Dec 18, 2019
Can you imagine your life without social media and the round-the-clock connection with your acquaintances? Without the speed at which your messages deliver to the recipients? Or without social media in general? Definitely no! Instagram is one of those unique platforms that allows you to connect with people and brands irrespective of their location. However, while Instagram makes people more connected than ever, its global adoption has brought forward big concerns about users’ mental well being. It’s not easy to navigate the world of Instagram addiction especially for a social media manager. Caring about its users, InstaBF, a popular Instagram and IGTV provider, has collected several survival tips for Instagram managers’ mental health.
Don’t Multitask
Multitasking seems a greatly beneficial thing. And even though editing images, analyzing your traffic on Google Analytics, answering DMs looks attractive, our brains can’t handle multiple tasks at once. Moreover, multitasking reduces one’s productivity up to 40%! A human brain is not able to deal with more than two tasks at the same time. Besides this, multitasking drains the whole energy of one’s brain tiring as much as nothing else. According to the researches, those who take breaks (at least ten-minute ones) every couple of hours show better results in anything they do including Instagram management. So, to keep your mental state normal while working on an Instagram account, stop multitasking!
Get Rid of the Feed Trash
If you are an active Instagrammer you must have been tempted to compare your “boring” life to those seemingly perfect ones of influencers. But remember, they are all about advertising and even if some of them really lead the life they showcase, it will neither serve nor feed you. Hence, not to fall in a pointless depression, just use the power of the “unfollow” button. Instead, intake the content that contributes your vision and mission and doesn’t clutter your brain with a bunch of unnecessary content.
Don’t Cling to Likes
The invention of the “like” button on Instagram (just as in any other social network) is perhaps the most ingenious way of satisfying one’s need for social validation. On the other hand, it keeps you hooked on the network, come back to count every like every post you make gets. Actually, Instagram has a lot in common with a slot machine – when you trigger the machine the expectation whether it will win or not feels the same as when you open your Insta full of anticipation if your new post has collected more likes and comments. In the core, it is the quality of your interactions on Instagram matters and not the number of likes you have. So, stop counting them to safeguard your mental state. Besides, with the new feature of removing public likes from feeds, chasing likes looks so backward!
Browse Mindfully with Purposefully
Whether Instagram has a potential adverse effect on your mental health or helps you relax during the day is determined by how you use it. Every time you feel the urge to check in your account stop and ask a question – what do you do that? If, for instance, you wonder whether a pretty girl you follow has posted a new picture from her “perfect” life or not, it will be a sheer waste of time. Instead, be sure you have a specific goal in mind every time you log into the platform. That may be interacting with your followers, exploring new brands you might get interested in the products of which, finding inspiration for an upcoming event, watching a tutorial for an evening makeup to apply tonight, etc. And remember, once you log into your account, scroll through the feed and see there’s nothing you would like to engage with, reread the Tip #2!
Dec 17, 2019
Instagram Stories are a grandiose way of boosting brand awareness and attracting new followers. The more interesting and unique your Stories are the higher your chances of success will be. And animated Instagram Stories appear just awesome. Such eye-catching content is on trend currently. Do you wonder how you can create them? By the way, you don’t have to own a professional camera or hurry a design team for creating animated Gram Stories. With your bright imagination and a proper application (there are multiple apps for creating Stories available), you will get your freshly animated Story within a few clicks. InstaBF, your unique means of raising Instagram and IGTV engagement, is ready to show you how you can create a fantastic Story animation. Flashy and eye-catching animated Stories are more likely to stop your followers to watch them. Fortunately, there are many applications available today that you can use. So, you can do that right from your smartphone. Just keep your excitement high and your eyes on this article.
Life Lapse for Stop-Motion Stories
Life Lapse is a wonderful application you can use to create top quality stop motion videos just from your gadget. Besides, it has easy tutorials that guide through the entire process. In fact, the application allows creating videos ten times faster with a simple smartphone than a pro editing software or an expensive camera can! Additionally, the application also comes packed with filters, a diversity of speeds, stock music. The interval timer, meanwhile, helps to get the right timing for your videos. It’s available for iOS devices completely free.
Enlight Pixaloop Will Bring Motion to Your Images
Pixaloop, developed by Lightricks, can easily bring an element of surprise to any static image by adding movement. Using it is so easy, but if you feel uncertain, here is a brief guide:
- Place arrows to designate the motion in the photo;
- In order to eliminate the speed in the animated area, add anchors.
You see, there’s absolutely nothing difficult in using the application. It just requires some practice. Pixaloop is available on iOS devices.
StoryBoost for Seamless Gram Stories
If you have a stock of images or footage and want to transform them into videos, StoryBoost is the application you need. It comes packed with a myriad of story page templates, as well as custom transitions that make sharing multiple short videos seamlessly. So, tapping forward, your followers will view a single and connected story. The application also has GIFs, stickers, and fonts that make image customization an easy thing. It’s available for iOS smartphones.
Adobe Spark for Creating Animated Graphics
If you plan to create animated graphics without having any design experience, Adobe Spark can be handy. The app is packed with multiple stock images free of charge, filters, and fonts. Adobe Spark will help you add a touch of animation to a photo or even a text. It’s completely free and easy to use on both iOS and Android devices.
Dec 16, 2019
Having talked about the power of the Instagram Stories campaign, InstaBF also started a free guide to planning out your first Stories campaign. Ready to go on?
Figure Out Your Strategy and Creative
Deciding on the creative direction you will have a Story campaign totally different from your ordinary stories content. And if you feel uncertain about the strategy and creative direction, we offer to your attention four basic elements to pay close attention to.
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Define Your Campaign’s Concept
Whatever concept lies in the basis of your Insta Stories campaign, it must be closely tied to the campaign goals. For instance, if you aim at promoting a new product line, the concept must be driving sales and the creatives to use should include product stickers, clicks on the link in the bio, swipe-ups to your brand’s website, and so forth.
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Designate the Visual Style of Your Stories Campaign
Just as it’s important to have a brand voice, building a Stories banding kit is a must. It includes inspirational imagery, a static color palette, a design style guide, fonts, defined filters.
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Draft the campaign message and editorial style of your campaign
Having schemed a campaign message you will feel sure about introducing, explaining and even selling your product as long as the campaign is consistent. Hence, draft a couple of words that you’re going to weave during every campaign asset.
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Distinguish with the Stories features
It’s definitely a good idea to establish particularly what features of Stories you’re going to use in promoting the campaign. In case it’s built around a giveaway, which is time-sensitive, a countdown sticker will create interest around it the best.
And don’t neglect Spark AR effects! You can always create and promote AR effects related to your own brand to drive more traction.
Get a Storyboard for the campaign
A storyboard is a visual representation of your campaign that will help you foresee how it will unfold right from the beginning. It will help you determine how to convey your message most effectively.
Create the Assets
Now it’s time to get down with your Stories Campaign Assets, i.e. the content you’ll post including images, videos, GIFs, graphics, etc. Depending on the scope of the campaign, the assets will drastically differ. For instance, in case if you plan to promote a giveaway or a contest, lifestyle shots, illustration, UGC might work well as assets.
Schedule the Campaign
Now just combine all the components and create your Instagram content calendar. It’s not necessary to have the official launch day of a product/event identical to the timeline of Instagram. Besides, think about the lifespan of the content you’ll share and the frequency.
Promote the Campaign
The basic goal of any Instagram Stories campaign is to reach as many people as possible. For its promotion, draft a strategy. Create hype around it with a countdown sticker, partner with compatible influencers to build excitement, create a campaign hashtag, etc.
Go Live on Instagram on the Campaign Launch Day
Besides getting ready to answer questions, monitor the excitement and engage with your community on the launch day of the Stories campaign, there are several other points to perform. Here are they:
- Update your bio;
- Be quick with DM responses;
- Reshare the content your followers share;
- Go live for Q&A.
How successful the Stories campaign was, can be determined through Instagram metrics. Track your brand awareness KPIs (engagement rate, impressions, signups, e-commerce purchases, etc.).
Dec 15, 2019
In the beginning, brands weren’t sure about how Instagram Stories could help in promoting their campaigns. However, those days are long gone and today Stories are a major help for any Instagram business and perhaps every brand has found a way or several to exploit the feature to their benefit. If you feel enthusiastic about all this, InstaBF, your faithful guide in the world of Instagram and IGTV, will gift you with top tips concerning how to plan an Insta Stories campaign. Let’s get to work right now!
An Instagram Stories Campaign: What Is It?
Just like an ordinary Instagram marketing campaign, a Stories campaign aims at achieving a certain marketing objective by means of posting Instagram Stories. That objective can be as broad as building brand awareness, or as specific as generating sales for the new product release. Regardless of it, the key to running it successfully is creating top-quality and interactive content that inspires viewers to comment and share.
How to Plan a Stories Campaign
So, now when you fully acquire the importance of a Stories campaign, let’s see how you can plan it efficiently step by step:
Pick the Goal
The first step of your Stories marketing campaign should be defining the goals since the latter determines what type of campaign you need to run and what metrics will be required to track it. So, spend enough time picturing what you are going to achieve when it comes to an end. After this, think about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Whatever your goal is, it must be tied to numbers. For instance, if you aim at promoting a new product, think about how many units you want to sell. Actually, the more your Stories campaign is tied back to measurable results, the more palpable they will be.
Additionally, don’t forget about the metrics. How many likes, comments, shares, and views you gather still matters a lot.
Aim at the Target Audience
Once you have your goals set, it comes to determining the target audience. Depending on the purpose of your campaign pursues, your audience can include only the narrow subset of your current followers or it can be a broad one with Insta users who are not your followers, yet. To get on track easily, base on the following points:
- What type of content your ideal audience should engage with;
- Whether they prefer photo or video-based stories;
- What stickers they give preference the most;
- In what communities they take part;
- What hashtags they mostly follow.
Only after completely nailing down your Instagram Stories campaign goals and target audience, you can courageously pass to scheming the rest of the campaign.
Set the Timeline
The goals your Stories campaign has, influences its timeline, too. For instance, if the campaign is tied to a real-life event (an in-store sale, a master-class, etc.), the timeline of the Story completely depends on the event and usually stretches to a week at most. If the campaign is tied to a larger event (a Pride Month, for instance), you can set a longer timeline. Just be cautious not to let it go for too long or you run a risk of losing the steam.
Here are the parts to be based when setting the timeline:
- Pre-campaign hype (teasing it before the launch);
- The launch day (the day you post the main campaign content);
- Post-campaign follow up (continuing the conversations once the initial excitement has fallen by UGC, customer reviews, and so forth).
Dec 14, 2019
Instagram has a huge influencer market size – around $2 billion! Brands have started heavily investing in it since it was set to reach to Generation Z or millennial audiences. Appearing too attractive not only for brands but for ordinary users as well, the Instagram influencer market is supplemented actively. The job of an Influencer is the dream job for so many young people around the world, that to appear in the view of brands, they determine to cheat over both the social network and businesses by buying fake followers and engagement. This artificially inflates their clout. Generally, all influencers are constantly suspected of buying fake engagement. However, this is typical mostly to small or micro-influencers. But don’t brands differentiate users with real following from those who use bots? Can anyone become an Instagram influencer overnight? We are going to find answers to these questions right away, in the blog of InstaBF – an Instagram and IGTV provider you can apply to whenever you need!
The Experiment Set
To find out whether it’s possible to secure brand sponsorship deals for accounts with fake following or not, Mediakix set an experiment. The service created two fictitious accounts with completely fake following. They also bought engagement (comments, likes) for the accounts before applying them to campaigns on the influencer marketing platform. The first account was for a fake fashion Insta model while the second one “belonged” to an adventure and travel photographer. Here are the steps that Mediakix undertook:
Generating Content
For the fashion model account, the service hired a local model and had a one-day photoshoot to fill the account with lovely images of a pretty girl. For the content of the second account, meanwhile, Mediakix used stock images. Those were mostly landscape images from popular travel destinations including Maui, Paris, and Yosemite. Additionally, as the account was titled “wanderingggirl”, they also added images of a blond girl from behind (again from stock images).
Buying Fake Followers
Once the accounts were set and posts were made regularly, they started buying 1k followers per day. Companies selling Instagram followers and engagement demanded from $3 to $8 peer 1k followers. For the first account of a model they bought 30k followers, while the second one was filled with 50k followers.
Buying Fake Engagement
After collecting the necessary number of followers for each account, the service ordered likes and comments (from 500 to 2,5k likes and from 10 to 50 comments per each photo). Generally, the prices for 1k likes range from $4 to $9 while a comments costs 12 cents on average.
Heading to Influencer Marketing Platforms
There are various influencer marketing platforms most of which require at least 10k following for signing up. After hitting the threshold, Mediakix registered its two fake influencer accounts and started applying for new campaigns every day. As a result, the fashion account secured two deals – one with a national food & beverage company and the other with a swimsuit company. The next account, in the meantime, secured a deal with the same food & beverage brand and one with an alcohol brand. Both fake influencers were offered free products and monetary compensation.
So you see that even brands are often mislead and can’t say which influencer is true and which is fake. This is, definitely, a huge problem for the entire industry.
