or programme
  • Define audience demographics for more precise targeting
  • Keep pace with trends and find out who are the influencers that create a buzz in the industry
  • Make better predictions based on the conversations that the audience are having before/during/after airing a programme
  • Analyze channel profitability and impact, to optimise investments and identify when to cancel or renew a show

The benefits are clear. 

So why aren’t most broadcasting and media companies using social media analytics to improve their performance?

The problem lies in the amounts of data – with so much data available across different channels, it takes a lot of time and effort to sift through the noise.

That’s why it’s crucial to approach analytics systematically.

Wondering how?

Your 4-Step Social Analytics Plan

To turn social data into actionable insights, broadcasting and media companies need to tackle four critical components:

Social Listening

Before you analyze social media data, you need to gather enough information about the relevant conversations that your audience is having online.

The biggest challenge of the social listening phase is the amount of data available.

If you pull your data directly from the social media platforms, you will end up with a pile of unstructured information that would a long time to organize before it can be used for analytics.

That’s where third-party social listening tools like Keyhole come in handy – these tools allow you to focus on the conversations you are interested in, and avoid the rest, saving you lots of unnecessary work in the process.

Data Refinement

The mass collection of data in the first phase results in mounds of information that have high-potential, but need to be organized and structured before they can be used. 

Manually extracting and then refining all the data is an exercise that requires a lot of effort.

To ensure that no conversations and opportunities are missed, most modern organizations overcome this challenge by automating the data selection and categorization process.

Goal Setting

The insights you get from data only make sense if you know what you are trying to accomplish. A common mistake in broadcasting and media is silo thinking and disparate data across the organization.

More often than not, different departments have different ideas about where the organization is headed, and they use social media to achieve different outcomes. 

Needless to say, this diminishes the value of the collected data – the only way an organization can increase engagement, optimize activities and drive better performance is by creating a single, shared vision about the organization’s goals.

Sustainable Strategy Creation

Finally, organizations have to take it one step further and develop a long-term, sustainable strategy that outlines how the collected social media insights will be used across the organization.

This is an iterative process that involves continuous testing and refining.

Now that we’ve explained the four step process of turning raw data into useful, actionable insights that can drive change in the organization, let’s talk a bit more about…

What Metrics Can You Track?

Public Sentiment

Sentiment can be positive and negative, and by following online conversations on forums and social media platforms, networks can get a real-time insight into how people feel about their programme. 

TechTalk’s has published a report on the most popular TV shows public sentiment. We’ll discuss some of their findings, as these are a great illustration of what we talked about until this point.

With 32,197,368 mentions, and an average of 3,7 mentions per users, Stranger Things tops the list of the most talked about show at the time when TechTalk was gathering their data. 

The most talked about TV shows
Source: Tech Talk

This corresponds with Netflix’s streaming data about the third season of Stranger Things – according to their insights, with a record of 40.7 million household accounts watching the show since its global launch on July 4th, Stranger Things was the most watched series on Netflix.

Netflix Tweet: Stranger Things breaking netflix records

Stranger Things has a more or less gender-balanced viewership: 44% of the viewers who talked about the show online are male and 56% are female. 

More than 80% of conversations online were positive.

Sentiment towards netflix show, stranger things
Source: Tech Talk

The data shows that most of the public sentiment about the show was positive, with disgust and fear amounting to a total of 12%.

The show is in the horror genre, so these numbers are expected. 

Feelings of sentiment analysis
Sentiment towards stranger things
Source: Tech Talk

If we analyze the mentions and pieces written on the show, we could see that a lot of the conversations are about Jim Hopper’s anger management issues and Steve Harrington being the best (and most underrated) character.

Influencers

Another way broadcasting and media could use social media analytics is to find influencers in their industry.

One way of doing this is finding the most popular stars in a show and then using these findings to enhance marketing. 

Another way is to find creators who are in some way related to the industry and are influential within their community – and then use these creators to generate buzz around a new programme, a show, or a campaign.

This is exactly what YouTube did when launching their YouTube Red service which offers an ad-free option and premium content that stars some of the most popular YouTubers.

Competitive Analysis

Social data can uncover great opportunities for broadcast and media companies.

One such example is Netflix’s decision to pick up the TV series, Lucifer, after it had been cancelled by Fox.

Netflix is known to leave nothing to chance, so this decision, just like most of the streaming giant’s decisions, was made after a viral #SaveLucifer Twitter campaign was launched by passionate viewers on May 11th.

Twitter campaign for #savelucifer

The campaign amassed 1M tweets in less than 24 hours.

Twitter campaign for #savelucifer

With so many people invested in the show, it was only logical that Netflix would renew it for a fourth season and give millions of viewers what they want. 

“Lucifer is a fantastic show that has really resonated with audiences in parts of the world, so we felt it was important for our licensing team to try to help that show continue for our fans,” Netflix’s VP Cindy Holland said for Deadline.

Netflix is great at monitoring and analyzing public opinion and conversations and turning data into actionable analytics and insights that support better decision-making.

Hashtag Campaigns

Disparate information can make it hard for organizations to track online conversations. 

The #SaveLucifer had this problem when more and more people started joining the campaign with different hashtags.

Twitter campaign for #savelucifer

How theCHIVE Uses Unique Hashtags to Engage their Follower Base

TheCHIVE Charity Group, had a hard time tracking and engaging their 20 million strong follower base. 

TheChive’s solution to this problem was to begin using unique hashtags for their campaigns.

Let’s have a quick look into their use case.

WHO ARE theCHIVE

TheCHIVE is a popular website that publishes feel-good photos and videos.

Over the course of 10 years, theCHIVE have amassed a following of millions, and have 20 million monthly users.  

The company’s charity division leverages the website’s massive influence and strong social media presence to find people in need, focusing on rare medical cases, special education initiatives, veterans and first responders.

What theCHIVE will usually do is ask their audience to share a photo with a hashtag and then donate $1 per every shared post to the related charity or cause. 

Over the course of 10 years, theCHIVE have managed to raise over $10M for people in need all around the world.

The Problem

The problem that theCHIVE had was keeping track of all the people that are engaging with their content. They were looking for an easy way to track all the mentions and the online conversations that were going on about a campaign. 

One of these campaigns was the first-ever national beer tournament which theCHIVE organized across 50 US states. They needed to pick two winners from each state, who then confronted each other on a national championship. 

The problem was, how do you track all the contestants in all 50 states in real time?

The Solution

TheCHIVE’s solution was using unique hashtags. For every state, theCHIVE came up with a dedicated hashtag. 

So now, they had 50 different hashtags they needed to track in real time… which is where Keyhole came in.

Using Keyhole, theCHIVE were able to monitor all the online conversations people were having online related to the championship, and access them via an easy-to-use dashboard that gave them a complete view of the entire tournament.

Now that you know how social media insights could be used to reinforce a channel, a programme, a show or a campaign, let’s recap…

Why is it Important to Measure Your ROI?

Measuring your ROI will enable you to understand your market, your audience’s preferences and help you spend your money more wisely by investing in projects that are more likely to take off.

By measuring your ROI, you’ll be able to understand what kind of shows your audience likes the most, test how long they’re willing to wait between different episodes of a programme, what are the optimal times to post, what stars or characters are the audience’s favourite, how your audience reacts to product placement, and more.

All this will enable you to optimize your investments, improve predictions, enhance advertising and ultimately offer better service to your customers.

How to use Keyhole as a Tool for Media and Broadcast Industries

By now it’s already clear why broadcasting and media need to look past TV ratings and traditional forms of testing, like focus groups and pre-screenings.

They need to create a “blended” listening practice that incorporates social media analytics.

However, social listening and analytics can be a time-consuming activity given the amount of information available (we’re talking millions of consumers), so it’s important to automate the parts that can be automated. 

Third party analytics tools like Keyhole streamline social listening and gather and structure the data for you.

Using Keyhole, you will be able to:

  • Get more information about your reach
  • Understand the demographics of the people that are having conversations about your company or products online
  • Find the most influential individuals among those that are talking about you
  • Track trending topics and keep pace with what the audience wants to consume, so that you can create a more effective content strategy
  • Find out the optimal posting time and length so that you can spend your marketing dollars more wisely
  • Compare your performance to the performance of your competitors
  • Get more in-depth insights about a specific topic you’re interested in exploring further
  • Predict how the conversations you are tracking will evolve the following week and month

All these features and much more are part of what Keyhole offers as a tool. 

Final Thoughts

Social media platforms have become a valuable business intelligence tool where millions of people give away free information about their habits, opinions, and needs. 

As the media consumption habits are changing and more and more people are second screening, media and broadcasting companies need to start looking into social media for meaningful insights that could drive better decision-making.

When done correctly, social media analytics can help broadcasting and media companies to have better conversations with their fan base, identify brand affinities and influential individuals, optimize their programmes and ultimately increase their profits and ratings.

However, most organizations still struggle to determine which data they need to analyze and what counts as “noise” and should be left out.

Third party social listening and analytics tools like Keyhole take away the time consuming grunt work of data collection and sorting and give organizations clean and understandable reports on what the organization does right, how it competes with other players in the market, and help to uncover opportunities to improve their performance.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Sports Marketing: Tracking Social Media ROI, Influencers, and Engagement

On the surface, sports marketing in the digital age should be easy.

You have a thrilling product, a rabid fanbase, and a growing arsenal of social media platforms to connect the two.

Sure, you can post content all day long, but how do you evaluate the success of one sports media campaign versus another?

How do you prove your sports marketing agency is better-equipped to land that contract? How do you justify your marketing strategy to your superiors? And how do you prove that what you’re doing aligns with your business goals?

In other words, how do you measure the ROI and success of your sports marketing campaigns?

In this post, we’ll explain why you should be measuring the ROI on your sports marketing campaigns, what metrics to track, and case studies on metric tracking in sports media.

  • Why you should be measuring the ROI of your sports marketing campaigns
  • The most important metrics to track
  • Example use cases of these key metrics
  • Case studies of effective metric tracking in sports media
  • Tools to help you track these metrics

Let’s go!

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Why Should You Measure the ROI of Your Sports Marketing Campaigns?

Which Sports Marketing Metrics Should You Track?
Visibility Metrics
Engagement Metrics
Sentiment Analysis
Audience Analytics
Influencer Analytics
Other Business Metrics

Sports Marketing ROI Case Studies:
The Special Olympics
SportQuake
MELT Atlanta

Why Should You Measure the ROI of Your Sports Marketing Campaigns?

Even if you have a product that sells itself—like a successful sports team—blindly posting content for the sake of posting content is only going to get you so far.

By setting specific, measurable goals before embarking on any sports media campaign, you’ll be able to identify what went well, what went wrong, and what you can improve for next time.

Start with the question:

“What am I trying to accomplish?”

Is it growing your team’s social following? Is it attracting new sponsors or investors? Making existing sponsors satisfied with their investment? Creating new partnerships? Recruiting or tracking influencers? Raising awareness for a cause?

By identifying your goals in advance, you’ll know what data is needed to prove your campaign’s value to any relevant stakeholders, whether that’s your boss, a sponsor, or your own sense of accomplishment.

Once you’ve picked a goal, decide what metrics you’ll use to measure success and pick specific targets.

For example, if your goal is increasing followers, by what percentage, and over what time period? If your goal is impressing a sponsor, you may want to set targets for total reach and fan sentiment.

Not sure which metrics you should be tracking? Don’t worry, because we’re covering that next.

Which Sports Marketing Metrics Should You Track?

Let’s jump into which social media metrics you should be tracking to understand your ROI, whether you’re measuring posts, particular accounts, hashtags, or your audience.

Visibility Metrics

No matter what your goals are, it’s likely you’ll be invested in the overall visibility of your campaign.

Reach

Reach is the number of unique users that have seen a particular post, keyword, or hashtag.

For example, if one account with 10,000 followers posts your hashtag, that hashtag has a potential reach of up to 10,000 unique users. The same account posting again on that hashtag would not increase the potential reach.

If your content has broad reach, that means it’s making its way to a large volume of users. It’s a sign that your content is being broadly shared by influential accounts.

Impressions

Impressions is the total number of times the piece of content has been viewed (similar to page views on your website).

In contrast to reach, the same user seeing the same piece of content twice would count as two impressions.

High impressions are either a result of high reach or high repeat engagement from a core follower base.

Follower Count

Of course, you’ll also be invested in the number of followers to your sports social media accounts, whether it’s on a single platform or across platforms.

By growing your own follower base, you can directly impact the potential reach of your own posts, relying less on influencers and shares to have your message heard.

You may also need to track the follower counts of your sponsors or your team’s athletes.

You can also track your follower growth rate, calculated as follows:

Example Use Case: Sponsored Hashtag Monitoring

Measuring hashtag analytics will be extremely important to you if your goal is to track the success of a sponsored hashtag.

Take #SuitingUpTogether for example: a Toyota-sponsored hashtag used by the LA Lakers on Twitter, Instagram, and various other platforms.

To prove the success of the sponsorship to Toyota, the Lakers could share metrics like reach, impressions, and increases in @ToyotaSoCal’s follower count over time. 

Engagement Metrics

Beyond pure visibility, you should also track how engaged your audience is with your posts.

Average Engagement

Average engagement measures the average number of likes, comments, and shares each of your posts gets. 

Average Engagement Calculation: (likes + comments + shares) / (# posts)

This is an indicator of the volume of interactions your posts get.

Average Engagement Rate

Average engagement rate is your average engagement per follower.

Average Engagement Rate Calculation: (average likes per post + average comments per post + average shares by post) / (# followers)

This ratio is more telling of the quality of your content and/or how active your followers are. If you have a lot of followers, but low engagement, you may need to step up your content game!

Optimal Post Time & Post Length

Once you have visibility and engagement metrics, social media monitoring tools can start to give you feedback on what type of posts are providing the most value.

A tool like Keyhole can give you data like the optimal time of day to post, what type of content formats are performing best, and the length of text that gets the most engagement. 

Example Use Case: Game Hashtags

Game hashtags are known to have tons of engagement from fans.

Whether it’s a hashtag you created for a team, or you’re joining in on a grassroots hashtag created by fans, there are sure to be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of posts on that game’s hashtag.

But how do you post on that hashtag to gain the most engagement?

Here’s an example of a hashtag, #nbafinals2019, with a game specific clip.

By analyzing the average engagement rate of posts at different times, you can identify the perfect time to post during games. Is it at tip off? Half time? During the intermission? 20 minutes before the game? As the clock winds down?

Only by measuring these metrics will you know for sure.

Sentiment Analysis

Quantity doesn’t always mean quality. Posts, teams, or athletes can go viral for the wrong reasons—so you have to look beyond reach and engagement.

Sentiment analysis allows you to track the number of positive vs. negative posts for a given hashtag or keyword.

By tracking sentiment analysis, you’ll be able to prevent and manage PR crises, better understand your audience, and keep a finger on the pulse of your audience’s mood.

Example Use Case: Player Sentiment

Let’s say you have a video campaign planned where you’re featuring an athlete in your organization in each video.

If bad news breaks that day about that player, you don’t want to add fuel to the fire by sharing a mistimed feel-good post about that player—especially if that post is tied to one of your sponsors.

By using social listening and sentiment analysis tools, you can make sure you’re avoiding any intended consequences.

Here’s a hilarious piece of player-driven content from Liverpool FC. But they wouldn’t want to post it soon after one of the players in the video made a costly mistake for their team.

On the flip side, if a player is trending for positive reasons, it may be the perfect time to pull an older piece of content on that player out of the archives.

Audience Analytics

Your sports social media campaigns will only be made stronger the more you learn about your audience.

By using the native analytics tools in the social media platforms you’re using for your campaign, you can track audience metrics like:

  • Countries
  • Language
  • Gender
  • Keywords
  • Devices

Example Use Case: Multi-Lingual Campaigns

By using audience analytics, you may learn you have a growing demographic that you should tailor more of your content to.

Because they’re located in a southern US state with many Spanish speakers, the Arizona Coyotes launched Spanish versions of all of their social media accounts in 2019.

They would have been able to justify that decision in advance by using audience analytics on their English-only accounts.

Influencer Analytics

Engaging with your team’s top fans is an amazing way to make fans for life.

By inviting influencers into your sports marketing strategy, you’ll give them a platform to share their authentic passion that’s sure to resonate with your wider audience.

Example Use Case: Targeting New Demographics

By using Keyhole’s influencer tracking tools, you’ll be able to identify, compare, and measure potential and existing influencers with all the metrics we’ve already mentioned above.

For example, if you’re looking to reach a demographic that your audience analytics say you’re not currently reaching, you can seek out influencers whose content clearly resonates with that exact demographic.

Other Business Metrics

Actual ROI

Of course, the truest and simplest way to track your ROI is to track the financial cost of your strategy compared to the overall gain of your strategy.

But tracking your financial gains isn’t always easy.

If you know the financial value of a single follower, you could estimate revenue gained from gained followers.

Or if you can link landing or renewing a particular sponsorship to your marketing campaign, you can consider that your financial win.

Website Analytics

You can also turn to your website analytics to prove the effectiveness of your campaign. Did your website traffic go up after your campaign started? Did it go down once it stopped? 

Linking your marketing campaigns to other metrics outside of social media shouldn’t be ignored!

Sports Marketing ROI Case Studies

The Special Olympics

The Special Olympics are a huge sports endeavor—with nearly 5 million athletes with intellectual disabilities participating worldwide.

At that scale, tracking the ROI of their social media campaigns is a tall order.

Ryan Eades, Director of Digital and Social Engagement at the Special Olympics turned to Keyhole to track the ROI of their social media efforts.

They sorted their audience by follower count and engagement to identify their most influential ambassadors.

Once they linked up with model and actress Brooklyn Decker, they used Keyhole to track engagements and conversions linked directly to her posts.

SportQuake, the Data-Driven Sports Marketing Agency

Sports marketing agencies have the most to gain from tracking ROI.

As they’re not in-house employees, they have to prove the potential and actual benefits of every campaign they run for any organization.

They need as much data as they can get.

SportQuake is one of those agencies. They are often in a position where they’re trying to recruit influencers to aid in marketing campaigns.

But they look beyond follower counts. They want to make sure the influencers they work with are actually likable.

That’s why SportQuake uses Keyhole’s sentiment analysis metrics to monitor the audience sentiment towards a particular influencer—allowing them to have a data-driven approach to choosing the right fit for their campaigns.

MELT Atlanta’s Cool Approach to Analytics

MELT Atlanta is a sports marketing agency that connects major brands with top athletes and athletic events.

For example, their most recent project is a marketing campaign connecting Coca Cola with athletes in the 2020 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

To MELT, tracking the success of their campaigns is crucial to proving ROI for their clients.

“Having a reliable number of impressions and reach for the hashtag that we are able to get within seconds of logging in has definitely solved our biggest pain point,” said Jenna Cook, their Digital & Social Media Manager.

With Keyhole, they track brand accounts, athlete accounts, hashtags, their most engaging posts, best posting times, follower insights, and more.

By having an easily accessible dashboard with their most crucial metrics, they can easily answer whether or not their clients are seeing ROI on their campaigns within seconds.

How to use Keyhole to Track Your Sports Marketing ROI

No matter what your goals are for your marketing campaign, you’re going to need to prove your campaign’s effectiveness with hard data.

By using Keyhole’s advanced social listening tools like hashtag analytics, influencer monitoring, keyword tracking, sentiment analysis, and more, you’ll have a wide range of metrics to prove the success of your marketing campaigns.

Ready to get started? Start your FREE Keyhole trial today.

5 Under Analyzed Social Media Metrics that Matter [+ Tools to Measure Them!]

5 under analyzed social media metrics that matter and tools to measure them

This post was updated on November 27th, 2019.

With so many social media analytics tools that focus on different stats, it’s hard to figure out which metrics matter.

Some of the most important ones are often ignored in favour of “vanity metrics” – numbers that don’t help guide your marketing decisions, but are easy to track.

To make strides in your social approach, it helps to dig deeper into underlying data.

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5 Social Media Metrics:
1. Click Through Rate (CTR)
2. Response Rate to Prospects and Customers
3. Sentiment
4. Network Referrals
5. Assisted Conversions

To start, monitor these five social media metrics:

1. Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the number of people who click through to your website after seeing your post.

It’s common practice for marketers to A/B test headlines and calls-to-action (CTAs) on web pages to track CTR, but not as many do the same with social media posts.

For those not familiar with the concept of A/B – or split – testing, it’s a way to compare two versions of a marketing piece.

For example, you could send different renditions of an email message to 100 people. The one that yields the highest CTR wins, and will be sent to your remaining contacts.

You can test:

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

Based on the results of a few tests, you can start determining the best posting practices for getting clicks.

The Tool: Twitter Analytics

Twitter is the ideal platform for A/B testing posts.

Repeating tweets is normal. Only a tiny fraction of your audience is online at a given time. And depending on how many people they follow, your followers’ timelines are packed with tweets.

After conducting a few split tests, just click the option to view each tweet’s activity metrics:

Then compare the CTR for each tweet.

2. Response Rate to Prospects and Customers

Social media users sent 21% more messages to business accounts in 2015 than 2014, according to research by Sprout Social. And 40% of these messages, including complaints and questions, require a response.

This data shows that community managers are increasingly valuable, as they directly deal with current and potential customers’ problems.

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

If you seldom track metrics related to issues community managers solve and questions they answer, you lose insights into your overall customer service approach.

After all, you’d know to restructure your strategy if half of client issues went unsolved. And if an interaction as painful as this one happened, you’d have to take action.

The Tool: Hootsuite Core Analytics

Whereas the majority of social media analytics platforms focus on external data, Hootsuite Core Analytics also deals with internal metrics.

To measure the performance of your team and individual colleagues, you can track stats such as messages sent and issue resolution time.

3. Sentiment

Sentiment may seem like a superficial social media metric at first, but it can prove valuable.

It’s measured by monitoring messages and relevant keywords, sorting them into emotion-based categories. For example, some categories could be sad, angry, happy and appreciative.

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

You can glean useful information by analyzing posts talking about your brand, services and sector. This is especially true when you have a large enough sample size to confidently say “wow, people love aspect X of our industry but hate aspect Y.”

Based on sentiment analysis, you can come up with small ideas worth further investigation, like:

  • Launching events or campaigns your audience would likely enjoy
  • Replicating services or products that your key markets appreciate
  • Altering how you position your brand based on what people say about your competition

The Tool: Social Mention

Think of Social Mention as a search engine with a complementary social media analytics suite. You can access a stream of user-generated content from more than 100 platforms just by typing a keyword.

It records sentiment through a positive-to-negative content ratio, along with a look at neutral posts on the right side of your screen:

Social Mention - Social Media Metrics Tools That Matter

4. Network Referrals

As well as promoting your brand and engaging key audiences, your activity on social media should drive traffic back to your website.

You can measure network referrals to see how well you’re doing.

Normally, referral traffic is defined as visits to your website from sources other than Google. When someone clicks a link to your website on Instagram, it’s a referral.

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

Website traffic generated from social media is often a guiding metric in overall marketing strategies because:

  • Noticeable changes can indicate whether or not your content meets your audience’s needs
  • You can see which shared URLs drove the most traffic, indicating what your social market wants to learn about
  • For some news and content-based organizations, analytics firm Parse.ly says Facebook alone drives more traffic than Google

The Tool: Google Analytics

Used by marketers worldwide, Google Analytics is the top choice for analyzing website traffic – including network referrals.

Find your key stats by clicking Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals:

Social Media Metrics Tools that Matter - Google Analytics

From here, you can see which network drove the most sessions, page views, pages per session and more metrics.

You can also dig deeper to see how individual links performed on each platform:

Google Analytics - Social Media Metrics Tools that Matter and Tools to Measure Them

5. Assisted Conversions

You’ve probably tracked conversions from social media when running targeted campaigns, but your social media activity can also help collect assisted conversions.

What’s an assisted conversion?

If a social platform plays a role in the conversion path, except the last interaction, it gets an assist.

For example, someone clicks a Twitter link to your site, leaves and then comes back a day later to convert.

Here’s a sports analogy to clarify – numbers 9 and 22 get the assists, but 21 scores the conversion:

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

The assisted conversions metric gives you another look at how your customers behave and meet the goals you’ve set for them.

By analyzing assisted conversions from each social network, you can plainly see which ones impact your online success and which ones need new strategies in terms of what you post and how you advertise.

The Tool: Google Analytics

Stick with Google Analytics and find this metric through Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions:

Google Analytics - Social Media Metrics that Matter and Tools to Track Them

You can see how social media compares to other assisted conversion sources. What’s more, you can look at the assisted conversion value from each social platform to learn which ones are most profitable:

Google Analytics - Social Metrics that are Improve and Tools to Measure Them

Assisted conversions, network referrals, sentiment, response rates and split tests results may be under-analyzed, but they certainly matter with regards to building a strong marketing strategy.

Set and meet goals based on them to get a leg up on your social competition.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Writing Instagram Captions that Convert: Content, Formatting, and Hashtags

Writing Instagram Captions that Convert: Content, Formatting, and Hashtags

In this guide, you’ll unlock how to get more likes, more comments, and better reach using Instagram captions.

You’ll discover why Instagram captions are so important, and why you shouldn’t ignore the powerful engagement that a well-written caption can garner.

We’ll also share can’t-miss tips on how to write a great Instagram caption—real, actionable tips you can use right away.

Plus, we’ll introduce you to how to perfectly format your captions, and how to choose the best hashtags for your posts.

Finally, we’ll sprinkle in some great, real-world examples of Instagram captions to inspire you.

Let’s get started…

Jump Links:

Why Instagram Captions are Important

How to Write an Amazing Instagram Caption
1. Write a Killer First Line
2. Add a Strong Call-to-Action
3. Be Authentic
4. Add Value
5. Tell a Story
6. Have Fun with Emojis
7. Be Purposeful with Your Caption Length
8. Use Hashtags
9. Practice Elsewhere First

Instagram Caption Formatting Tips
1. Use Line Breaks
2. Use Symbols for Bullets
3. Use Emojis like Punctuation
4. Use Short Sentences

Choosing the Best Hashtags for Your Posts
Branded Hashtags
Community Hashtags
Campaign Hashtags

How to Find the Best Instagram Hashtags for Your Post

Why Instagram Captions are Important

Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users, with more than 500 million of them using the platform every single day.

Those users spend a whopping 53 minutes on average scrolling through their favorite posts, engaging with their favorite brands, and buying the hottest products.

So what’s the key to reaching that enormous audience?

Perfectly written Instagram captions.

They capture the attention of the casual scroller, and turn them into dedicated followers that engage and promote your brand.

How?

They allow you to unlock more followers, increase engagement, and extend your brand’s reach beyond the borders of the Instagram app.

A good Instagram caption will capture your scroller’s attention. A great Instagram caption will stop them dead in their tracks.

The more time a reader spends reading your caption and engaging with your post, the better your post will rank in the Instagram algorithm.

With enough engagement, your post can end up on the highly coveted Explore Page, bringing more eyeballs to your posts than ever before.

instagram explore page
Instagram’s Explore Page

That’s why captions are the gateway to building stronger relationships with your audience and customers.

But how do you write a compelling caption that inspires your reader to connect with you in a meaningful way?

Great question!

How To Write an Amazing Instagram Caption

So what is the secret formula to writing the perfect Instagram caption?

Use this formula:

Context + Personality + Inspiration = Engaged Followers

It’s a simple concept, but it takes planning to put into action. 

Here’s how to make it happen:

Tip #1 – Write a Killer First Line

You need to put everything into that first line. 

Not only does Instagram cut off your caption at around the first two or three lines, the first line has to capture your reader’s attention, or they will just keep scrolling for better posts. 

So make that first sentence count!

The trick is to deliver the attention-grabbing element of your post in that first line before the caption is cut off, making it visible in your reader’s feed, without them having to click “more”.

Laneige instagram post
Instagram only shows the first sentence of your caption on mobile.

Here are some attention-grabbing elements you can put in your first line:

  • Spark their interest with some hard-hitting stats
  • Pique their passion with a disruptive statement 
  • Tap into their egos by asking a question
  • Trigger an emotional response with a compelling narrative
  • Share an exclusive offer that they can’t pass up
  • Tease their curiosity and keep them guessing
Socialnature instagram post
Use humour to catch your reader’s attention

Whatever you choose, it needs to capture their attention quickly so they will actually click “more” and engage further with your post.

Tip #2: Add a Strong Call-to-Action

Once you have captured their attention, you need to give them something to do with that interest.

A strong Instagram call-to-action (CTA):

Use active language

Using phrases like “register now”, “buy now”, or “click more” help your audience know what to do next. 

If you don’t tell them what to do, they will move on and scroll to other posts that do tell them what to do.

Virgin mobile instagram post
Virgin uses active language in their CTAs.

Creates a sense of urgency 

Your CTA has to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Phrases like “for a limited time only”, “available to the first 100 customers”, “only 24 hours to use this discount code” will get your followers to act quickly before their interest disappears.

Hudsons bay instagram post
Hudsons Bay builds FOMO in their captions before a sale.

Uses “You” Statements

The goal for your Instagram CTA is to make your readers feel like you are talking directly to them.

“Create a free Keyhole account today” is just not as effective as “Create your free Keyhole account today.”  Make it about your reader, and not about you.

Keyhole instagram post. twitter audit: how to conduct and optimize your account
Keyhole connects the post to the reader with “you” statement.

Stand Out

Before you can get your followers to do what you want them to do, you have to capture their attention.

Make your CTA stand out. Make it colorful, use great images, and use emojis, anything that says “eyes over here”. 

sephora instagram post
Sephora uses vibrant colors to draw attention to their CTA.

Another great Instagram CTA tip: Ask your followers to tag their friends in the comment section of your post. Adding “tag a friend who needs this!” or “tag someone who would wear this” is an incredible way to boost your post with the Instagram algorithm.

hercampus instagram post

Tip #3 – Be Authentic

Write in a natural way. Authenticity is really what matters most on Instagram, and is what will register most with your audience.

While your instagram captions and posts should be thoughtful and strategic, you should speak to your followers like you would speak to a friend.

After all, your followers are your brand’s closest friends, so talk to them like they are!

sprouts instagram post
Sprouts uses authenticity to connect with customers.

Tip #4 – Add Value

Your captions are Instagram currency—what will you trade for their time?

Offer tips, expert advice, or even humor to increase the added value of your Instagram caption. 

Adding value to your posts will encourage your followers to engage more by sharing, bookmarking, or commenting, helping to boost your Instagram analytics in the process.

instagramforbusiness instagram post
Instagram For Business often adds value by posting tip, wins, and case studies

Tip #5 – Tell a Story

This is where your brand personality can shine.

Every brand has a narrative style, and every product or service has a story. Tell it.

Be specific, cover the senses by tapping into sensory words that describe taste, sound, sight, touch, feelings, or emotions. Connect your reader with what you are talking about.

redbull instagram post
Red Bull uses storytelling to increase engagement.

Tip #6 – Have Fun With Emojis

Emojis are everywhere on Instagram—if you aren’t using them, then you are not speaking the native language.

ben and jerry's instagram post
Emojis are part of Instagram culture.

With nearly 3,000 emojis (and counting) out there, you can have some fun incorporating them into your captions.

The benefits of using emojis:

  • They animate your captions
  • They add visual interest, helping your post stand out
  • They draw attention to actions
  • They break up dense copy in your posts
mcdonald's instagram post
Emojis are often part of McDonalds’ captions, bringing attention to CTAs and the eyes to keywords.

Just don’t overdo them. A few, carefully placed emojis can boost engagement, but if you overdo it with too many, you can lose your message and send your readers packing.

You should also make sure your emojis fit in with your branding and tone of voice. 

Many businesses are incorporating approved emojis into their brand style guides, ensuring consistency in overall messaging across all social media platforms.

Special note: While celebrities can get away with a simple emoji in a caption, brands and influencers need to be champion storytellers, especially in an environment where authenticity drives the best results.

Tip #7 – Be Purposeful With Your Caption Length

Like with everything in marketing, your focus should be quality over quantity.

Instagram trends have varied from the short and punchy to longer “micro-blogging” posts. There’s really no right or wrong length for Instagram captioning. 

The more you post, the more you will see what works for your followers. But when you are first starting out or if you are in doubt, it’s best to stay on the shorter side.

madewell instagram post
Madewell does a good job at fitting caption length to post type.

About micro-blogging: This is a newer Instagram trend and a fantastic way to connect with your readers on a deeper level—quickly turning them from followers to brand loyalists.

themiddleageddiva's instagram post
Micro-blogging is a popular trend for for storytelling

Tip #8 – Use Hashtags

Instagram hashtags are the key to ensuring people actually find your posts—so make sure you’re using them properly.

Hashtags act like keywords. They’re trackable on Instagram through Instagram Analytics and other sentiment analysis tools like Keyhole, and can be the difference between popularity and obscurity.

Read more about using hashtags to find influencers.

Tip #9 – Practice Elsewhere First

Before you jump right into the Instagram platform to write out your captions, draft them somewhere distraction free first.

Whether it’s a Google Doc or even pen and paper, find somewhere that lets you focus on your campaign and engagement goals without the notifications and nuances of the platform.

You can also write out several captions at once, keeping your brand voice and message consistent across posts and social media platforms. 

Your first attempt will most likely not be your best. Give your creativity room to breathe and grow—you will be surprised at what you come up with!

Instagram Caption Formatting Tips

Proper formatting makes your captions and posts easier to read. The easier it is to read, the more people will ready them and take action.

When you are formatting your captions on Instagram, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Formatting tip #1 – Use line breaks

Line breaks are a great way to split up long chunks of text.

In the past, you had to use periods to simulate line breaks. Thankfully, the Instagram app was finally updated in 2019 to allow for proper line breaks.

So to add line breaks on Instagram, just hit return! 

Formatting tip #2 – Use symbols for bullets

Bullet points are another great option for eye-catching text.

You can use emojis or copy and paste text-based symbols from a text editor for DIY bullet points.

Formatting tip #3 – Use emojis like punctuation

It’s easy to go overboard with emojis. Used the right way, they make your caption easier to read. Used the wrong way, they clutter everything up.

Use emojis like punctuation: at the end of a sentence or thought.

Formatting tip #4 – Use short sentences

Long posts have their uses, but long sentences rarely do. Keep sentences short and sweet to make them easier to read, and use punctuation where helpful.

Bonus tip: But that said—normal grammar and punctuation rules don’t always apply on Instagram. It may be more authentic to write more casually and without full punctuation.

Choosing the Best Hashtags For Your Post

Instagram hashtags are an important way to make sure your posts are searchable, and is the best way to get discovered by new audiences.

This can transform into better engagement, more followers, and ultimately, more customers for your business.

Make sure you are making the most of them.

The Different Kinds of Instagram Hashtags

Branded Hashtags

Branded hashtags are your own creation—unique to your business. 

Common branded hashtags are company names, taglines, or the name of a product or campaign.

This is an amazing opportunity to extend your brand identity and show your marketing creativity. 

Remember, your branded hashtag might have nothing to do with your brand name, just make sure it has everything to do with your brand identity.

starbucks instagram post with caption
Starbucks uses branded hashtags to celebrate the opening of their new roastery.

Community Hashtags

Community hashtags connect groups of like-minded users to a specific subject. They don’t need to be connected to a business, but they can be.

This type of hashtag is broader and less focused than branded hashtags, and is all about bringing people together. It can represent a lifestyle, a philosophy, or a movement. 

There are well-established community hashtags that have stood the test of time, and there are trending community hashtags that can reflect a hot topic that many users identify with.

If you want to create a community hashtag, keep the scope narrow to optimize the amount of engagement. Stick to a niche interest that will easily build a community around it.

shakeshack instagram post
ShakeShack combines a community hashtag with their branded hashtag to connect the two communities.

Campaign Hashtags

Campaign hashtags have a shorter lifespan than branded or community hashtags.

They can last a few short days, run for a season, or even for a year. But the point of them is to promote a campaign, product launch, or partnership, and are stopped being used once the promotion has ended.

coca cola instagram post
Coca-Cola uses their campaign hashtag #KindnessStartsWith to engage users.

How to Find The Best Instagram Hashtags for Your Post

In order to be prosperous with hashtags, you need to be strategic—not only with which ones you choose, but when you choose to use them as well.

The most popular Instagram hashtags are used millions of times a day, but that doesn’t mean that you will get your fair share of engagement just by adding #cats, #truelove, or #blessed to your posts.

instagram hashtags cats
#cats has over 100 billion posts

To be found, it’s better to use hashtags that are more niche to get your audience truly engaged. It also will bring in more qualified users that are relevant to your industry and brand. 

But how do you find them?

The best way is to look. See what your followers, competitors, and industry leaders are already using. 

A great way to find more niche but related hashtags is to look at the “Related Hashtags” section under bigger topics, like in the example above.

To do this manually can be a daunting task, but there are many tools at your disposal.

Keyhole provides advanced hashtag real-time research and analytics tools to gain intelligence from social media platforms like Instagram.

hashtag tracking - oreo
Tools like Keyhole let you track top posts and see what hashtags your competitors are using.

Related reading: Read more about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hashtag Marketers.

A Final Note on Instagram Captions

When it comes to creating Instagram captions, being strategic is key. 

Instagram is also a wonderful opportunity to show off your brand personality. Combining your own unique voice and point of view on this laid-back platform lets you reach out to your audience in new and exciting ways.

But all the best strategies include monitoring your hard work. 

Instagram analytics tools like Instagram Insights and Keyhole allow you to see how well your posts perform, giving you a powerful understanding of how well your social media engagement is tracking.

Keyhole also gives you real-time access to see your audience’s reactions as soon as you post.

This allows you to tweak your campaigns to ensure that you are getting the best ROI on your marketing time. 

Honing in on your followers and focusing on leading niche conversations in your industry is the surefire way to attract the best and more loyal followers to your Instagram account.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

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