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Social media is meant to be SOCIAL! 👋🏼Don’t forget... it’s not all about posting great content. You have to engage with other people and interact daily! Happy connecting this week! ✨ Picking the perfect Instagram name for your business can be tough, but we have a few tips for you to keep in mind!
✔️ Tell people what you’re offering in your name. This will make it easier for you to pop up on searches! ✔️ Make it memorable! ✔️ Allow room for growth so you aren’t tied to just one specific offering. ✔️ Make it consistent across all platforms! Here are our top tips + tricks for creating your own flat lay and how that helps your brand communicate with it's audience.
Tell a Story Flat lays are a great way to add variety to your social media content. They are more than just a pretty set up...flat lays can and should tell a story to give your followers a glimpse into your day-to-day lifestyle and behind the scenes. Get Creative + Keep it Relevant There are hundreds of flat lay categories, from clothes to office supplies to food to travel... Be sure when putting together your flat lay, it stays relevant to the brand. It wouldn't make sense for a travel company to do a flat lay of clothes, UNLESS they are talking travel-wear tips! It wouldn't make sense for a grocery store to do an office supply flat lay UNLESS they are talking about their work environment or maybe they're hiring for an office position. Build a Personal Connection The biggest struggle with promoting a brand over a person is building relationships with it's followers. As we mentioned earlier, flat lays give your audience a glimpse into the day-to-day. This helps brands build a PERSONAL connection to it's tribe and fosters a connection with it's customers. Now, since we all know you need to match great content with an equally amazing image, here are some photo tips we've picked up on through our own experiences + working with different photographers. 〰️ A E S T H E T I C 〰️ T I P S 〰️ Color Scheme It will make your editing process quick and a whole lot smoother if you choose colors that already have the same warmth or coolness to them. Mix Textures Create a level of depth with your photo by mixing together different types of textures for your shot. Do you have a rough coaster or a prickly succulent? Throw them in! Layer Another great way to create depth in your shot is to layer. Layer books, magazines, papers on your laptop. Flat lays should look clean but also “lived-in.” Lighting + Background Always shoot in natural light or in an atmosphere that won’t create heavy shadows. Also, pick a background that is simple, clean and not distracting from your flat lay objects. Cropping I know you don’t want to do this after you’ve spent so much time laying everything out perfectly, but trust us on this. Cropping out parts of different objects make your shot look natural. It also gives you variety when shooting, you can take several different shots from one flat lay and use them as new content each time. The Ifs and That’s of IFTTT First, let’s start at the beginning, what is IFTTT? It’s a FREE automation platform that allows users to create logic statements to trigger user-specific actions through Applets that help them pair up Internet-enabled services and/or devices in ways that can make life easier—or more entertaining. We are all are connected to our apps and devices. But, how many of those interact with each other? IFTTT bridges that divide and makes each app, service, or device talk to each other and chunk different tasks for improved productivity. Everything IFTTT can do is accomplished through Applets. These are tiny programs that you can create that use triggers (the “If’s”) to perform actions (the “Then That’s”). It’s also a simple way to introduce automation into your life if you’re not tech-savvy. By implementing an IFTTT applet you are able to skip monotonous daily tasks and get more important things done. Examples of an applet might be: * If you make a call on your iPhone, then a log of that call is added to a Google document. * If you add a new item to your Amazon Alexa shopping list, then it will be added to your Evernote app. * If (when) the season changes on Mars, then you’ll get a smartphone notification about it. (Yes, this is an actual IFTTT applet!) Once you design and activate an Applet, IFTTT does all the behind the scenes work without you having to remember it again, you will be able to enjoy a new level of interconnectivity! You can also turn Applets on and off and edit and even share them with the IFTTT community. If I haven’t convinced you that allowing IFTTT to automate your life is worthwhile, then see below for just a few benefits of IFTTT:
The Best IFTTT Recipes for Social Media Automation:
Want to get started? Try it out by going to: https://ifttt.com/ At Mixed Media Marketing Group, we are constantly listening to podcasts to feed our brains with new ideas and inspiration. We built a list of our current favorites that give us that weekly boost. We would love to know what's on your list! 1. The Goal Digger Podcast We love Jenna Kutcher! This podcasts brings you the the productivity tips, social media strategies, business hacks, and inspirational stories that can help YOU design your dream career. Jenna shares tangible tips and hacks that she used to become a self-made millionaire in photography, online courses, Instagram sponsorships, and navigating the world of being a #girlboss social media influencer. 2. The Gary Vee Audio Experience Gary Vaynerchuk is an incredible entrepreneur, CEO, investor, vlogger, and public speaker. On this podcast you'll find a mix of #AskGaryVee show episodes, keynote speeches on marketing and business, segments from DAILYVEE video series, interviews and fireside chats. 3. The Influencer Podcast The Influencer Podcast is an innovative podcast that explores the secrets behind the ever-changing trends of influencer marketing and the careers of today’s top social influencers. Julie brings you marketing and branding strategies with Marie Forleo, Amy Porterfield, Lauryn Evarts of The Skinny Confidential, Melyssa Griffin and more. Through each episode, learn how to strengthen, monetize and build your own industry-leading influence. 4. Online Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield How do I start an online business? Grow my email list to thousands of subscribers? Sell more and grow faster? These are just some of the big questions that leading online marketing strategist, Amy Porterfield, digs into on the top-ranked Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Each episode is designed to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for starting, scaling and automating your online business. 5. Building a StoryBrand If you’re frustrated because you struggle to get the word out about your product or service, the Building a Story Brand Podcast will help. This podcasts brings practical advice about clarifying your message and growing your business. Don and the StoryBrand team talk about the power of story formulas to get people talking about your brand. This one is all about getting your message out, growing your company, and standing out in the marketplace. If you don’t have an Instagram account for your business, we highly recommend creating one, ASAP! Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform around and it’s also ranked highest in user engagement, not to mention you don’t have to pay to be seen by your audience (looking at you Facebook!) Here are our top three tips to keep in mind while gramming: 1. Use Your Instagram Stories Feature There is so much to say about Instagram Stories so I will try to make this quick, but keep a lookout for a more in-depth blog post later. One thing we love about Instagram stories is that it allows for a more personal interaction between you and your audience. It allows you to be real and raw and form a connection without messing up the aesthetic of your feed. It’s especially useful for businesses in helping them form a personal connection with their audience. People are more likely to trust a person representing a brand over just the brand alone. So hop on that insta story and give your audience a real look into your day-to-day! 2. Tag Your Location This is one of the best ways to optimize the visibility of your post. Whether it’s in your feed, your story or your highlights (more on that later) tagging your location allows your post to be seen by users who are searching around for content in your area. Not to mention, when you use this tactic in your stories you will get added to your cities story and your content will easily be seen by hundreds, if not thousands (depending on where you live) of users that don’t even follow you yet! 3. Hashtags Hashtags are a great way to connect with likeminded people. This means it’s a great way for you to connect with others as well as an incredible way for people to discover you! It’s a guaranteed way to showcase your feed to people who don’t follow you, but are interested in what you are #hashtagging. This tactic produces both extra “likes” and followers, not to mention the fact it can land you on the discover page. Want more #info? We talked all things hashtags a few weeks ago, here. There you have it! If you are wanting to try out Instagram for your business, keep in mind, Mixed Media Marketing Group offers free consultations. Send us an email and lets chat!
A social content calendar allows you to guarantee that you don’t run the risk of spamming one social channel whilst overlooking another. Content calendars give your team an outline of what content needs to be published at a certain date and time. After your content calendar for the week is complete, set aside a couple of hours --preferably in the week prior to plan and schedule your content across all of your social platforms. The more you can schedule out posts in advance to go live automatically at the chosen time, the better, because you will have less to deal with during the week. There’s nothing worse than realizing that it’s prime time on Instagram and you don’t have anything to post!
Hashtags are one of the things we get asked about quite a bit! Do they really matter? How many should I be putting in my post? Do I need to separate them with those little dots on Instagram?
Good news. We are giving you the breakdown on hashtags so that you can know what to keep in mind when you’re building your list. Q: Do they really matter? A: Yes! Hashtags are one of the easiest ways to make you more discoverable, specifically on Instagram. We call this type of discoverability “stumbleupon” marketing. Q: How many should I be adding to my posts? A: Load them up! Instagram allows you to add up to 30 hashtags per post. Q: Do I need to separate them with dots on Instagram? A: People do this just for a cleaner look, aesthetically. This separation makes things easier to read when scrolling through the app! Pro tip: to get these to separate, just click enter after each period (make sure there is no space after the period) to get the line break. Q: What’s the best way to build an awesome hashtag list? A: There are lots of apps out there that help with hashtag list building. Find one that you like and test how well it works in boosting your posts. Save the list on your notes app or in your Instagram planning tool to make is easy to grab for future posts! We are all about the time savers. Q: What should I keep in mind when building hashtag lists? A: You should be thinking about these things: Who is my ideal customer? What do they do for fun? Where do they go? What are they searching for online? |
Mixed Media Marketing GroupWeekly tips and market trends for small businesses Archives
November 2019
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