The main recommendations I gave to Africa Blooms with respect to scheduling that were brought up in the client presentation meeting were:

• the platform with the most engagement which should be focused on;
• the best times to post;
• the recommended frequency of posts; and
• how to increase engagement with followers.

With a limited budget we found Instagram was the best platform as engagement was much higher, whereas Facebook required paid promotions to get any significant reach for a post and Twitter had a number of impressions but zero click-throughs or engagement. Blooming, the owner of Africa Blooms, appreciated this feedback as we gave her a social media strategy for a limited budget she can implement right away and a strategy that includes greater Facebook engagement when she can raise her marketing budget.

I learned a lot during this project by actually using Hootsuite in a marketing capacity and monitoring the Africa Blooms social media channels. We were limited by a lack of budget but it made me focus on ways to increase engagement without paying for it. I found using Hootsuite not nearly as helpful as I would have expected for a platform with so many users and a billion dollar valuation. Even upgrading to Hootsuite Pro it was still a frustrating platform to use with bad UX design and little analytics available without paying for additional reports (e.g. Facebook Insights were really useful but after the first report we would have had to pay). It took much longer to schedule posts than I would have thought. Aside from Hootsuite, one of the major frustrations with social media scheduling is the different requirements of each social media channel. Since Twitter has such a strict character limit (once you attach a picture and link you’re left with very few characters to get a message across), Facebook isn’t conducive to hashtags and on Instagram it is beneficial to use a large number of hashtags you can’t just schedule one post for all three platforms. Each post must be created and scheduled separately for each platform, which is very time consuming.

While we found the greatest engagement on Instagram, it is the hardest platform to optimize your strategy as there is little analytics available. With the little data we did have to go on we found daily posting was the best practice and that the most important factor was to be posting high quality content. Our posts with the least engagement were those with low quality photos so I suspected it had more to do with content than with timing. With Instagram I recommended that Blooming post daily, however, in the client presentation this was a point of concern as she didn’t have the time or available content to be posting everyday. We found a drop in engagement when we didn’t post for a couple days so I think it’s important to be consistent and post daily, especially for a fashion company. I gave Blooming suggestions on how to find more content and what to post and together we determined the best way to go forward would be to post every second day finding additional content from the brands she is selling on her website and their advertising materials.

The research I conducted on best times to post generally said Wednesday and Saturday were the best days, however, this wasn’t reflected in our data. We had very limited data so it was hard to come to any real conclusions on best times. Our data didn’t contradict the research as we found weekday evenings to have good engagement as well as weekends, but we didn’t find that Wednesday and Saturday specifically received better engagement than other days of the week. It would require a lot more time to really have noticeable insights as the engagement we received seemed to be more based on the content of the posts and hashtags used, not necessarily on timing. However, I also believe the stable engagement throughout the week is just a general insight on Instagram, that timing isn’t nearly as important as it is on platforms like Twitter. I think this is mainly due to the longer lifetime of a post on Instagram as compared to Twitter posts (approximately 10 hours on Instagram versus 20 minutes on Twitter). Unfortunately the engagement on Facebook and Twitter was so low that no real insights could be taken at all with respect to best times to post as we received little to no engagement on every post.

Overall this was a really insightful project, not only did I learn how to use Hootsuite and what it takes to create a social media schedule for a company, I also learned a lot from my team members who had a number of helpful insights about best practices for content, email marketing and Google Adwords. Prior to this class I likely would have just created an Adwords campaign without AB testing it but now I’ve learned how important having two campaigns is to determine best practices, and how Adwords campaigns can be tied to social media campaigns. We also noticed that there were certain days Adwords had much greater effect so on a limited budget it was much more cost effective to use it on Thursdays and not waste money on Mondays using Adwords.

This project taught us all a lot about how to create an effective digital marketing campaign on a budget. It’s amazing how much you can do with such a limited budget so we learned how powerful internet marketing is for a company on a limited budget but also how much you can do if you actually do have a budget using promoted posts and Google Adwords. Digital marketing has really leveled the playing field when it comes to advertising. A company no longer needs a million dollar budget for TV, radio and print advertisements. Digital marketing is so much more cost-effective so it gives smaller companies the ability to successfully market their company without a large budget as long as they are smart about the way they do it.

Virtual reality was traditionally used for military training but has more recently has become popular in gaming (video games) and is now being touted as the next big thing in digital marketing. A number of brands such as North Face, Marriott, Volvo have used virtual reality experiences to promote their brands and products. North Face unveiled virtual reality experiences in its Manhattan stores where viewers were able to experience hiking, rock-climbing and base-jumping to excite customers about buying gear and going on an outdoor adventure. Thomas Cook, a global travel company, has placed Samsung VR headsets in 10 of its stores where customers can experience travel destinations like Santorini and Manhattan to encourage users to go on these vacations. Some companies like Birchbox have announced that subscribers will receive a cardboard VR headset and instructions to download branded VR experiences to their smartphones.

With the release of Google Cardboard that only costs $30 virtual reality has now become much more accessible making it much more likely that companies will be making content since it’s now more likely to be consumed. While the quality is not as high as that of Oculus Rift, it doesn’t boast OR’s $350 price tag and makes VR accessible.

Not only are companies using VR getting excitement from their customers trying the VR experiences they are getting a lot of press and attention just for using VR as it is still in its infancy with respect to marketing uses.

With the release of VR headsets for consumers in a wide range of prices VR is becoming more accessible to consumers but the cost and uncertainty around creating VR content and whether it will pay off is still preventing many to companies from giving it a try. However, any big brand does have the ability to film VR content at a relatively low percentage of its marketing budget and the buzz surrounding VR content increases the return for brands. All it requires is cameras that can cover a 360 degree view and a software program to stitch the footage together. Many creators of VR content are using GoPro’s where 16 of the cameras have been attached as shown below.

VR may seem like a daunting and expensive task for companies but programs like Google Jump make it east to create and provide VR content to your audience. Google Jump provides a VR camera that costs $15,000 as well as a video assembler that stitches the files together to create a seamless globe and then a player on YouTube which includes support for viewing via CardBoard or regular viewing without Cardboard.

With the cost coming down I think companies will start adopting it more prevalently, however, the success of VR for marketing will all depend on whether consumers widely adopt it. It’s a risky strategy since it’s not mainstream yet but with the cost so low and it being such an amazing technology it’s only a matter of time in my opinion.

Pinterest now has well over 100 million users but the amount of users isn’t the most attractive part of Pinterest for brands, it’s who these users are. They on average make $100,000 and have a greater propensity to shop online. As an online retailer this is a platform you MUST be on to increase sales.

Especially if you are in any of the industries listed below you should consider Pinterest marketing to all the users looking at ‘pins’ related to your field.

If you’re a company and are not sure how to go about marketing on Pinterest there are now a number of marketing firms offering Pinterest marketing and some even built to exclusively offer Pinterest marketing. If you’re not familiar with the platform, Pinterest is an image based platform where you can search just about anything and it will pull up ‘pins’ (often hundreds) that people have uploaded of that search item. Most pins are images, some lead you to other sites but basically it’s like a search on Google images except the content is all posted by those on Pinterest and you can then ‘pin’ that post to your own board, like a digital scrapbook. As a brand you want pins of your product to come up and now with Pinterest for Business the user can buy your product straight from there.

It may seem like a leap to start marketing on ANOTHER platform when your social media department is already doing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and maybe also YouTube, LinkedIn and the many other smaller platforms out there that may appeal to your audience, however, for the reasons above it is worth it. Pinterest is the most profitable website for social media marketing with respect to ROI.

Some examples of brands doing an awesome job on Pinterest are Birchbox, Target, Whole Foods and Nordstrom to name a few.

For example, Whole Foods Pinterest board features a hundreds of healthy recipes with droolworthy photos to match. A key factor to Pinterest that they are doing well is not just blatantly advertising their products but appealing to the interests of their customers by posting healthy recipes.

Tips For Pinterest Marketing

Buffer, which now allows you to schedule, manage and measure your pins, has released a number of articles in the last year with some great tips to start and optimize your Pinterest strategy and I will summarize some of the top tips here.

1. Aim for 5-30 pins per day, Buffer found that 1-2 pins were day was not getting them very good engagement but upon increasing to 10 pins per day engagement went up 150%. Buffer allows you to schedule your pins so if you don’t have time to spend time on Pinterest every day you can go on, find a bunch of pins and schedule them for the week.
2. Buffer also found that the best times to pin are Saturdays, afternoons and evenings, specifically between 8-11pm is the time they recommend. However, timing matters less on Pinterest as pins are highly searchable. Also keep in mind, these are the top subjects by day:

3. Pinterest is highly searchable compared to other platforms so posts have a much longer lifetime. Piqora discovered that 40% of clicks on a pin happen within the first day and 70% happen wihtin the first 2 days. The remaining 30% of clicks happen all the way up to 30 days and beyond.

4. With respect to your actual pins you need to make sure you have high quality images with descriptive captions so they are highly searchable and Pinnable. You must also make sure your pins link to a useful and relevant website. This isn’t the place for hashtags, promotions or sales tactics like (“Buy Now!”)

5. Don’t get caught up in trying to get followers. Pinterest’s Smart Feed places Pins on users homepages according to an algorithm which doesn’t take into account followers. They do base the placement of pins on the quality of pins, related pins to what a user pins and interests the user is following. This means people are more likely to discover your pins from a search on Pinterest than just strictly from pins in their feed.

This should be enough to convince you and get you started on Pinterest. With the extremely high growth Pinterest has had there is increasingly more and more data coming out and tips on how to improve your presence on Pinterest so get started today!

Instagram has become a necessary platform for companies marketing to consumers, it boasts the highest growth and engagement rates of any social media platform and is now used by the majority of top brands around the world. However, despite having over 400 million monthly active users and being a major platform for social media marketing analytics for Instagram are not widely available. Buffer, Hootsuite, Twitter Analytics and many other programs provide useful analytics in order to maximize your social media strategy for other platforms but the options for Instagram are very limited. There are programs like Iconosquare that can provide basic analytics but obtaining data on your followers isn’t easy. With the rise in Instagram advertising where mobile ad revenues are projected to reach 2.81 billion by 2017, it is likely that analytics for Instagram will greatly improve but for now we must rely on the limited analytics available and reports which analyze data from Instagram users to provide the general best times to post.

In this post I will round up some of the more reliable studies done on Instagram posting and give you an answer to the question “when’s the best time to post” once and for all, or does time even matter?As you can see the most popular hours to post are 1am and 4pm yet 1am is not when users are most engaged so your post is likely to get buried within the 80 million photos that are posted to Instagram every day. Since Instagram is primarily a mobile app people tend to check the platform throughout the day so it is more important to post when there is less content to compete with.

1. A study released by AdWeek shows that you may want to post near breakfast time as there aren’t many new posts showing up between 6am and noon (less than 8% of posts occur in the morning) but people are still checking their Instagram feeds during this time. It’s not recommended you post earlier than 6am as there are a surprising amount of posts put up in the first 6 hours of the day.

2. Huffington Post, using data from Latergramme, found that Wednesday at 5pm is the ideal time to post.

3. A major factor to consider when deciding on when to post is where most of your followers located. Due to the lack of analytics for Instagram it’s difficult to determine where your followers are located but you may be able to get a sense of this by manually looking at a sample of your followers feeds and determining what percentage are in what time zone. You may also find the best method is just to test out different times of day and determine when you receive the most engagement. Iconosquare can track your accounts posts over a timeline and give you recommendations on best times to post based on the data from your own account.

4. As you can see in the following graphic by Simply Measured Instagram engagement for top brands really does not fluctuate all that much, there seems to be a spike around 8pm so you could test this as a best time to post but I think this answers the question of ‘when is the best time to post’ with IT DOESN’T MATTER (or it’s at least not the most important factor when planning your Instagram posts.

However the graphic below provides useful information if you’re trying to determine when there will be less traffic on Instagram (i.e. less competition for your post).

And again this information shows engagement is the same whether it’s Wednesday prime time, off hours or on the weekend.

So when is the best time to post on Instagram? The answer doesn’t really matter but that’s not the answer you want to hear so I believe 5pm Wednesday is a great time to test to see if you get greater engagement as well as weekday mornings (6am-noon).

Most businesses recognize the importance of being on Instagram; it has the highest growth and now boasts over 300 million monthly active users (making it officially larger than Twitter (with 284 million active users). However, sheer numbers are not the only reason all businesses should be on Instagram. It has a number of benefits that make it unique compared to Facebook and Twitter marketing. In this post I’ve outlined the top four benefits of Instagram over other social networks.

Highest Engagement

Unlike Facebook where only about 5% of your followers will actually see your post on Instagram your post will show up in all of your followers news feeds. A recent study done by Forrester found that Instagram content generated 4.21% per-follower engagement. This is 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement than Twitter. It’s the best tool to foster a community around your brand and engage with current and potential customers. Especially for small businesses, building a community is key to growth.

Longer Half-Life

The half-life of a social media post refers to the amount of time it takes for the post to fall to half of it’s peak value. This is measured by looking at the lifetime of a post and the half-life is the point where your post has received 50% of all the engagement it’s going to get. For Twitter the average half-life is about 20 minutes whereas on Instagram it is closer to 10 hours. Posts on Instagram get higher engagement and last longer increasing the return on the time your company puts into crafting its social media post.

Greater Discoverability

Not only does Instagram not hide your posts so your posts show up in all of your followers newsfeed, your posts may also show up in the ‘explore’ tab of your followers’ followers exponentially increasing your reach for each post and making your account discoverable to a huge amount of potential customers. Especially since these will generally be people following your followers they are targeted accounts more likely to follow you than if you were exposed to untargeted users.

Users can also discover your account through hashtags and geotags. We all know hashtags from their success on Twitter but unlike Twitter that has a very small character count Instagram lets you include up to 40 hashtags in a post. This way you can include general hashtags where your post will be exposed to a large number of users (although it will get diluted very quickly as other posts use this hashtag) and specific hashtags which give your post the ability to be discoverable for longer periods of time. See for example the post below from a popular Vancouver restaurant, they use general hashtags like #pasta and #homemade to gain wide potential reach although people looking at this hashtag will only see this for a few minutes as it will immediately be pushed down the list from the #pasta list which has over 6 million posts. To be searchable for longer they have included more specific hashtags like #yvreats and #mygastown that are specific to their location and they were then shown as a ‘top post’ under the hashtag #yvreats and will remain near the top of this hashtag for longer.

One of the best tools on Instagram for businesses targeting local customers is the geotag function. This allows instagram users to search a restaurant, retail store or any business with a physical location and then see every post that has been tagged at that location. This is extremely beneficial for restaurants. Instead of going to Yelp to look for reviews a user can look at the geotag for a restaurant they want to try and see photos of the restaurants décor, food, menu, staff, kitchen and/or any other posts people may have put up at that location.

It’s Free!

Yes, it costs nothing to post on Instagram. Unlike Facebook where you must pay a fee to promote every post in order to get it to more than just 5% of your followers and Twitter which gives you the chance to promote a post in order to make it more visible to your followers and potential followers, Instagram automatically puts your post in the feed of all of your followers and likely in the ‘explore’ tab of many of your followers followers all for free. Instagram has recently added sponsored content into people’s feeds but prior to this all posts were on equal ground cost-wise. This makes Instagram a must-use tool for small businesses or those with a small marketing budget. Your only cost is to create the content!

Before doing any work in digital marketing I never understood the frustrations of the 140 character limit on Twitter. On a personal account Twitter is mainly used as a news feed, to share articles or links to other sites or quick quips or other musings. Yes it could be frustrating to shorten your thoughts but you could always send your thoughts out in multiple tweets or if it was a longer more personal thought you would just use Facebook. However, after doing the content creation for brands’ digital marketing the character limit was a source of daily frustration.  For most branding tweets we’re including a link to the product and this link adds 23 characters limiting the space you have in a tweet to actually convey a message. Especially now that research has shown that tweets with photos get 313% more engagement you’re more likely to add a photo to your post which takes up another 24 characters. After including a photo and link to product you’re only left with 93 characters. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time attempting to shorten my tweets so they still make sense but are shortened enough to meet the limit. It also creates an additional pain point in that when scheduling your companies’ social media posts for the week you can’t just enter the information and post to Facebook and Twitter, you have to create separate posts for each platform due to the restrictive limits on Twitter. It also limits the ability to provide customer service on Twitter, it’s hard to respond to a customer’s complaint or question in 140 characters.

I’m trying not to be too optimistic in case Twitter doesn’t end up lifting the character restriction but since they did lift the character restriction for direct messages last summer it’s possible they are realizing the limits they’re creating for users with the character restriction.

It has recently come out that Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than 140 characters. There have also been discussions that if Twitter does not do this they will at least remove things like links, user handles and photos from being included in the character count. Apparently the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is supportive of the change. He has expressed a need for Twitter to reach more mainstream audiences and lifting or altering the character count would do so. It makes sense for Twitter to do so when newer platforms like Instagram are growing and having much greater engagement between brands and their customers. In order not to lose to Instagram with the rise in visual marketing Twitter is going to have to improve their photo sharing abilities and make it easier on marketers to use Twitter for their brands and increasing the character count is one way to do this.

At least in my world Twitter is the most difficult platform to use due to the character count. It really limits what you can do with the platform and forces you to create separate text content for a Twitter post, which is often of inferior quality due to the abbreviations required and stunted thoughts, making it an inferior platform when compared to Facebook and Twitter. Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.

In this post I review the article Email is the Best Way to Reach Millennials by Kristin Naragon, Director of Email Solutions at Adobe.

There are endless articles on the web about why companies should target millennials, and how much time millennials spend on their smartphone and checking email but in this article Kristin Naragon actually recommends how a company should go about email marketing to this target audience. While many would assume social media is the best way to target this age group the author uses a study conducted by Adobe to show that email is the most effective way to target millennials.

Naragon’s four main pieces of advice for email marketing to millennials are: (1) mobile optimization is key, (2) timing is everything, (3) optimize emails for images and use graphics, and (4) understand your customer to send less but better targeted emails. According to Adobe’s study 88% of millennials are regularly using their smartphones to check email so it is incredibly important for a company to optimize their email campaigns for mobile. It can be frustrating to receive an email that doesn’t load properly because the company has not prioritized mobile. Many other studies show that millennials now prefer to use mobile over desktop (source: BetaNews) for everything from Google searches (Google has stated that more searches now come from smartphones and tablets than laptops and desktops, source: AdWeek) to mobile shopping (source: Shopify)

This emphasizes the importance of mobile in general for all companies. Not only must your company’s email campaigns be optimized for mobile but your website should also work seamlessly on a mobile phone. Without getting too far into all areas of mobile strategy lets just say that mobile must be a priority for any company with respect to its website, app and marketing campaigns. When releasing any piece of content a company should ask, will my customer be seeing this on a laptop/desktop or on a phone/tablet, and will it be effective on both?

With respect to timing, Nagano references Adobe’s study which shows that of millennials are more likely than any other age group to check email in bed so it would be worth experimenting with sending emails early in the morning and late at night to see if greater ROI is obtained during these times. This is a great insight into how to best use email marketing. Obtain as much insight as you can about the routines of your target audience and see when and where they’re checking email and when they’re most likely to actually convert (make a purchase, sign up etc.).

One of the most crucial pieces of advice in this article, that I hope more email marketers will listen to, is to send fewer but better targeted emails. Adobe’s study showed that many millennials want to see fewer and less repetitive emails from brands. While Adobe’s study does not have the most convincing statistics in this respect, other studies not mentioned in this article show that when asked how marketers could improve their emails the #1 answer was less frequent emails (source: Campaign Monitor) and the most common effect of frequent emails is disengagement (open and click-through rates drop). As you can see from the image below, read rates drastically drop with an increase in email frequency and complaints from recipients increase.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Marketers should really focus on creating quality content to their audience and if they are currently sending out a large number of emails, test whether conversions increase with a decrease in email frequency.

While I agree with the methods Naragon recommends in this article to improve your email marketing, unfortunately, the study used to support her claims is not the most convincing. The study, which was conducted by Adobe, only surveyed approximately 400 U.S. based white-collar workers over the age of 18 about their use of email (source: Adobe). Only a portion of these respondents are in the millennial age group so the statistics she references  to support her claims are not entirely convincing on their own. However, I found a number of other studies also supporting the claim that email is the most effective form of marketing to millennials, as well as studies referenced throughout this post that back up her recommendations. Research from Principal Financial Group found that email is the preferred way millennials want to keep in touch with companies (source: PFG).

Source: Why Brands Should Care About Millennials

And not only do millennials much prefer to be contacted by email over social media and other forms of contact but email also has the best ROI for marketers (source: Millennials love of email).

Source: Campaign Monitor

Despite the rise in social media, Kristin Naragon’s article and the additional studies I have referenced show just how important email marketing still is, especially when directed at millennials. With a higher ROI and being the preferred method of contact by millennials from brands companies may want to reconsider pouring more money into social media and optimize their email marketing strategy instead.

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