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Digital Chai Pe Charcha – How To Use Instagram For Business

Posted on by Anuradha Nair
Reading Time: 3 minutes

The fourth edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha was held at Karya Space on Saturday, May 28th 2016. The turnout for this event was fantastic with over 60 entrepreneurs, working professionals and social media influencers participating in the session. The topic for this session was all about Instagram and how it could be used to leverage business.

Instagram is a very powerful platform which when used correctly can help brands and business reach out to a niche and specific audience. The customers that brands acquire through Instagram can display strong loyalty towards the product or service.

Here’s the presentation that was discussed during the session

How To Use Instagram For Your Business from Social Beat

It was a very interactive session with the participants sharing their personal experiences with Instagram and asking plenty of questions. Here are few tweets shared by participants about the event.

EventTweet1

EventTweet2

Here’s a quick recap for those who attended the session and for those who could not make it yet would like to leverage Instagram for their business

  1. Instagram is a young and an emerging platform and great for Indian brands to get in early
  2. Instagram pictures showcase not just a good looking product or a service but a lifestyle
  3. High quality and organic pictures work very well on this platform and products need to be showcased with a story
  4. Text showcased on images in a creative and aesthetic way can work very well to promote content like blogs and articles
  5. Instagram does not allow clickable links on the content accompanying the image. Therefor the bio and the website link becomes extremely important to direct the potential customers to the website
  6. Instagram Ads are a great way to reach the relevant target audience. To run ads on Instagram, one needs to use the Facebook ad manager and link the brands Instagram page to the corresponding Facebook page. More details are mentioned in the presentation shared above.
  7. Instagram ads work especially well for mobile apps and websites that are mobile optimized
  8. It is important to keep track of your followers and unfollowers through apps like Crowdfire, social rank etc
  9. Hashtags are very important to help the right audience and can be broadly divided into three categories – Popular, Industry related and Brand specific
  10. There are many influencers on Instagram who specialize in a certain industry, eg. Food, beauty, Fashion, Parenting etc. To help reach the right demographic brands need to leverage and tie with these influencers.
  11. Using analytical tools available online, it is imperative to understand the progress of the page and even analyze the best performing hashtags
  12. Maintaining a steady flow of interesting posts and content is crucial since a long break may result in losing the traction generated over time

While these pointers can help you, like any other platform, Instagram is constantly changing and brands will have to adapt and implement these changes. In fact over the past couple of days, Instagram has rolled out a massive algorithm change due to which you will see posts based on your interests rather than chronological order. The reach due to hashtags will decrease and your followers will be more important than ever.

What has you experience with Instagram been so far? Do share your feedback in the comments!

 

Key takeaways from the comScore Advertising Benchmarks Report’s 2016

Posted on by Srilakshmi
Reading Time: 3 minutes

ComScore recently published a report that highlights the advertising benchmarks for the year 2016. As a leading global cross-platform measurement company that accurately assesses audiences, brands, and consumers, comScore has analyzed and published a report on how ad blocking, invalid traffic, and viewability of ads are impacting delivery of advertisements across the globe. The report also lists what the concerned industries can do to tackle these challenges. The following is a brief summary on the key learning from the report.

The digital marketing industry, particularly the digital advertising industry, has experienced constant and powerful growth that has not show any signs of decline, so far. However, in order to continue its global rise, the industry needs to guarantee clean ad delivery, i.e. ads should be viewable to the consumers, and it should be free from fraud. Nevertheless, an ad that is not seen by consumers cannot have any impact.

Based on research and data mining, the comScore report enlightens us with some key learning across the following three extensive categories.

1. The growing global phenomenon of ad blocking

Issue:

Young users aged 18-24 are more likely to block desktop ads than any other average user. In fact, young males are 100% more likely and young females are 42% more likely to block ads in comparison with other users from the US. Moreover, users from higher income segments block ads more than average users.

How to resolve this:

The sole way to resolve this issue is to refocus on user experience. These statistics are a wake-up call for all the digital advertisers to improve their ad quality in terms of content as well as user experience. Seeking less invasive options, with or without advertising, can also be a good alternative.

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2. The rise in sophisticated ad fraud

Issue:

In December 2015, almost 80% of the global invalid traffic (IVT) was sophisticated. Additionally, ads that have less transparency like video ads on programmatic exchanges are almost 4.5 times more prone to IVT than its direct counterparts. In general, with wider CPMs, videos give a higher chance for IVT than display ads.

How to resolve this:

Sophisticated IVT requires advanced analytics to detect. Therefore, it is very crucial to protect websites and all ad campaigns using latest methods like comScore Triple Detection Technology, which goes beyond the standard filtration. This sophisticated IVT detection tool uses three key data assets, viz. ad tags, census page tags and a panel of humans. Detection methods like these not only measures invalid traffic, but also provides more protection. If sophisticated IVT detection methods are not in place, the whole advertising processes might go into waste.

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3. 50% of the ads worldwide are still not seen

Issue:

According to this comScore global report, more than half of ads worldwide still don’t have the opportunity to be seen. The desktop display viewability ranges from 39%-50% across all markets. Video viewability is even lesser; this is due to IVT on programmatic video exchanges. According to research, direct buys see higher viewability than their programmatic counterparts.

How to resolve this:

For better viewability and impact, one needs to improve delivery. Invalid traffic together with low viewability can create mayhem in any campaign. Therefore, when the performance of a campaign is evaluated only by using ads that have an opportunity to make an impression, advertising can be made two times more efficient. This will help publishers prove the worth of their advertising and marketers measure the true return on investment (ROI).

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To summarize, ad blocking, invalid traffic (IVT), and low viewability are the three key challenges in digital advertising. However, by taking the above mentioned steps, clean campaign impressions and potent results can be guaranteed.

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