At Mobloggy, we love sharing our expertise in social media, and in the recent weeks we posted about powerful benefits of Instagram marketing for your business, together with essential steps for a powerful Instagramming routine. If you’ve read through, you might feel like this channel requires a lot of work, and that is true. Below is a run-down of 5 essential tools that you want to use to boost your Instagram efforts – 5 tools that we use ourselves. Use them to their full potential and one day you might enjoy Buzfeed fame like some other pro #Igers have.
Understand the examples as concepts, not as the only alternatives available. Software we present here does have competitors, and the ones we hand-picked are our proven personal favorites. All of the tools featured here are free and we are giving them shout-outs without receiving compensations in any form. Getting likes and followers on Instagram is super important and it can be quite difficult to gain them, unless you target your audience using hashtag provided by KENJI! Some people evenbuy likes on Instagram to accomplish the same effect.
Statigram
Statigram is amazing. “All Instagram online”. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. Log in with your Instagram account and enjoy the magic.
Find your most engaged followers. That allows you to strengthen valuable relationships, as giving extra love to the most engaged people is a powerful community building practice.
See who unfollowed you. This helps you evaluate your posting consistency by digging into why those people tapped that ugly button.
See a break-down of your growth stats – just to make yourself feel great, to brag to your client, or to be able to plan for near future.
Go through your content and see which posts did best. That shows you what works and what you should do more/less of.
See what percentage of #instalove you get comes from fols. That gives you a hands-on idea on how to work your brand voice and tone, as knowing this stat shows you who it actually is that you talk to.
Optimization. A key tool for a dedicated #iger. As depicted in the screenshot below, this tab tells you what times and days are best for you to post in. Instagram does not allow scheduling through external services, therefore knowing the stat gives you a high competitive advantage. No matter how many great blog posts about best-practice of timing posts you’ve read, your own community is unique and knowing it well gives you a wealth of decision-making ground. What happened in our own experience is that a large and highly engaged group of following was in Japan – the different time zone brought along ideal times that we would not have expected.
Moreover, Statigram gives you a list of the current top 100 Instagram hashtags. Use at least one of those in each of your posts. The list is also provided by Webstagram, the main competitor of Statigram.
Statigram provides a long list of marketing tools, and the last one we’ll mention here is Comment Tracker. By clicking on “Manage”, you open a tab that allows you to never miss replying to a comment. Doing so, even if just very quickly, brings stoke level and engagement in your instarelationships rocket high.
Pixlr Express
Pixlr is in Top 10 Android Apps of 2013 by Mashable. Once you start using the app, you will see why. The functionality is HUGE for a free app. Accounting for how fun it can be to edit photos on a touch screen, you will not even feel like using PhotoShop much at all.
A decent competitor to Pixlr is Snapseed. A complement, on the other side, can be PhotoGrid and other collage makers. Instagram works best with square photos, but if you have a good reason for, say, not cropping your favorite painting, use PhotoGrid to add white stripes. Note that white is the color to go with, for Instagram’s background is white too, and matching the color scheme looks neater.
The huge functionality of Pixlr reminds of expensive software such as Photoshop, and the fun of editing on a touch screen makes you feel like you’re in an art class.
PhotoRepost
PhotoRepost and other apps for reposting Instagram photos are GREAT for two things. One, if you are short on content one gloomy day, you can snatch a beautiful photo from someone else. More than that, you can do so in a way that makes authors happy, as most #igers see reposts as another way of giving them recognition.
Two, you can repost photos as a part of strategic features. With as few as a couple hundred fans, you are attractive enough for a lot of people to want to participate in a feature contest. With a bigger audience, you can create your own hashtag and see big crowds striving for a feature from you. Instagram is, after all, a medium where members are narcissistic and proud of it. “#me” is number one hashtag there, which is not a bad thing at all, for Instagram stands on genuine content coming from real people who also are the authors of the published photos.
Features are a great way of engaging your community and showing your appreciation for the beauty of their images. Giving love brings you love back, and apps like PhotoRepost allow you to do that in a powerful way.
Google Drive
Drive is another one of powerful tools for Instagram marketing. You will love the it if you do edit photos on a computer, if you receive photos from collaborators, if you collect photos for posting later, and more. Create a folder for your Instagram account, then make a couple sub folders like Posted, To Post, To Edit, etc. Have the folders automatically sync across all your devices.
Competitors of Drive include DropBox and Samsung apps.
Google Analytics
The fifth and last tool for Instagram marketing brings us back to analyzing your Instagram activity, which in turn helps you estimate ROI. With just Instagram or Statigram, you will never know how many people clicked on that sacred link in your bio. With website analytics by Google, you do gain that valuable piece of data. This will allow you to justify your Instagram marketing spending and to keep tweaking the strategy. If your business is coming up with the best instagram bio ideas then you will be more likely to get clicks through to your site, justifying your spending even more.
Google Analytics have a number of competitors, but the level of integration of social metrics and the fact that the genius service is free of charge makes us look no further.
Mobloggy is Here to Help
Now that we unveiled our secrets, we remain available to tell you even more. Contact us for a consulting session or for finding out how exactly your very business can benefit from getting together with Mobloggy’s expert online marketing. We’ll help you keep it social and simple.