Top 5 must have Instagram marketing tools

Instagram is about more than just teenagers posting selfies.

The number of companies using Instagram for marketing activities will reach 70% in 2017, surpassing Twitter for the first time.¹ With over 500M users, Instagram has become a key mobile destination for brands.

With these Instagram marketing tools, you can get the most out of this popular platform (read our Social Media Pocket Guide for additional insight) . Learn how to track your competition, run contests, and manage your account more efficiently, while hopefully also getting your fair share of the 3.5 billion likes per day that Instagram generates.²

The days of logging directly onto a social media platform to engage with your audience are long over. With most brands managing dozens of active social media accounts across multiple departments, this method is not efficient or effective. What you need is a tool that allows companies to engage with comments and connect with consumers on a larger scale, as well as provide actionable analytics on Instagram interactions. Lithium Social Media Management (now Khoros Marketing) incorporates native Instagram posts into scheduling and analytics functions.

Instagram contests and sweepstakes are great ways to drive engagement and generate brand awareness. There’s nothing wrong with running a simple campaign on your own, such as asking users to like a photo or “caption this” and then randomly picking a winner. But, with contest apps, you can deploy a more complex campaign and get a bigger return without much additional effort.³ Woobox and Shortstack both offer limited free features if you’re looking to start small. According to the Woobox website, they make it easy to run a photo contest that integrates with Instagram.“ The Woobox Photo Contest application will automatically monitor Instagram for posts with your hashtag and import entrant photos into the submissions dashboard, where you’ll have the chance to review and approve individual submissions to be displayed in the voting gallery.”⁴ Shortstack offers an Instagram Promotion Template which allows you to run an integrated Instagram Campaign. This Instagram marketing tool allows you to offer a customized entry form with exclusive content.

In the world of social media, spying on your competition is called research. Instagram marketing tools make it easier than ever to analyze your top competitors’ content strategies, find their top influencers and learn from their successes (and failures). View your competitor’s analytics profile with the Klear dashboard. According to Social Media Examiner, “This powerful dashboard will generate the account’s top content on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (if you manually add it). You can also see activity and responsiveness levels as well as a list of people the account most frequently interacts with.” ⁵ A free trial subscription with Minter.io will provide detailed competitor account reports that include audience demographics, engagement statistics, and most effective hashtags.

It’s no secret user-generated content is the most trusted type of content available. 3rd party apps like Repost for Instagram and Repost on Iconosquare offer ways to share influencer posts on Instagram. ALWAYS get permission before re-gramming another user’s post, and ALWAYS give them credit. It’s a great way to interact with your influencers and provide the trust-worthy content your audience is looking for.

According to Simply Measured, 7 out of 10 of the most-used hashtags on Instagram are branded. Hashtags are a great way to increase your exposure and boost your follower count. Tools like Websta and Hashtagify deliver popularity results for your chosen hashtag and, even better, what related hashtags are more popular. For example, the hashtag #instagrammarketingtools ranks low in popularity with only three searches. However, there were over 82k searches for the hashtag #instagrammarketing. Experiment with the number of hashtags and the placement of them in the post description and comments to determine what works best with your followers.

Learn how to get the most of Instagram and other social media platforms with our Social Media Pocket Guide.

¹ https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Number-of-Companies-Using-Instagram-Nearly-Double-Next-Year/1013122

² https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/20/23-stats-and-facts-about-instagram/

³ http://www.jeffbullas.com/2016/06/15/top-five-social-contest-apps/

⁴ http://blog.woobox.com/2013/05/instagram-photo-contest/

⁵ http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/4-free-tools-to-analyze-your-social-media-competitors/