Social Media Marketing Trends – Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat

In terms of SEO marketing, social media is a creative and effective way to create outreach for your brands and advertisements. Currently, Facebook serves as the standard of social media use in terms of its number of users, shares, and even the amount of information accessible. Next on the list is Twitter.

Yet, other social media sites, such as Pinterest, Instagram (owned by Facebook), and Snapchat provide a great format to market to users and share information across the web. For businesses, social media marketing should include all of the big name players, and the interconnectivity of sharing across all of these platforms is essential in creating brand awareness and likeability.

Following is a breakdown of each outlet, and how you can affectively use them in your social media marketing strategy.

Instagram

Instagram is a photo sharing service that allows businesses to create brand recognition through the use of visual content. Instagram recently released a 15 second, filter video service that outperforms Twitter’s Vine service and allows businesses to create advertisements for users that can gather shares.

It is essential to set up the right Instagram account that separates your personal page from your business page. Creating a short and creative bio is one way to get users to follow you after they uncover a shared post. Also, include a link to your webpage from your bio to better mediate conversion goals and visitors to your website.

Instagram’s posting is a bit more relaxed than Facebook or Twitter, so creating a timely schedule and articulating the right photos and videos to share will ensure that users are not bombarded by mindless and constant posting within their feed and will be more likely to follow you. The secret of Instagram is that over 60% of users already follow a brand, so regular posting with new and unique content that applies to your brand’s mission and likeability will market to users without having to go the extra mile for outreach.

Since 90% of information processed in our brains is visual, it makes sense that posts should be sized for the most professional quality and resolution. Using Photoshop or even Instagram’s own editing tools are a great to create a panoramic image that sticks within the user’s memory.

Users can be very skeptical. Think of the video you’ve probably seen of McDonalds professionals dressing up a fake cheeseburger for its marketing campaign. The secret to posting is to post authentic visual quality that doesn’t come off as too pushy or even fake. Create inspiring images that take a unique look at the world will market your brand more effectively. Engage with consumers through comments, photo sharing campaigns, and even following them back.

Pinterest

Pinterest is also a picture sharing service, often compared to a visual search engine. Pinterest business accounts come with a lot of perks, such as tracking tools, which track the average ppc of a pin, its sales increase, and how many times its repined.

Pinterest remains the number one social media site in terms of shares as one estimate states that the half-life of a pin is 16,000 x more than a Facebook post.

Knowing which categories apply to the gender and demographic of your customers is key. Images with higher resolutions, are lighter, and don’t include faces have higher re-pin rates.

There is so much research into Pinterest’s growing market because Pinterest works for business branding. Including keywords into pinned photos, content from your own website, and even infographics and listicles are simple SEO strategies that work miracles across Pinterest.

Make sure to include links to your own website, categorize your boards, post frequently, and link to other social media platforms to maximize user engagement.

Snapchat

For most SEOs and business marketers, Snapchat might sound silly as a means to create brand recognition or to even improve your own ad revenue. Yet, Snapchat has over 100 million active users and includes 400 million snaps a day.

This growing market allows marketers to target younger audiences and provide more personalized accounts of the brands they follow. Platforms like the NBA have been prolific in improving its own audience outreach through Snapchat. Snapchat is a video sharing service that creates storylines of video snaps, which last for 24 hours.

Snapchat is a great way to unveil new and exciting products to users, such as debuting a new fashion line or menu item to your audience in an exclusive and esoteric way.

This is one way to spread brand recognition without actually marketing to your audience. People will be hungry to find out what’s new with your brand. Snapchat can also be a cool way to provide behind-the-scenes looks at the day-to-day operation of your business.

Snapchat includes filters and fun tools that can help enhance the quality of your videos and gather more shares. Many companies have partnered with Snapchat to create geofilters and Snapchat sponsored lenses to create fun and interactive ways to engage with their brand and its products.

One advantage Snapchat provides is that video sharing can also be shared with third parties without leaving Snapchat. Videos can direct you to a company’s website without having the user being forcefully removed from Snapchat itself. Snapads have also undergone a few case studies, which has been shown to increase visual recognition and even be more effective in gathering views than Facebook and YouTube ads.