Intro

There is no marketing without Social Media anymore. Marketing strategies need to optimize social media posts in order to get the biggest punch. This means that social media messaging is critical. Hence, why we wrote this social media guide. 

A few home truths to begin: One tweet usually does not make all the difference. Although nowadays no one knows what will go viral next. There is often little rhyme and reason to it. But also: One thousand cuts can bleed you dry. Small mistakes can add up to friction. And, that friction can cost you visibility and authority in your market niche.

So, this article serves as a social media guide and covers how to use social media at its full potential to get the best results for your business.

This social media guide is a long piece of content. Buckle in.

The social media guide: Where most businesses should have a social media presence

These are the networks that most people use today when leveraging social media to drive visibility. None of these social media networks should be unknown to you. 

But, and this is a big ‘but’: don’t start with the social media network. That is like putting the cart in front of the horse. Rather, think about your customer first and what content they need. The medium is the message.

What can you publish that you can repurpose for each of these networks? What of your content can stretch the furthest? Then, pick a couple of social media networks to start with that you believe most align with your perfect buyer’s hang out location. Invest the majority of your time and energy there, and only expand as you get better and faster at providing valuable content.

Let’s start with Profiles: Your Home Page on Social Media Networks

First rule of this social media guide: Spend the necessary time on your social media profile. It goes without saying that your profile page on each social network is important.

Your profile should be business centric. Your brand is the star here, not you (unless your brand is a “person brand”). Your profile page should look and feel professional and designed. Put together. Just like you.

Profile Photo

The photo is the instantly recognizable visual identity of the brand. If your brand is a “person brand”, meaning you have a person that’s effectively the brand or representing the brand, then use their picture. If not, you should use a logo icon to represent your brand. This photo should be the same across all your social networks. Consider this another rule of this social media guide: consistency across social media networks to make your brand recognizable across the social media landscape. You want potential buyers or customers to find you easily across social networks.

Profile Background Photo

The background photo should reinforce and support your brand’s image. It’s a good place to put a visual or emotional image that conveys something important about your brand’s personality, culture, or beliefs. Depending on the brand and the social network, you can also embed your slogan or tag line into the background to give your brand some extra messaging lift. Don’t overcrowd your profile, though. Keep in clean and crisp.

URL

Most networks allow a URL. If they do, you should use it. But, instead of linking to your profile, the best practice is to link to a “link tree.” A link tree is a page that has a list of other links, formatted to work well for mobile consumption. Think of this as another rule of this social media guide: you cannot expect your potential customers and buyers to be browsing your social media messages on a desktop or lap top computer. Your profile needs to be formatted to work for mobile consumption. Make sure that whatever links you offer in your link tree are accessible for mobile consumption as well. Keep your link tree updated with the things you’re talking about in social media. Links to articles. Links to training. Links to offers.

Some businesses customize their link tree for each social network. That is commendable, but it is a lot of work. I would suggest you start with the basics and have a single link tree to use on all networks. Once you are more comfortable with providing content for different social media networks, you can branch out and customize your link tree for each social network.

The links should be URL shortened, and UTM parameters added for tracking. You want to be able to see what links work best. Dead weight links that do not provide click throughs should be eradicated. Track and Test. Track and Test. You must be willing to ‘kill your darlings’. Links that do not catch eyeballs are just a dead weight in your link tree. 

You can build link trees on your own website (a custom page optimized for mobile devices) and that’s what we’d recommend. But, if you are not comfortable building pages on your website, you can also use various other services. Just remember, these can cost additional money and be harder to track.

Mini Bio

Most networks have a short section for a bio. Your bio should be tight, and again written for who you serve. Usually, it contains what, who for, and why. Ideally, it should also be an inspirational call-to-action. Even in networks like Linkedin where your profile can be longer, you should start with a short bio. Then, fill in details as necessary. It is more important to have a bare bones bio up and running quickly than to spend a lot of time perfecting it before you publish. 

Remember, the mini bio is about you. But, it’s the ‘you’ in service to your tribe. Examples of a good short bio are: Restaurant: “great vegan food for health nuts because life is meant to be lived.” WiFi Equipment Vendor: “WiFi solutions for retail businesses because shopper experience makes retail work.”

Verification

At some point, many networks let you apply for verification. As soon as you can do this, you should. It gives credibility to your brand through the social networks. Think of it as a stamp of approval. And, in many cases, social network algorithms give more visibility to verified profiles. And it is hardly ever a negative to have more eyeballs land on your page.

Buttons, CTAs, etc.

Some networks let you build out contact buttons and other calls to action. In these networks, take advantage of the real estate and do it. Also, if possible, include any branded hashtags that you use. Again, you want to make sure that your buyers/ customers can easily find you across social media networks.

Now let’s get to the meat of this social media guide: the social media messaging strategies.

The social media guide: how to engage on social media.

You might expect that the next point of discussion of this social media guide would be on how to post on social media. But actually, I believe it is important to mention social media engagement before the strategies for posting on social media. The reason is simple: it’s MORE important.

Trust me on this. Social media engagement is the most important social media messaging strategy. And this holds true across the various social media networks. If there is one think you should take away from this social media guide, this is probably it.

The majority of content you produce for social media is comments on other creators’ work. When you engage on other peoples’ content, you help their content get more reach. And, you expose yourself to their audience. The Social Media comments are the first impression that someone has of your business. Make sure they’re helpful and in service to the person and the tribe.

When the creators review your comment, they look at your profile and other posts. They see your interesting content. And, they engage. And because you’re causing more activity on the social network which drives revenue for the social network, they reward you with more authority.

So, when you think about your social media strategy, assume that engagement is where you will spend the majority of your time.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s $1.80 strategy is a great method to use. I’ve linked it for your review.

Next up in this social media guide: strategies for posting on the various social media networks.

The social media guide: Social media posts

Let’s Start with the Basics—Archetypes, Audience, & Objective.

Excuse us for starting off this section of the social media guide with a deep dive into the fundamentals of marketing messaging.

Archetypes

Archetypes are a classification of common behaviors people have in general, and while it is not social media specific, the classification is very useful for messaging your perfect buyer. Using archetypes simplifies building out content and other materials that resonate with your perfect buyer. Most people use a version of Jungian’s 12 archetypes for this. But, for the purposes of simplification for this social media guide, I’ve shortened it down to the most common types you see on social media. If you want more information on Jungian archetypes in marketing messaging and finding your perfect buyer, watch out for a future blog post.

In general, when you show up in social media, you’ll lead with one of these archetypes. Some are obviously more in service of the tribe than others. And, sometimes you’ll “break” your archetype. But overall people crave consistency. Show up the same way in social media, aligned with your brand, and increase trust. When you look at many popular social media accounts, you will see this particular pattern emerge. Popular social media accounts are following a particular archetype that the creator has determined to best describe the intended audience.

Audience

First and most important: Write content to support your perfect buyer’s needs. It might seem like an oversimplification, but it’s so important and often overlooked. Many people use their social media profiles in a way that’s all about themselves. Me. Me. Me. And that might be fine for an individual person’s account, but not for a business social media account. Instead, you need to know your tribe and their needs. Your tribe is all the people in your market place.

Once you know your tribe, and once you realize that certain positions and certain phrases resonate different with different people, your social media account needs to be all about your perfect buyer. You might wonder who is this perfect buyer? How do I know who to cater to? Well, this is where the Jungian archetypes come in, they are a shortcut. They help you pick the right kind of phrases and positions to reach your target audience. If your perfect buyer is young moms, your content should be for young moms. If it’s for CEOs, then it should be content that would be interesting for CEOs.

Let’s face it, this is not rocket science. This social media guide is not re-inventing the wheel. It is, in fact, stating what should be obvious: Write for your perfect buyer. Don’t broadcast how innovative you are. The only ‘you’ here is the you in service to them.

Objective

Second, write posts to match your objective. Again, this seems obvious. But it is surprising how often we can forgot or get distracted by the thrill of the medium. Of course, we all want likes, follows, shares, and visits to our website. Leads and sales. But, these are goals. The destination. They are not the objective.

Instead, the objective is how this specific post will move your audience — the perfect buyers you have identified —  along the path to the destination. Your goal is to reel in the fish. Your social media post is the bait.

Objectives run along these lines:

• Know. Make them feel like they know you and are familiar to you.
• Like. Like as in “they like you” and like as in “they are similar to you”.
• Educate. Establish credibility as knowledgeable and authoritative.
• Mindset. Make people feel good. Make them feel like they can do it! Some people call this one Inspire.
• Converse. Talk to them. Engage them in where they are and what they want.
• Promote. Give people a secret way to transact because they’re special.

Now that we have discussed the basics, the next part of this social media guide will address the various individual social media networks and what types of social media posts will work for each network. 

The social media guide: The social media networks

Twitter (~ 330 million users)   

It is no coincidence that we open this part of the social media guide with Twitter. It is the social media platform of the moment. Twitter positions itself as a place of open, real-time communications. You see this throughout their platform, including the prompt for you to add a Tweet (“what’s happening?”).

People love or hate Twitter. There are a large amount of unused accounts. But, people that use it use it regularly, with over 86% of people returning daily.

Visual Style 

Twitter is following the general trend towards more visuals.

According to Khoros:

• Animated GIFs get 3 to 5 times the number of likes.
• Photos get a 313% increase in engagement and 35% additional retweets.
• Videos receive a 6x bump in retweets over photos and 3x more retweets than GIFs. You can generally get a 28% increase in engagement with a video.
• Visuals also let you include more text than the character limit.
• Infographics are 30x more likely to be read than text content. And, charts and graphics get a 17% bump in retweets.

Content Types

All content objectives can be used. There is only one exception I would raise: If your primary role is “journalist”, you should not focus on ‘like’ content.

Posting Strategy and Frequency

Tweets have an incredibly short life. Minutes at best. So, when things are transient like this, you have to do it often. Frequency is key here.

For a business that’s active on Twitter, the strategy should be up to 15 times a day. No more than 1x per hour.

Twitter tweets 

Tweets are individual posts. They can also be threaded (similar to carousels on Instagram).

While research seems to state that you shouldn’t tweet more than 3 times a day, for a business account an increased frequency is key.

The most common tweet is a text tweet that links to a page.

According to Khoros, there are a few things you can do to optimize your tweets (apart from focusing on visual content styles)

• Short. Tweets with less than 110 characters get 17% higher engagement.
• Polls. Asking questions increases engagement, but not sure by how much.
• Hashtags. Tweets with 1 to 2 hashtags receive a 16% boost. Hashtags with 3 or more receive a 17% drop in engagement.
• Quotes. Generally a quote gets a 19% boots in retweets.

Twitter Threads

A thread is a series of Tweets that are usually published at the same time. They can also be a “live event” where you update the Tweets in real time.

In marketing, you generally list a series of Tweets on a topic. They work great for list articles (listicles) where each point is its own Tweet.

Generally, post the entire collection of tweets at the same time. By doing this, you’re publishing the entire article inside the Twitter platform.

The best practice is to end your Twitter thread with a call-to-action.

 

Twitter Moments

Twitter Moments are a curated set of tweets about some event. They can be tweets created by you, and also tweets you source from others. 

Moments are much like threads, but for tweets that you don’t own (or do). The other difference is that you can also put a headline and a cover story on the Moment. So, in that way, it’s much like an article posting with a title and a background title image.

At least to me, Twitter Moments feel tied to an event—something happening, maybe something rare, something symbolic, something of importance. It doesn’t have to be a live event or a news story, but it’s suited to the “news moment” style format.

The “moments” in the desktop interface of Twitter are also buried behind a … button. So, these aren’t as likely to get used or surfaced. And, they’re not available on the mobile interface of Twitter. So think about how much exposure you can genuinely expect from a twitter moment commensurate to the amount of time you invest in creating them.

The best practice for a Moment is that there should be no more than 10 or so Tweets in the moment.

Here is an update for you: Twitter recently replaced or rather subsumed Twitter Moments under the Twitter Explore category. So, Moments are still there — at least for the time being — but they are now clumped together under a consolidated tab with Live Video, trending hashtags and the search function. I will have more on this in a future blog post.

Instagram (~1 billion users)

Next up on the list of social networks in this social media guide is Instagram. Instagram has proliferated like crazy in recent years and spun off into stories, reels, shops and tv. According to Hubspot, many people are turning to Instagram versus Google to search for brands. So it is an important place to be.

Instagram Profile

First, you should be using a business account.

Second, make sure your account is public.

Your Instagram profile should link to your products and services. Make it easy to do business with you. You’ll usually do this with a link tree or a customized landing page. Or, you can create clickable/swipe-able posts and stories that allow the user to go directly from perusing the visual to purchasing the actual product.

When you post your bio, it’s common culture in Instagram to use emojis. But be professional.

Your account’s profile picture should be reflective of your business. Bonus points if it also interesting and memorable. Anything to distinguish your account from a myriad of others.

Note, when you post a story, it will be indicated with a pinkish ring around your profile picture. After 24 hours the story will disappear, unless you save it to your highlights area.

The “Highlights” area is below your profile. Highlights are circular pictures with a title underneath them. They can contain posts and stories that are about a particular topic. Or, a highlight could serve as a place to store coupon codes you offer to your products. In general, use the highlights area to organize your content into categories that make sense. Don’t overcrowd the area, and don’t make people search through the highlights area to get to stuff, i.e. be descriptive in your titular choice in what information is presented in each highlight

Below the Highlights area are the shortcuts to the various kinds of instagram posts that you have generated: The general ‘posts’ (everything that you posted in your feed and did not delete), the ‘tagged’ posts (posts that were highlighted), ‘Reels’ (the new Instagram version of TikTok), ‘guides’ (also a new feature that allows you to create list-like or Twitter thread-like content with commentary), and ‘IGTV’ (the longer form video content).

You can also create different Instagram profiles for topics, instead of your brand. So, if you are a “curator” archetype, you’d have an Instagram feed that covers your topic (like shoes). You’ll see a lot of these. You can also have a brand Instagram and a “personality” Instagram, and have one link to the other (usually such connections are referenced in the little bio blurb).

Visual Style

Instagram content is challenging for many businesses. Why? It’s visual. And, it is often hard for a person to visualize what to post to be effective. And effective here means ‘distinguishing’, or ‘compelling’. Something that lifts you above the mass of visual content a user sees on social media, especially on Instagram. Something that catches the eyeballs and ideally turns an Instagram peruser into a customer.

Most Instagram users are ‘scrollers’. To catch their eyeballs you need to stop the scrolling in its tracks. How? By posting visually engaging content. This is the key to effectiveness on Instagram.

An individual post’s look is decided by the content type. In general, it should always look clean and professional. Beyond that, really, the sky is the limit.

And it will be very different depending on:

1. the purpose of a post
2. the product or service that is being offered or discussed
3. the overall aesthetic of the feed
4. the general visual design consensus on instagram on how to market a particular product.

There are certain types of posts that seem near obligatory when hyping specific products or topics: such as the flatlay, the amusing everyday capture, the 1-2-3 option carousel, the posing-in-the-street shot etc. You should familiarize yourself with standard and standout practices for your product category. Try them out for effectiveness. Find the ones that first, catch the most eyeballs, and second, convert best to purchasing.

But, you also need to think beyond an individual post. Whenever you post something, think about the aggregate: your entire feed. There are a lot of different strategies for how to present your feed. You need to determine what aesthetic works for you and your business.

Be honest about how much time you are willing to invest. Maintaining an interesting feed is not easy. It is time consuming. It involves research and production values. Creating a feed that converts is a long term effort. It takes time to attract, acquire and maintain followers (the eyeballs), and to turn followers into customers.

In addition, you need to stay on top of any potential algorithm changes. Your content is only effective if people actually see it. People need to do more than just follow your feed. They need to click on individual posts. They need to comment on posts. They need to ‘like’ posts. How much people comment on and like your posts is very important for keeping your content visible. So, make sure that 1. you don’t disable your comments, 2. you actually post content that people want to comment on, and 3. engage with your commenters to encourage even more comments.

Content Types

Instagram content works with all the content objectives we push through publishing. It’s an open place.

Posting Strategy & Frequency

According to Coschedule, most brands post 1.5x per day. They post at 8a-9a and then again at 2pm.

Unlike other networks, you don’t curate content and repost it. Instead, the culture is to modify the content using a reaction video, or something similar. You may link to another Instagram account or post, or even create a collaborative post. You may highlight a tweet thread or a selection of borrowed visual content in a content carousel, a story or a guide. But in general, Instagram is more of a remix culture.

Instagram Feed

The feed is the first impression that a person has of your brand on Instagram. It contains basic image posts, stories, videos, and carousels. Looks are super important here.

And keep in mind that a lot of people scroll through the feed on a mobile device (most often a phone), not on a laptop computer, at least not at first. That means that the visual punch that the thumbnails create need to work regardless of scale.

The keys to the feed looking great are:                   

• It needs to be visually consistent. It shouldn’t appear slap dash or disorganized. Why would anyone want to buy from someone that doesn’t have their act together? Colors, lighting, filters. Have a consistent aesthetic and approach.
• It needs to have visual contrast. When you have busy photos, you need to have simple photos that act as a kind of “white space” between the photos. This is a good place for Mindset content, where you post quotes and or statistics.

Think of your feed as your “curated” best content. It’s your greenfield.     

When someone scrolls over the feed, it leaves an impression. The thumbnails of your posts create that

impression. What does your impression say?

As an example, let’s look at Julie’s Kitchen. I don’t know Julie from anyone, but she has a very pretty Instagram profile.

Highly contrasted food photos with kids and dishes.

She has highlights and has presented her categories of food and other topics in a visually interesting way.

Instagram Posts

You can choose to post a photo, video, or a carousel. On Instagram, these are all considered posts.

Usually, these will come from files that already exist on your phone (versus live). You record them using your phone’s camera app or a third party creator app. Then, you select them when you create a new post.

• Photos–After you select a photo, you have the option of selecting filters for the photos. You write your captions and you share.
• Videos–Like photos, you choose a video. Then, you add a filter and a cover for the video. The cover shows on the feed page, and a video will have a “play” icon in the corner of the image to indicate that it is a video rather than a photo post.
• Carousels–carousels have more than 1 photo and/or videos combined into a single “post.” Viewers can swipe through them. The first photo or video cover shows on the feed with a “multiple pages” icon in the corner.

Once you’ve selected your type of post, you can use a filter to set your style. There are a ton of filters available, but remember, less is more. Make sure you use the same filters consistently throughout your feed.

Then, you can edit your post caption. Let’s cover the best practices.

Hashtags

Hashtags are used on Instagram. In most posts, there will be 5 to 10 hashtags embedded. Posts with at least 1 hashtag have been reported to get a 12%+ bump in engagement.

People can follow hashtags on Instagram, and they can search for specific hashtags as well. So, it is important that you pick hashtags that have traffic to maximize the value of exposure.

Location

Instagram users often look for images around a location. So, it’s a good idea to add location to your posts as well. This would be extra true if your business is local retail or geographically-centric.

Caption

Your post caption should include keywords and hashtags that match the post. Hashtags have always been the keywords of Instagram. And, now that Instagram has released keyword search, other keywords are important as well.

Alt-Text

When posting, click Advanced Settings and write your own Alt Text. This is used for screen readers and it cannot be left blank. If you don’t write the Alt Text, then Instagram’s AI system will insert this based on the picture’s content. So, it’s a good practice, especially now that the caption is keyword searchable.

Tags & Mentions

These aren’t something you post. But, they’re still critical to your posts. When someone tags you in another post, or mentions you in a post, it’s like a “backlink” for their algorithm. The more you’re mentioned and tagged, the more prominent your content will be.

Social Media Ties

You have the option to announce new Instagram posts on your Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr feeds. To do so, you first, need to have accounts for these social media feeds that are tied to your Instagram account, and second, you need to have the apps loaded on your mobile device.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are Instagram posts that vanish after 24 hours.

If your feed is your curated content, your stories are your “fresh” content. If something works here, it’s possible to “move” it to your posts.

What’s special about Stories is that they can appear at the top of your follower’s home page feed for 24 hours. When the person taps on your profile pic the story shows on their device in full screen. They see everything you’ve posted to your “story” for the 24 hours.

In Stories, there are no likes or public comments. They show and then they are gone (unless you specifically save them to your highlights).

You can use stickers in Instagram stories. They are not available in Instagram posts.

If you’re using stickers as, well, stickers, then you can use any third party photo editor.

But, stickers can do a lot more. There are a few different types that have custom functions.

• Polls–Ask a question with 2 options and get the answer.
• Questions– You ask a question, and people can answer (which you can see).
• Sliders–A person can rate something on a scale from bad to awesome.
• Quiz–You can ask a question giving multiple-choice options for answers.
• Hashtags–you can put a nice sticker that will embed a hashtag for discoverability.
• Links–you can link if you have more than 10,000 followers or a Verified account.

These stickers are awesome because they create engagement and even call-to-actions. You can do a lot with them.

For example, an Instagram Story poll allows people to select options. Polls are a great way to get feedback on things before you invest time and energy to write content. And, they’re a great way to engage an audience. Take a poll and post the answers the next day.

Stories also can have Boomerang effects.

Boomerangs are mini-video clips that go from start to end and then back, like a boomerang.

• Classic–front to back in the same speed
• SlowMo–like classic, but a bit slower
• Echo–blurred effect
• Duo–glitch effect

A few other newish features of stories are:

• Layouts–layouts let you see 2 or more videos at one time. They are used for reaction videos etc.
• Hands Free — You don’t have to hold onto the button to record a live video.
• Audio–this used to be called music. You can add music that will be in the background. This is to use someone else’s sound or music as the background of your clip.

Stories are discoverable by others, and can increase your reach. There are two primary ways to do this: Hashtag stickers and location tags.

Hashtag stickers

To maximize reach, you can add up to 10 hashtags. The recommended best practice is to add them in very small text. Then, to put a sticker over them. Yes, it does sound like a hack. But it works.

Location tags

Like Posts, you can expand the reach of your Instagram Story by adding a location tag. Adding location makes your story more likely to show up for people near this location.

Instagram Reels

If Stories are the Snapchat of Instagram, Reels are the TikTok of Instagram. Honestly, they’re more like “Stories-lite.”

Reels are 15- or 30-second video clips (compared to Instagram videos that can be up to 60 seconds long). They can be sped up, slowed down, and effects added. You can also attach audio to them.

The editor in Reels is where the significant differences are to Stories. There’s a timer function that let’s you start a video at a point in the clip, run it for a period of time, and then stop. It lets you build up a clip from many short takes (a la TikTok).

Like Twitter, the fact that you’re condensed to a smaller amount of time and text forces you to get to the point. And that makes for more sticky content (all 30 seconds of it).

With the Reels creator in the Instagram app, you can post the finished product to your Feed, Stories, or to the Reels subheading. So, where do I see Reels? They’re at the very top of the Explore page, which is the tab that has the search icon.

If Reels are just “stories-lite”, why should I bother with them? Because they can increase eyeballs, a video however short tends to get more engagement than a static photo. And because of their short time span, Reels feel like less of an investment than a story for those perusing Instagram.

Like for stories and posts, hashtags, keywords, and location tags matter.

In short, Reels are a good replacement for some of the static content and photos in your feed. They tend to get a lot more exposure precisely because of their nuggety nature.

Instagram Guide

Instagram Guides are a relatively new format for sharing curated, scrollable content. This feature allows you to create a curated flow of posts with commentary. It is an easy to use, flexible tool that allows users to share and consume recommendations, tips, step-by-step guides, tell stories, provide guidance, and shopping lists.

Go to your profile page (and again, you need to have a public account), click on the + icon in the upper right hand corner and select one of the three guide formats currently available: places, products and posts. Note, you can only curate products that are available in an Instagram Shop.

You can share any Guides you create to Instagram Stories or directly with other users by tapping the paper plane icon.

Why should you care about Instagram Guides? Because it allows you to add extra context or commentary to your shop-able products. It is also a great tool to add influencer partnerships to your content and so increase the number of mentions and backlinks to your curated content.

Instagram Shops

If it makes sense for you business (i.e. if you are selling easily perusable and shop-able products) then you should set up a digital storefront in Instagram. Why? Because Instagram marketing is essential for e-commerce business. An Instagram shop allows you to directly sell your products and promote them with curated shop-able content. Your products will be instantly perusable and available to shop to every single one of Instagram’s 1 Billion plus users.

Setting up a shop is easy. You need to have an Instagram business or creator account, connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account, and sign up for a business manager account. Then you set up your shop in Commerce Manager or another supported platform, upload your product catalog (or create one), and et voila.

Instagram allows users to search for specific shops or shop-able content through the explore tab. There is also a ‘shopping bag’ icon, that links directly to Instagram shops and editor promoted content. Instagram will also indicate what content is shop-able through the same ‘shopping bag’ icon superimposed on the content thumbtacks.

You can create ads, collections and special tags for your shop-able content.

IGTV

IGTV is the YouTube of Instagram. It’s the long form video app of Instagram, supporting videos up to 1 hour long.

Instagram recently introduced IGTV ads to a select group of creators. Ads are expected to be widely available for brands and companies to monetize their IGTV channels in early 2021. Details about how to create IGTV ads are still slim, but it will probably be similar to the general advertising process for Instagram.

Want to really get a leg up? Make sure you know exactly how to advertise on Instagram now (check out Instagram Story ads), and be ready for creating video ads to Instagram specifications as the features become available.

Until then, IGTV is being more deeply integrated into the Instagram accounts. Instagram is promoting IGTV as the place where “deeper storytelling” happens. IGTV’s big claim to fame is that it’s mobile first.

A couple of things to note: IGTV is a separate application from the Instagram feed. You consume IGTV through the “watcher” app, so you are essentially running two different apps. Yet, it is run using the same Instagram account, and you can direct eyeballs from your profiles page through the IGTV tab, which yes, can be really confusing.

If this seems too much of a bother, focus on stories and Reels instead for starter, and slowly work your way up to IGTV.

Here are a couple of quick rules:

• if your video is longer than a minute, it should be on IGTV.
• IGTV titles need to be short: each title is only 2 lines of text with around 20 characters per line
• Descriptions are buried in the viewing of the video itself. So it is all about the title.

Right now, IGTV is only searchable by the channel (creator name). So, people will only find you on IGTV if they are looking for you. I expect that this will open up over time to the same hashtags, keywords, and location tags that are available on Instagram proper.

A little hint: there is a way to search by topic on IGTV but you have to do it outside the app, using Google to search for specific content rather than creator.

Instagram Live

Instagram Live is where you can go live and do a screen share and conversation with someone. People can join your feed, and you talk to them live.

Right now, they are only designed for followers. It’s pretty hard to find live programming unless you’re following the particular creator. But, it is a good strategy for getting a person to follow you. You live programming will have to be so tempting that people stop lurking and become actual followers.

I’ll update this content as I wrap my head around Live more.

Facebook (~2.3 billion users) 

Of course we cannot leave out Facebook on this social media guide. After all, Facebook. We all know it. We all love to hate it. It might not be the young and hip place to be anymore, but it is still the biggest social media site around. It has more than a billion people using it every month. There are more than 65 million businesses using it. And, more than 6 million advertisers. Lots of commerce!

Visual Style

The new Facebook UI has greys and whites. Given this, it’s a good idea to be contrasty to this. So, visuals should be high contrast. Think YouTube video thumbnail styles. Skip white backgrounds.

Content Types

Like Instagram, all content types are supported.

Posting Strategy & Frequency

According to Social Media Today, posting up to 5 times a day produces optimum organic reach.

IMO, this is too often. It takes time and energy to produce good facebook posts, you cannot just post any crap, and to achieve this five times a day is difficult. I recommend an approach of 2 times a day, around 10am and 3pm. This maximizes the morning and evening exposure. If you can do more, great, but don’t sacrifice content minimum quality for frequency.

You should also keep in mind that you have to post regularly. Research studies found that posting less than 1x a day causes a negative drop off in engagement.

Sharing other people’s content works well, but make sure you link back to their content. The 80/20 or 90/10 strategy applies here. Give your post context.

Now, let’s break down the types of profiles and content you can post.

Profile. Page. Group.

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