Brand Marketing on Instagram

Instagram is becoming all the rage lately. Everyone who's anyone is using it, especially companies to try to increase awareness for their brand. And people who are on Instagram, about 90%+ of them, trust what their friends say and think about brands, so it's important for brands to have consumers make brand recommendations. 

A few tips for brand marketing:

• Share authentic content: Look real and be unique
• Content streams: Share behind-the-scenes images of your product, including "in the moment" images and planning ahead for the future. Build a calendar around content streams.
• Share quality content: remember--it't about quality, not quantity. Be interesting, engaging, and memorable. 
• Positive Content: Ask users to share their positive content on your media page.
• Post often: be consistent with posting great content and don't let people forget about you.
• Hashtags: DON'T FORGET HASHTAGS!! You can never use too many hastags, but make sure they're relevant to your content, as well as UNIQUE. Users may start to use this hashtag, which will help raise more awareness for your brand and content.
• Relationship building: ENGAGE with your users..always try to connect with them and not just post one-sided. It must be a two-way relationship.
• Customer Service and Negative Feedback: People want to talk to you, especially if they have something negative to say, so don't be afraid to talk back and try to solve their problems. 

After comparing the social media strategies of Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, I learned a lot..especially in relation to these tips for brand marketing. It is so important to always engage with your users, whether they are saying good or bad things, keep them interested, interact with them, and be memorable. It's not enough just to post things every once in awhile without interacting and engaging. You must always have something important to say that your consumers will remember and therefore be more likely to follow you, try your product, be a loyal customer, etc. These are very good tips for any company, no matter how big or small you are--and on any platform.