5 useful and handy tricks to drive traffic to your website from Instagram

Instagram became one of the most popular social network platform in a very short time since it was released in 2010. With an immense scale of users, Instagram is also becoming one of the most intriguing battlefield for marketing managers. In today’s blog, I would like to share some useful and handy tricks that I had obtained from this article to drive traffic to your website from Instagram.

Trick # 1: Add a website link to your bio

By adding a website link in your Instagram bio,  your website address would be in the most conspicuous area to draw your audience’s attention and attracts a lot of clicks.  Here are 2 examples from the events industry:

Trick # 2: Place a Call to Action on images

If you want to maximum the efficiency of  your Instagram marketing campaign, you should design and utilise all the images to convey your message instead of solely uploading some random pictures, because it is supposed to be the broadcaster of your brand, inserting captions to images is a great way of concluding more message and information through Instagram. And links of your website could be placed in the description. I also have found 2 great examples in the event industry:

Read the Call to action words they used in the description.

Tactic # 3:  Include a URL in Videos.

Videos are rare in Instagram, however video creates much more inbound links than pictures.

Tactic # 4: Invest in Instagram Ads

By opening its API to all companies and brands, which means if you’ve got a budget for Instagram, then spend some in the Instagram advertising, you will probably see an sudden increase in website visits and conversions.

More to read for Instagram marketing:

— http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/13-instagram-marketing-tips-from-the-experts/

—  http://www.agorapulse.com/blog/more-traffic-from-instagram

—  http://www.jennstrends.com/drive-traffic-with-instagram/

How to utilise storytelling in Facebook marketing for events

Everyone loves a good story. Back to the old days when we were kids, parents coaxed us to sleep by telling us stories, and when we grow up, we go to the cinema again and again just to get excitement from stories. Our brain are always eager for compelling  stories.

In the marketing world, storytelling is also one of the most useful tactics to attract attention and create more interaction with your target customers, yesterday I stumbled across this well demonstrated article on how to incorporate the science of storytelling into your Facebook marketing campaign.

Here are several tips grabbed from the article that I want to share with you on how to involve storytelling into your Facebook stuff for events

• Share “behind the scenes” photos of your event. 

Here is an outstanding example from Unitec Youngminds, on its Facebook page, Unitec Youngminds Post wonderful “behind the scenes” photos and demonstrations of a just over business forum:  

• Ask your customers to share their photos

It is a great way to interact with your audience and by incorporating their unique experience in your social media, you are gonna present a more friendly, trustworthy and engaging expression to your potential goers, which would enhance the charm of your event. Here is an example from Glastonbury Facebook encouraging their festival goers to share their photos taken in the event.

• Add inspirational quotes to your imagesTo Run a successful Facebook account, it’s important to keep posting in a suitable  frequency, which means sometimes when you don’t have new events coming up, or just no idea about what to post. The tricky solution for you is simply posting images with inspirational quotes and make sure it looks matching your culture and the atmosphere your want to create, believe me people love quotes, some even collect them every time they feel illuminated. An decent example from Unitec Young Minds: 

If you want to read more about storytelling, here are some sources for you:

1. The art of storytelling in 6 content marketing context questions
2. why our brains crave storytelling in marketing
3. Science of storytelling: why and how to use it in your marketing

Time tactics for twitter strategy of your even

As an event manger/ marketing specialist, an indispensable part of job responsibilities is to maintain updating posts through social media platforms and try to entice attention from as many people as possible.

But When is the best time to post your important events information like official trailers, upcoming timetables or the stirring news that a superstar just confirmed to come, should it be in the morning, afternoon or night when everyone’s back home surfing the internet?

I found this wonderful article in razorsocial.com about best tweeting time and would like to share some clues for all event twitter account holders in this blog.

1. Do research on the active online time of your targeting audience. A recommended tool to utilise is twtrland. It allows you to see the areas of the world that your audiences are coming from and decide on your tweeting time zone^_^. And you can use socialbro to analysis what time of day are most of your audience online and make your strategy upon generated statistics. The third dimension you should think about is your potential exposure by day of week. If you are lucky to have followers from different parts of the world and all of them are your potential event goers and they show solicitude for your event, then actually there’s no worrying and struggling with the posting time, cause whenever your are tweeting something new, a certain proportion of your followers are active.

A good example of an event with global audience( means time of posting is not a big concern) is the Venice Film Festival( a mega event) which has just lowered its curtain.

2. Do tests on results of posting at different time.  It might should quite an old-fashioned way but use one-by-one testing  results to be your guidance might really help you figure the best time for your audience group. Use a tool like buffer would help you run the test and export informational analytics. Keep testing for a period, you would receive the enlightenment you’re in need of.

3. A recent infographic from Kissmetrics said that around 5pm is the summit time most retweet happens. so that might be  a time you should use appropriately to gain attention and retweets? Just make sure you test it before it becoming your real tactic and rule( according to 2)

Let’s move on to a video tutorial on this topic and grab more ideas:

and a real pragmatic video about how to LIVE Tweet an Event

Extensive readings if you are interested:

a best time to tweet research: https://blog.bufferapp.com/best-time-to-tweet-research

what are the best times to post on social media :https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/01/02/what-are-the-best-times-to-post-on-social-media/

How to promote your event on Facebook without annoying people: https://www.facebook.com/notes/andy-reid/how-to-promote-your-event-on-facebook-without-annoying-people/443132425203

How to make your event ads stand out in social media?

What first comes to your mind when thinking about ads? I think most people would say annoying and wish ads disappear. Ads interrupt us when we are watching our loved TV series, listening to our favourite radio programs. after we enter the web 2.0 age, ads are bursting into social media like flood in Facebook, Instagram,youtube, etc.

But people are harder and harder to be pleased and emotionally evoked and tend to ignore ads like they don’t exist at all, so why would a event manager/marketing specialist use money to put in an ad? The answer is in your ads,it is just not excellent enough to attract attention and raise awareness in your potential customers. Good ads are not annoying, just the bad ones. I came across this wonderful article  this morning and would like to unveil some secrets for event marketers to present perfect ads in social media.

1. Use Video or GIF

Pictures are boring, multimedia is the new sexy. Upload a video about your event, displaying how exciting and engaging it is. The video can represent the essence of your previous event, or it can be a promotion video of your incoming event. You can post funny GIFs as well.

A great example from Glastonbury:

2. Incorporate Humor

A humorous ad is so attractive just like a humorous person, it makes you laugh, makes you get a sense of intelligence in it, which definitely makes an ad stand out to get attention and create clicks and publicity for the event or whatever you are promoting.

Heroins of a new-released film taking selfie in Instagram is a great example:

3. Provide Content Downloads

Days that you can just put a product in advertisement and sell it are gone, what do marketing experts do nowadays are providing useful information, knowledge, tips and everything that has a meaning, people can benefit from.

If you want to know more, read the following articles:

a beginner’s guide to social media advertising

THE SOCIAL-MEDIA ADVERTISING REPORT: Growth Forecasts, Market Trends, And The Rise Of Mobile

why social media advertising is set to explode in the next 3 years

3 Recommending tools for event marketers to be visually creative

There is not a slight argument on the fact that social media is becoming more and more visual these days. Using eye-catching and stylish visual elements will definitely draw your audience’s attention and slow down their pace to close the tab. However not all marketers are design experienced, then except from hiring an designer(which is very expensive) or spending another 3 years for a design degree( You must be joking!!) , Is it possible to perform like an design expert to arouse moments of “WOW, this picture/video is amazing”. The answer is YES, I’ve got the right tools for you after reading this amazing article ( How to Get Started With Visual Content Marketing) .

1. Canva, a multi-functional and handy tool to create designs for amazing covers, photo collage, presentation, poster, etc.

You Just need to login on to canva.com with your facebook /google account and start playing with it. I made 2 examples for you in 10 minutes( So fast and handy), and there’s much more templates you can select from, photo streams uploaded by other users for you to absorb inspirations, and a blog updating frequently tutorials of features, Coool, isn’t it?

Example 1:

           

original photo                       vs                       styled by canva

Example 2:

original photo

vs

 styled by canva

2. Recommended tool for mobile devices: Word Swag

“WordSwag is like having a graphic designer in your pocket. With their exclusive Typomatic Engine technology, you can quickly generate custom text layouts with the tap of a finger.”( quoted from the article linked in paragraph 1)

Wordswag also offers a video editing product, videohance, which enables you to create your stunning promotional video just by DIY.

3.  Recommended tool for creating your own website: Bootstrap, a web building template developed by Facebook. You just need 2 hours to study the basic HTML and CSS language, then you can create your own website.

Wanna Hack The China Market? Get Going With Content Marketing In Wechat Public Account

           

I don’t know how many of you guys have ever heard of wechat, the most popular app in China. According to the data published recently, wechat has around 500,000,000 active users and the number is still increasing. Besides the normal functions such as instant messaging , wechat creates a unique feature called public/official account, which has already become a battlefield for content marketing in China. Today, I would like to share some of personal experiences and comments on content marketing on wechat platform, inspired by this article.

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These are parts of my wechat public account subscriptions which clearly reflect my interests and what I, as a consumer, would like to pay money for , like Shanghai International Film Festival( My dream employer) and Swing dance lessons etc

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Below are some of the characteristics that help you operate a successful account, especially in the culture industries( to attract people to attend a film/music festival) in terms of content marketing.

1.  High content quality. Content marketing is all about the content. Make sure the information you provide is attractive and always enlightens something, for example , you should hire someone who is an film/music expert to write article about a movie or album “Just keep in mind that it’s not about you, and it’s not about direct lead generation. It’s about providing value to an audience” ( quoted from the article linked in aforementioned article)
2. Be original, Yes It takes a lot of work to always be original because you have to keep updating your account .But originality is the essence of branding. Always spread something worth attention.
3. Be interactive. Interaction is the trend of content marketing. Don’t just make the speech alone, get your target audience involved to communicate and experience! Run a vote of “What’s your favorite film/song to win a ticket to the festival”, etc.  Watch the video below to get an insight of some basic interaction methods in wechat.

Implement great content marketing, you will get your target crowd of people around you all the time!