Tag: Social Media Company

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Social Media

5 Lesser Known Features Of Instagram to Make Any Business Stand Out

Features Of Instagram

Everybody is on Instagram! With 1.386 billion people actively using the platform every day, it is the 4th most used social media platform in the world. According to us at Flora Fountain, one of India’s top digital marketing companies, Instagram is no longer just a social media platform to post pictures and videos, but an ever evolving people’s platform where people can connect, interact, stream and even shop.

And for a business to make the most out of it, here are 5 interesting but lesser known features that Instagram’s product team came up with in 2020-2021.

The Audio search tab

Everyone is reeling aka scrolling through reels. It’s true! Close to 100 million daily active users in India consume content on reels every day. It has also brought back into limelight many musical classics and become a deciding factor in new songs trending.

But the challenge was that people couldn’t recall the actual names of the songs. Now with a new search feature called Audio in the search tabs of the Explore section, anyone can simply type in either the lyrics of the song or the name of the artist and find the audio clip and its many variants on Instagram.

Instagram Audio Search Tab Reels Feat

Further, users can also see the many reels made using this specific audio clip and even use them for their own content. How does this help businesses and professional pages? The social media experts at Flora Fountain, the best digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad, say that by using popular or viral song clips on the reels, the chances of the reel ranking higher on the explore pages of people consuming similar content increases, and it becomes easily discoverable to more people on the platform.

Text translation in stories

As per Statista figures from October 2021, India has 201.1 million active users on Instagram. Instagram supports 9 Indian languages on the app for posts, stories, etc.

Now, to ensure all its viewers get to explore, see and understand what people around the world are talking about on the platform, no matter which language they use, Instagram had launched Text Translation on Stories in July 2021.

Text-Translation-on-Storie

How does this work? Every time someone sees a story with an overlayed text in a language that is different from the one set in their app, Instagram will show a “See translation” notification on the top left corner. Once users tap on the option, they will be presented with a translated panel. This feature currently supports 90 languages.

This update can be useful for brands operating in global markets. Instagram users all around the globe can now translate and understand the written text in the Instagram stories of their favorite brands. It already had this feature for its post captions, profile bios and even comments, but not many might have noticed or talked about it.

Words to Text Subtitle Sticker

Okay, now this one feature has us very excited! The words to text feature sticker on Instagram stories changes the way stories and reels are viewed. Known as caption stickers, this feature turns verbal speech into text and displays it on the screen as the video and audio plays along.

Think about it. People who can watch reels in public! Just by turning off the sound! And still not miss much of the action. Of course it is also super helpful for people who have hearing disabilities, who can also enjoy reels without any audio cues.

IG-Stories-Captions

Businesses and professional pages can reach out and engage with more people through this feature, and make their content more interesting. While this feature is officially available in all English-speaking countries, it is still being beta-tested in India and other big, non-English speaking markets.

Instagram Keyword Search

One of the subtlest, low-key yet important features to have launched on Instagram is the Keyword Search.

Now this feature is going to revolutionise the way people look for and consume content on Instagram. Earlier, if someone wanted to look for content on bridal jewellery, they’d have to search for content with hashtags such as #bridaljewellery. Due to this, a lot of interesting content that may not have used the right hashtag stood the chance of missing out.

Instagram-keyword-Search

But with Keyword Search (yes yes, very much like Google Search), people can simply search for the content they wish to see using the key words or phrases and the results show everything from posts, reels, videos, even if they don’t have the specific search phrase as a hashtag in their caption.

Instagram Guides

What are Guides? Exactly… This feature didn’t create much of a flutter, despite having a huge potential in changing and improving the engagement game on the platform.

Guides are article-like posts, which include various Instagram posts or captions, products or photos, and videos. It’s a creative functionality for accounts and creators wanting to recommend a food, products, services, tips etc. to their followers.

Instagram-Guides

Businesses can curate a complete range of their products and promote it in the form of recommendations. Brands can promote their services or products by smartly embedding them with well written descriptions and titles.

Now, these guides do not have any new piece of content, but are just existing posts curated into a structure.

Further, when an account posts a guide, it doesn’t get featured on the timeline of its followers like Reels or IGTV used to do. Instead, these guides needed to be promoted via stories and DMs for people to click on it and open.

But with our experience as one of the best social media agencies in Ahmedabad, we say WHAT’S THE LOSS IN DOING IT anyway?

Now that you have ‘DISCOVERED’ these interesting features of Instagram, which could help your business grow online, get started now! Or, you can get the experts at Flora Fountain to do the job efficiently and effectively. Drop us a hello on hello@flora.ffteam.in today to know how.

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Social Media

Advertising on Social Media: Why you need a separate game plan

Advertising on Social Media

Who would have thought that the platforms created to let people share stories from their lives through pictures and videos would turn out to be such great tools for audiences to discover new products and services and for brands to find these new audiences. And the pandemic has only made it more so!

It is time to go deeper into the social media rabbit hole.

Social media marketing and social media advertising. Always knew they were different, but didn’t know who to ask? Read below for some insights from Ahmedabad’s best digital marketing agency!

First things first, social media marketing is purely organic activity, which involves posting pictures, publishing stories, responding to comments and inquiries on messages and sharing the posts in various groups and communication channels.

While social media advertising comprises all paid marketing activity on various social media platforms through the means of sponsored posts and boosts, done over and above the usual social media marketing activity such as posting and creating stories.

While there is an overlap between the two in terms of results and goals, advertising on social media is a different ball game altogether, with targeted budgets, a keener understanding of target audiences, and a smart selection of the content that should be boosted.

Because of the difference in strategy and skills required for the two, the top advertising agency in Ahmedabad suggests that a mere social media strategy or calendar does not cut it for a brand. Serious brands must have a separate game plan for the two. Read on to know why and everything else about social media advertising.

WHY ADVERTISE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media advertising is an all-encompassing format of marketing for a brand. Since social media is a place where the people are a bit chilled out, it gives marketers the opportunity to go out of their way with creativity to make their brand stand out.

The regular advertising in the digital world includes the usual suspects, like pay-per-click ads, website display ads, video popup ads, digital billboards, etc. But social media has promotions and boosts, which offers them great flexibility in tweaking the audience, its reach perimeter, the budgets, and putting a pause or restart as per the brands requirements.

Even the best digital marketing agencies in India believe that organic reach is hard to achieve, hence if a brand has the bandwidth and resources to spend, they must consider social media advertising for quick win and turn around.

HOW TO ADVERTISE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Different platforms have different ways to let businesses and individuals promote themselves and their services to a large swathe of potential customers with interests that align with what they sell.

Listed below are the various kinds of paid promotions a brand can run on different platforms.

Twitter Promotions

With Twitter Promote, the Twitter algorithm automatically promotes Tweets to the brand’s specified audience. It promotes the first 10 daily organic Tweets that pass the Twitter quality filter. It also promotes the brand account to attract new followers.

Marketeers can focus on up to 5 interests or metro locations, and let Twitter do the rest. Unfortunately, with this feature, marketers can’t choose which Tweets to promote. (That’s why creating great content on a regular basis for every platform is important).

Facebook Ads


Facebook Ads
With over 2.45 billion monthly active users, Facebook is popular across many demographics. Just as many teenagers use Facebook as their parents—and seniors are quickly catching up. With ads, brands can direct users to its Facebook Page or the website as a part of the sales funnel. One such great form of advertising is Carousel ads on Facebook timelines.

Carousel ads work well to showcase different features of a product, or to explain a step-by-step process. They’re also a great way to present multiple products or services.


Showcase a Variety of Products
Sometimes, brands can showcase a variety of products in a single carousel chain, and every picture can have a customised purchase or inquiry link. This way, it can not only be a great sales and data collection tool too.

Instagram Promotions

Instagram is most popular with millennials, they say. Well, this platform is popular with people of all generations. Instagram has millions of Gen Z and GenX too, who create and consume content in the form of posts, reels, videos and stories.

Instagram currently has over 1 billion active users, a large majority of them using the app on their mobile phones. What’s interesting is that 71% of their demographic are users who are under the age of 35, who spend an average 53 minutes per day.

And what more, post the pandemic, where online sales have taken off and crossed the stratosphere already, it was found out that 80% of consumers use Instagram to help them decide on a purchase.

Just like Facebook, brands can target their ideal viewers with customised targeting options. Create lookalike audiences, define the audience’s behaviors and activities, interests, and demographics.

Seen above is a great example of a carousel ad on Instagram, that blends in smartly with the other content on the feed of the Instagram users.

Instagram Promotions

YouTube Promotions

Let us start by sharing a startling fact about this video streaming giant. YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet, and netizens consume close to 6 hours of video content every day.

Advertising on YouTube requires a Google Ads account, using which it uniformly helps brands create ads on multiple spots on the YouTube streaming page.


YouTube Promotions
The different types of ads on YouTube include short clips that play before the actual video, banner ads that get displayed on top of the playlist and clickable links that display in the corners of the screen.

Brands can set their budget and target the desired audience on specific YouTube channels. There’s no minimum price to run an ad – and brands can change their ads, targeting and budgets at any time.

LinkedIn Boosts

LinkedIn is much more business-oriented than other social networks in this post. It offers targeting options based on professional qualifications like job title and seniority.

Single images, videos, or carousel ads are all different options for sponsored content advertising on LinkedIn.


LinkedIn Boosts
Brands that are looking to target talented individuals to join their workforce, hiring agencies that have a large number of positions to fill, or companies who wish to talk about their achievements and attract more followers whose interests align with their brand, ideally choose LinkedIn Boosts. It has been noted that boosting on LinkedIn costs way more than its peers.

Get started with Flora Fountain

The team of experienced digital advertising and social media marketing experts at Flora Fountain have paved the path to success for many local and national brands to tap into a large swathe of unexplored audiences online, especially on social media.

Drop us a line here and let us invite you over for a cup of coffee and a riveting conversation on your brand’s future online.

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Digital Marketing Agency

You MUST outsource your digital marketing. Here’s why.

digital marketing

Marketing is the most crucial cog in the wheel for a business to move forward and grow. Often companies might think hiring a graphic designer and content writer is all it takes to start marketing on digital, but it is a special kind of beast which requires a team of experts with some very special skills to tame it. A graphic designer or a traditional marketing executive usually does not understand the intricate details and trends of social media presence, engagement, search engine optimization, digital campaigns, and the website design and development required to support it.

For mid-sized businesses, this is where outsourcing comes to your rescue. Instead of setting up an entire team of digital marketers — graphic designers, UI experts, content writers, social media analysts — and paying them hefty salaries, businesses can easily hire digital marketing agencies with in-depth expertise across digital platforms. Still wondering if it’s the right move? Read on to know the benefits you’ll reap by outsourcing your digital marketing activities.

Trust the experts

Outsourcing is smartsourcing, especially when it comes to digital marketing. When you hire a digital marketing agency, you get a specialist team of digital marketing experts like search engine optimization (SEO) experts, social media managers, digital content writers, UI designers, Pay-Per-Click campaign experts, web developers, and data analysts. Not only that, most agencies have platform-specific experts for Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Twitter marketing. Agencies also have specialization based on whether you are marketing directly to end consumers, B2C, or to other businesses, B2B. They help you in all aspects of social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, ecommerce, SEO, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Data Analytics, based on your business goals.

This way, you can focus more on growing your business and your digital marketing agency can ensure brand awareness, engagement, leads, and loyalty across digital platforms.

Digital without borders

The internet has no boundaries. You could be a premium tea vendor based out of Assam, India or a staffing agency in New York, United States, but your business can be marketed globally by a digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad, India. Infact, both of these examples happen to be clients of our digital agency Flora Fountain! 🙂

Digital-without-borders

Instead of being forced to recruit digital marketing executives in their city, businesses can hire digital agencies with the best experience in their particular segment whether it is jewellery, fashion, food, or lifestyle. And since all the communication and assets used in digital marketing can freely move through digital mediums like emails, messengers, and office suites, it is a smart and reasonable choice.

Say goodbye to long commutes to even longer meetings around conference tables to discuss every next move. Times are fast and you must be too. Hello digital!

Easier access to your audience

A study by Sprout Social says that customers feel more connected to a brand, if it has a strong social media presence. And on the internet, feedback is faster. Customers can reach out to brands directly on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and leave reviews on platforms like Google Business, Facebook, Zomato, Trip Advisor, Make My Trip, etc. This gives brands an opportunity to really hear what their end-user has to say, make them feel heard with quick response and/or solutions to any challenge. In this way improving the customer experience and solidifying brand loyalty.

Easier-access-to-your-audience

This is possible only when you have a digital marketing agency build a strong presence for your business across all relevant digital platforms and actively manage and engage the audience. Whether it is websites, social media pages, business profiles or digital storefronts.

With people now working, learning, shopping, and even dating online (Thank you, Covid-19!), it is imperative for businesses to tap this goldmine of an opportunity!

What gets measured gets done

Data is very important to understand the growth trajectory of your business. And a digital marketing agency helps you measure your business’ success. How, you ask?

What-gets-measured-gets-done

Digital marketing companies have expert data analysts in their teams, whose job is to study the trends of business on various digital media platforms, measure things like bounce rates, page views, conversions through social media and web analytics. And strategize on how to optimize these metrics. These metrics are usually compiled by digital marketing agencies on a weekly, fortnightly or

monthly basis to give businesses a clear picture of what promotions are working, which products are in demand, and who are the people that are consuming your products. Along with these reports, digital marketing agencies provide tips and suggestions on places you can improve, which new trends to tap on, and choose the next plan of action.

In simple terms, measuring and analyzing data helps brands sell more of what is already selling.

Save money

With a digital marketing agency on board, businesses can keep a closer tab on their marketing budgets. Multiple campaigns for the same brand can be run at the same time. An agency will manage your spending through Google Ads Manager, Facebook for Business, and various other digital tools meant for online campaigns like Google Pay-Per-Click, boosts for engagements and leads, and boosts for profile and website visits.

Save-money

Since these tools offer reports on every dollar spent and track clicks and conversions, businesses can analyze which campaigns require additional resources and which ones can be cut down a notch.

Further, when you have a digital marketing agency manage everything from websites to social media to SEO, you are saving a huge amount of money that could have been spent on hiring, training and paying people to do these jobs for you full time.

Make us your growth partner

Through our technology, design and content expertise, our Ahmedabad-based digital agency, Flora Fountain has been part of the growth stories of many national and international brands and individuals as their full service digital marketing agency. We have been able to help brands with their social media marketing, SEO, website development, content-writing, brand research, digital strategy and online branding, despite being in different geographical locations spread all over the world.

Check out our work here, and to plan out your digital strategy, drop us a line here.

Categories
Social Media

Why DESIGN is the hero of your digital marketing strategy

Facebook Engagement 3

Social media is no longer a child’s play. With more people having access to high speed internet connected to devices with the latest technology, a mere text post will get lost in the sea of millions of pieces of content being put out online daily. And this is where your design intelligence makes your stand out from the herd.

The idea behind a design

There is no dearth of written marketing content trying to sell you things online on websites though blogs and articles, but what sets the social media apart is its fusion of visuals and text. And in order to garner the attention of a potential consumer, one must use these elements in balance to create an impeccable design that speaks to him/her.

By picking the right colour and font for your brand and using them consistently in your designs, you convey the mood, meaning and feeling of the brand, and thus targetting a specific set of audience. And when you fit all this together with your content in the right copy space, you are effectively delivering your message to the consumers.

social media image size

Size matters (a lot!)

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make in order to save costs on design (BTW, a big NO NO!) is create one graphic image or poster for both Instagram and Facebook. But one needs to understand both platforms have different post sizes for both desktop and mobile. This is to provide the user with the best quality in visuals of the graphics.

If one doesn’t optimize their posts according to the social media platforms, the image or graphic will pixelate, thus killing the design and the entire message you wanted to convey. Given below are the sizes one should use while designing for Facebook and Instagram

Facebook Post: 940 X 788 px
Facebook cover: 820 X 312 px (desktop) & 640 X 360 px (for mobile)
Stories & IGTV: 1080 X 1920 px
Instagram Post: 1080 X 1080 px (Square), 1080 X 1350 px (Portrait) & 1080 X 608 px (landscape)

More visuals, fewer text

Visuals always have an upper hand over text when it comes to social media. It has been observed that more people respond to images and videos than written content. Hence it is advisable to involve more visuals in your social media marketing.
You will attract more eyeballs when the images are original and the videos have real people in it and not just graphics. Use text only if it is necessary to convey a specific message, like an address, phone number, website or slogan. But make sure your visuals always have space for your logo.

Where to source your visuals from?

While it is important to use original images and videos for visual posts on social media, we understand it is not possible for a small or medium business to spend on a promotional photo shoot for every campaign. And this is where free stock images and videos come to your rescue.

Given below are best sources for you to find high definition videos, images and icons for free and use them to create stunning designs.

Pixabay: With over 4 lakh stock images available for free, this is one of the most sought after sources for images of real people and products.

Unsplash: This website mostly has images from photographers who take artsy snaps and put it out for free use. It has a good source of such images that can go well with a subtle poster for stories and banners.

Pexels: This is a free content aggregator website that displays images and videos from sources where creators put out their content for free, which include Pixabay and Unsplash too.

Videvo: This is a free video source where you can get short video clips perfect for social media, consisting of places, people and products.

How to edit by yourself

While we’d always suggest that you take the services of a professional designer or agency (like us) to create your images and video posts for social media, we understand sometimes you need to pick up the mantle and do stuff by yourself. And if you are someone who does have a basic understanding of colours, fonts and design schemes, then you can use the below tools for a quick edit or post creation.

Canva: This is free photo and video graphic editing tool available for both computers and mobile phones. The best part about this application is that it has some beautiful, predesigned themes for almost all types of social media posts, from banners, posters, stories to covers.

Lightworks: This is a free video editing tool available for desktop, using which you can edit and create good quality videos using its basic tools available for no cost. If you want to use its advanced version, it does have a decent subscription plan.