Instagram, Twitter or Facebook Advertising – Which Is Best for Brands?

With last week’s announcement that Instagram advertising is coming in the near future (first through a limited test among U.S. users), brand marketers have taken notice. There will soon be a new way to reach the 150 million Instagram user audience. Ads will roll out with a small number of brands on both the Instagram website and mobile app with a focus on enhancing the user experience with ads.

An Instagram blog post explained the upcoming advertising launch to users as follows:

“Our aim is to make any advertisements you see feel as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already enjoy from your favorite brands. We want these ads to be enjoyable and creative in much the same way you see engaging, high-quality ads when you flip through your favorite magazine.”

Instagram users will also be able to hide ads they don’t like and provide feedback on those ads.  Let’s hope that the Instagram team will take many of the lessons its parent, Facebook, has learned about advertising to deliver a strong offering to advertisers that its user audience accepts.

Not only is Instagram joining Facebook in building an advertising platform that will generate revenue, but the announcement comes at the same time news of Twitter’s initial public offering hit the streets. In the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing from Twitter, the company revealed that it has 218 million monthly active users. Yoree Koh and Suzanne Vranica of The Wall Street Journal explain that this is significantly less than the 1.5 billion active monthly users that Facebook boasts. That 218 million Twitter user audience represents 22% of U.S. Internet users according to Forrester Research, but that’s very small compared to the 72% of U.S. Internet users who check Facebook at least once per month.

Koh and Vranica also explained in their article that Twitter advertisers don’t believe an audience of 218 million users is big enough to invest in Twitter advertising. Today, Twitter usage peaks during big events, and the rest of the time, it’s dominated by a small group of power users. Many advertisers are waiting for Twitter to find better ways to increase engagement among wider audiences and to encourage them to log in more frequently.

These shortcomings make most consumer brands choose Facebook first. Of course, Facebook advertising has its own long list of problems, but today, it’s the social network that most brands prioritize. Is it truly the right place for those brands to invest ad dollars or do they just think they have to be there because the Facebook user audience is so big and the site is so popular? For brand marketers, the problem becomes trying to explain why they’re not advertising on Facebook to executives.

So which is best for brands—Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook? The answer is, there is no single answer. Every brand is different, but advertising on Facebook because that’s where 1 billion people are doesn’t mean the investment will drive a positive return. The Super Bowl gets massive viewership each year, but that doesn’t mean every brand should advertise during the big game. If you can create a highly relevant offer and release it at the right time and to the right audience on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, then invest. However, as with all marketing investments, if you can’t generate the needed ROI, it doesn’t matter if there are 1 billion users, 218 million users, or 100 users. 

Blogging As a Path to Branding Excellence

Branding is the most effective and most rewarding type of marketing a small business can perform. Once you embed your brand into the consciousness of your customer, it tends to stick around. Blogging is one of the most effective and enduring tools available to assist the small business owner in achieving top-of-mind awareness, aka branding.
What makes blogging such a useful tool for branding? A number of things, so let’s talk about some of them.

• The Conversation – You can’t control the conversation in most venues online. Forums, social media, other off-site platforms are usually controlled by someone else. But your blog is yours. You can initiate the conversation and control the conversation. It’s the perfect branding tool.
• Customer Interaction – Besides being in control, you can interact with your customers and maintain a level of positive engagement. That is much harder to do in social media.
• Your Hub On The Web - Everyone needs a home base. I’m not saying don’t use social media or off-site platforms. You should use them, but you should use them to drive traffic back to your hub – the place of conversation that you can control, your blog.
• List Capture – As you direct traffic to your blog, get people to go deeper by joining your mailing list. This is where the money is and your blog is the gateway.

Branding begins with the conversation. Instead of throwing out bland marketing messages, interact with your customers and drive them to a deeper relationship with you through your blog.

10 Extreme Ways To Rocket Launch Your Profits

1. Advertise your web site with banner ads that are animated and include a call to action. You must grab people's attention and make them to c.lick.

2. Use pop up windows or advertisements on your web site. They grab your visitors attention because they jump right out at them.

3. Buy internet business books, ebooks, private site memberships, etc. Study and learn all the new web site promotional ideas you can.

4. Analyze all your promotional efforts.Concentrate on the ones that work and drop the ones that don't work. Don't waste your valuable time.

5. Get the most from each one of your visitors. Ask them to subscribe to your e-zine, participate on your message board, bookmark your site, etc.

6. Use text links if your banner ads are not pulling traffic. People don't ignore text links as much as they do banner ads.

7. Trade content with other ezine publishers or web sites. This is a powerful and effective way to place your links on other targeted web sites.

8. Keep your product available to your customers at all times. If you have to backorder it, they may end up canceling their order.

9. Use content on your web site so people can skim through it easily. Most people have little time so try using lists, short tips, short articles,etc

10 Add a message board or chat room to your web site. If people enjoy it, they will revisit your web site to participate regularly.

7 types of Social Media you need to use.

One type of Internet marketing that you must be taking advantage of is social media. The truth is your Internet business will not survive unless you are involved in various forms of social media. The only exception to that would be if you paiy advertising such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Marketing.

Perhaps you do not understand the various ways you can utilize these many types of social media to brand yourself and expand your business. Here are 7 types of Internet social media you should be doing everyday.

1. Blogging

Your competition has a blog and so should you. Blogs can serve many purposes. A couple of key points are host your own blog and consistently add fresh content. Never let your blog go stale.

If money is tight, you can install a free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like delicious. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

2. Social Networking

My Space and Facebook are 2 of the largest. Building relationships online are a big part of having a successful Internet business. Social networking allows you to hang out with people that have similar interests to you. Remember that the same social etiquette and good manners apply online as they do offline. Think about building relationships first, business second.

3. Micro Blogging

Twitter.com is a combination of social networking and blogging. Building a large list of followers is a great way to meet people and increase traffic to your blog and websites. Plus it is fun to Tweet! I’m a big fan of Twitter.

4. Social Bookmarking

Directories such as Digg and Technorati serve as search engine bait for your blog posts and for new traffic from people who read your blog articles. Bookmarking a blog post is very easy to do and the rewards can pay off for years to come.

5. Discussion Forums

This really was one of the first forms of social media and still is a great way to learn about the niche of your business and to drive traffic to it. Hanging out in discussion forums can be addictive so be careful to use them the right way and not waste time. There is an art to forum marketing and you must learn to do it correctly, but the benefits are many.

6. Email Marketing

There has always been money in having a list. The trick is to build relationships with your list and then sell to it after you have done that. For that reason we include it in social media. Today you can add video, audio, graphics, and other things to make your email more interactive.

7. Video Marketing

When Google bought YouTube everyone was put on notice that video marketing was going to be important. Today internet marketers can drive traffic and build credibility by adding videos to their blog and website.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube, Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable

This is 7 forms of social media you must be using to build your Internet business. The most successful Internet marketers already are!

The social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers’ experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.