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Instagram is more than just a social media platform: more than 80% of its users are raving fans of at least one business profile, with over 200 million visiting one business account daily. is bringing new opportunities to the world of Instagram trends. And if you are trend-fluent enough, you will be able to make your competitors jealous in . Ready to wow your followers? It’s time to be up to date on the latest Instagram marketing trends and add them to your content strategy. Below find the 9 biggest changes that are going to shape your perception of this social media network in . 1. Stock images for niche content The number of brands that are creating marketing content is still growing. This means that competition for the attention of your target audience is growing too. As a result, more companies are niching down their focus. This allows them to target a very narrow, yet specific group of the audience. Brands get more attentive to the content they post, thoroughly choosing images from the stock to publish only the most relevant ones. Some of them use libraries with pre-selected stock photo collections to post truly original content. Nerd Fitness, for instance, demonstrates a wise use of this tendency. Instead of targeting anyone interested in keeping fit, the brand focuses just on the people who are deep into fitness. Tips on the Instagram trend: Analyze different segments of your audience; Decide what segment to focus on; Thoroughly choose and publish content aimed at that specific segment of your audience. 2. Instagram Stories highlights When Instagram announced its Stories launch back in 2016, it was quite a big deal. Users started to fearlessly share moments that will vanish after 24 hours. This worked perfectly well for ordinary users, but brands and influencers could not get any value out of that. So recently, Instagram announced Stories Highlights – an amazing function that lets you curate already published stories and keep them visible for as long as you want to. H&M takes advantage of Stories Highlights. With this Instagram trend, they bring together images of jeans, blouses, coats, knitwear, and collaborations. Users don’t need to visit the official website, as the new H&M collection is always just one Instagram Story away ????   Tips on the Instagram trend: Treat Stories as a separate social media platform and create a special content plan for it; Make your own hashtags and use them repeatedly to navigate users through your stories; Pick thematic icons that match your branding and use them as highlights avatars. Use Instagram Story templates to save time. 2. IGTV: the rise of vertical videos Back in 2015, who would have said that vertical videos will become a new social media breakthrough? No one, that’s for sure. But it seems like the people at Instagram know how to turn literally anything into a hot trend. Ever since the Instagram Stories hit the social media landscape, vertical videos took over Instagram Live, Instagram Stories, and IGTV. Have you noticed some celebrities launch 2 or 3 differently formatted videos for the same song? Now you know the reason. Even Jamie Oliver uses vertical videos in IGTV to share 5-minute recipes with his followers. Tips on the Instagram trend: Fit the 9:16 ratio to make sure your vertical video appears fully on mobile devices; Record optimum length videos – these are 2 to 5 minutes long; Use animated graphics, images, and text to make your videos compelling. 4. Customized AR filters for brands VR and AR were the buzzwords of 2018. Though there are countless ways of their practical implementation, Instagram AR filters are the talk of 2019. Today, the inbuilt service for creating branded AR filters is already operating, but it is currently in a closed testing mode. Still, you can try out some filters created by brands and influencers. You must have heard about Rihanna’s diamond filter that is currently beating all the records. Haven’t you? Then check it out! Here’s how it looks:   Tips on the Instagram trend: If your brand is famous, address Instagram directly to get access to the feature; If you are a nano- or micro-influencer, calm down and wait for the official release; Meanwhile, try to upload your branded stickers/GIFs to Stories and see how your audience likes them. 5. Personalized Instagram content Similarly to all other social media platforms, Instagram has also jumped on the personalization bandwagon. The website carefully considers user preferences and curates individual feeds by analyzing data from posts users previously interacted with. This gives the platform the ability to provide users with a highly curated, personalized experience. Surprisingly, brands can also get creative and build personalized feeds for their users outside Instagram algorithm. One bright example is a personalized marketing campaign launched by John Frieda. The brand created the #ShadesofMe marketing campaign, which allowed them to gather data about users’ hair color. Then, the brand created personalized videos describing what the specific shade of hair said about the user. Personalize your content too, and you’ll see up to 20% increase in sales. Tips on the Instagram trend: Let Instagram be the starting point of your marketing campaign; Lead users to a landing page with a quiz; Use the data gathered to promote products that are relevant to specific groups of users. 6. Hassle-free shopping on Instagram In 2017, Instagram shopping was just a buzz. Today, it’s the hottest trend allowing you to shoppify your feed with integrated Shoppable stickers. The idea behind it is very simple: users are one click away from inspiration to action. Once they get impressed by a certain product, they click a button, and buy it directly from the Instagram app. This shopping tendency is a win-win situation both for brands and their shopping-obsessed followers. At the time of writing, just about 20% of marketers take advantage of shoppable posts. However, more than 50% are planning to integrate them into their social media campaigns in 2019. This year,

B2B social media provides marketers with the perfect system to present and engage their customers. This changes how customers feel towards other brands, and vice versa. This is precisely why most brands find meaningful ways to engage with their customers on social media.

In fact, 90% of marketers apply a social media strategy to their business, hastily becoming one of the most popular B2B marketing tactics.

Even with a modest level of ambition behind it, managing social media for a business is a mammoth task. How are you realistically supposed to keep up with the relentless pace of updates, queries, feedback, and even complaints? Even if you do manage it somehow, it’ll likely lead to burnout, as well as produce a steadily-increasing risk that you’ll slip up and post something in poor taste that gets you savaged in the court of public opinion. If you’re a social media manager, then, you need all the help you can get — ways to make your everyday workload simpler, faster, and less exhausting. Thankfully, you have options. Here are 8 straightforward social media hacks that can make your life easier: Social Media Hack #1: Create image templates Visuals are mission-critical for social media promotion, because even the most engaging article will sink without trace if you don’t attach an eye-catching image to the link. The problem is that finding suitable images takes time — often time that you really can’t afford to spare. If you gloss over it, you look bad. If you spend too long, you struggle. And it’s probably not an easy task unless you are an award winning web designer. This is why you need to create branded templates in whichever image editing tool you typically use (it could be anything from Photoshop to Easil). Set out your branded elements — here are some useful suggestions for that — and get everything ready so all you need to do is find a suitable image (stock or otherwise), drop it in, and change the title. Social Media Hack #2: Repurpose material You could make every post unique — but there’s no reason to. Even if there’s substantial overlap between your Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest followers, no one is going to complain upon seeing the same post used on multiple platforms. Furthermore, when you make everything unique, it’s incredibly easy to run out of content. And when it comes to using the same tweet several times, consider that it’s extremely common, and for good reason. Twitter feeds move quickly, and attention is at a premium. Once a post has fallen off the screen, it’s forgotten… so why not use it again after a while? That’s exactly what Bulkly is perfect for: recycling your updates to squeeze out maximum value. Social Media Hack #3: Focus on content quality A lot of digital content ends up going to waste. It’s so boring that readers don’t care, or it doesn’t get read in the first place. When a piece of content ends up as a dud, it’s a massive waste, because it takes time to write and distribute content — time that needs provide ROI. That’s why you need to ensure that your content is outstanding. When producing content, place each piece into one of two categories: evergreen, or ephemeral. Evergreen content is high-quality and applicable throughout the year. Great evergreen content will bring in traffic indefinitely, and you can link to it semi-regularly without it losing value. Ephemeral content is time-sensitive: it brings in a lot of attention, but only for a short while, or at a particular time of the year (think Christmas content). Social Media Hack #4: Set up a social chatbot Chatbots aren’t magical, and they can’t completely supplant people, but they are excellent for handling certain types of task: namely answering frequent questions, taking orders, and helping visitors navigate your site. The more of those tasks are handled automatically, the more time you’ll have to spend on the things that can’t be automated. If you run a website or a blog on something like WordPress, you have plenty of options out there: here’s a selection to get you started. If your site is actually a dedicated ecommerce store, then you’ll have more sales-centric options: for instance, anyone who uses Shopify’s snappy store designer can simply install the Messenger Chatbot Marketing app. Get everything configured, and you can just let it run for you, with you there to step in if anything goes wrong. Social Media Hack #5: Encourage UGC UGC is user-generated content, so anything that your followers produce — whether it’s on your behalf, or simply featuring your business in some way. Think of reviews, testimonials, pieces of artwork, direct recommendations, blog posts, etc. UGC is incredibly powerful because you barely need to do anything for it once it’s happening. If you can spur people to produce content, all you need to do is curate it to a basic degree. How do you get UGC? Provide minor incentives. Enter everyone who tweets a review of your product into a competition of some kind, perhaps. Alternatively, just ask politely. Shockingly enough, people like having interesting tasks to do, and if someone likes your company enough to follow it on social media, there’s a decent chance they’ll be game to participate. Social Media Hack #6: Group up your tasks No one is truly great at multitasking. Some people manage it competently, but it’s never ideal. What you want to achieve is something akin to the flow state — complete concentration with optimal performance, never getting distracted. You can’t manage that if you keep swapping back and forth between tasks: tweeting, posting on Facebook, writing titles, sourcing images, etc. So what do you do? You group up your tasks logically. You do all your tweets, then your Facebook posts, then your content preparation. While you’re tweeting, you’ll enter into a comfortable tweeting rhythm, and have them all done much faster. Social Media Hack #7: Take advantage of trends Trying to come up with suitable post ideas can take a lot of time and effort, so whenever you have an opportunity to skip it, you should take it. Thankfully, Twitter near-constantly provides ideas in the form of trends. All you need to do is keep an eye on your company Twitter feed, and look out for hashtags that might be relevant to whatever you’re trying to market. How

In the coming years, social media will continue to be a dominant fixture in marketing activities, particularly for small business. Here are three effective ways you can gear up your small business marketing efforts for 2025, and how to do it for the best results possible.

The competition for SaaS businesses is becoming tougher. In order to succeed, you obviously need to set yourself apart from the competitors. Here are seven tools that will make building your SaaS social media presence easier and some insights into their marketing strategies – used by the leaders from all over the globe. Check them out and dare to try what you find the most efficient.

You know very well just how different it is to run a social media account for a business compared to your own personal account. When I’ve mentioned that I work in social media management I’ve reactions like “it must be so fun to just look at memes all day on Instagram!” But, from one social media manager to another, we know our jobs call for much more than “scrolling through Twitter.” As our audiences continue to crave more exciting, personalized, and frequent updates, it can feel like an uphill battle to write, share, and curate compelling content. In a world where technology is constantly evolving and our audiences’ appetites for information continues to grow, social media managers need someone in their corner. In this case, let that someone be a few handy social media browser extensions. When managing social media you’re trying to juggle all the requests from the content and PR teams to share their work, while also filling in the gaps with content you’ve been curating. The only thing that could help you manage it all each day would be to have more time. Although we can’t stop time, we can use social media tools to make the best use of it. At a startup, we’re always looking for ways to save time, or to help with our efficiency. So, we use browser extensions, to manage many of these social media requests right from our browsers saving time and increasing speed. Here’s Rebrandly’s favorite browser extensions for social media managers. 1. Grammarly There is nothing worse than that feeling of sending out a tweet with a simple grammar error. As soon as you notice the mistake, flashbacks of your primary school teacher scolding you about the difference between there, they’re, and their ????. Lucky for us there’s a browser extension for that called Grammarly. This extension checks both your grammar and writing style, and lets you know every time you’ve made a mistake. You can get a complete inside look of Grammarly here. 2. Buffer Buffer makes it quick and easy to share on social media. When you’re online scrolling and you find something you want to share, you just click the extension, choose the accounts you want to post to, and Buffer will autofill the title. It also gives you the option to add any photos that it pulled from the content. My favorite part is the fact that you can add it to your “queue,” share it now, or add it to a custom schedule. I’ve found this extension extremely helpful to schedule and organize curated content on Twitter. 3. Rebrandly One of the most challenging thing about writing is keeping things short and succinct, and social media you have no choice but to keep posts brief. It can feel like solving a Rubix Cube to write a post that’s compelling, clear, and contains an actionable CTA in the least amount of characters. Rebrandly stamps every link you share online with your brand name, what you do, and where the link will lead in just a few words. That helps solve a few of our collective social media manager problems, right? Instead of using a generic short URL that carries the name of another company and doesn’t feature a CTA, branded links on social media immediately create trust with your audience. The best part is, you don’t even have to leave the piece of content you’re posting to brand the link. Just click the Rebrandly browser extension, customize the fields in whatever way you see fit, and boom, link branded. 4. Pocket Pocket is so simple, yet it’s one I rely on everyday. It’s essentially a “read-it-later” tool. When managing social media I use it as, a “share-it-later” tool. As I’m quickly skimming through the dozens of newsletters in my inbox each morning, I’ll see an article or video I think could be interesting for our audience and instead of reading it in that moment, I’ll Pocket it to review later. Once you have an arsenal of interesting stories, you can use a social media automation tool like Bulk.ly to share your content on all platforms, and even recycle past shares, taking the headache of constantly searching for new articles. 5. Check My Links Picture a typical day. The content team excitedly hands over the latest blog post for you to push live on all platforms. Ten minutes later a comment trickles in saying “the link in the introduction is saying is broken”. Not only does the writer feel bad, but it’s not a good reflection if a reader calls out one of your mistakes. The Check My Links extension checks every link on the web page you’re sharing. If there is anything broken it will be highlighted in red, giving you the chance to fix them before hitting “send.” 6. Pablo Pablo will be your best friend if you’re not a graphic designer but still want to create and share custom social media sized images. They have thousands of pictures to choose from, and even give you the option to add personalized text and a logo to make the image on brand for your company. If even works if you want to upload your own images, just be sure to check if they fit the format for your chosen social media outlet within the editing options. And once you have created all your images, why not recycle your social media images again and again? 7.SimilarWeb The SimilarWeb extension saves me so much time when I’m measuring if the content I’m sharing is from a legitimate and trusted website. Whether I’m sharing a one off piece of evergreen content and I want to make sure the source is valid, or mentioning another company on Twitter and want to check they’re reputable, this tool is extremely helpful. This extension gives you both traffic and engagement statistics for any website. With one click I can learn the average bounce rate, page views, monthly visits, traffic sources, site rankings,

Delivering on social media customer service isn’t easy. Today’s consumers are more demanding than ever before; Social Media Today reports that 60% of all users who complain expecting a response within an hour. And that’s not all – 67% of us now use social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to find a resolution to our problems, and one-third of us would prefer to speak to a customer service advisor on Twitter than we would over the phone. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Customer service on social media is often quicker and more cost-effective than hiring a dedicated customer service advisor to man your phone lines, and because responses are public, you get to show the world (or your followers, at least) that you care about your customers and want to put things right. When done well, it’s powerful marketing. In fact, when businesses deliver excellent customer service on social media, consumers end up spending 20% to 40% more than they would have otherwise spent, so it pays to put in the effort and keep your patrons happy and invest in a customer service strategy on social media. The biggest challenge for any small or medium-sized business in delivering effective customer service on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram is time, so today, we’ve rounded up some of the ways that you can speed up your responses and keep your customers happy. (Don’t have a business yet? Here are a few business ideas to get you started.) Hire a social media manager to help with customer support Whether you’re a small business or you’re managing a team of 200, delivering effective social media customer service on your own just isn’t possible. Sure, keeping open tabs of your Twitter and Facebook pages is a smart move, but the time and dedication required to manage every comment is just too much – so hiring a social media manager to do it for you is a good move. And depending on your business, another option could be to look for a volunteer coordinator who can help. The average social media manager will set you back around $50,000 per year, but if you make the right decision when hiring, you’ll be able to find a marketing expert that will be able to create graphics, grow your audience and drive more referrals back to your website. And when they’re not doing all of that, they can be answering customer comments and dealing with complaints on Twitter. Indeed, customer service training should be top of the list for every social media manager, so organise time for them to get to grips with your business and the most appropriate responses for comments, complaints and inquiries from your customers. If your budget doesn’t stretch to hiring a social media manager, then consider training your existing customer service team to keep tabs on your social media accounts. You can take it in turns to check profiles and respond to customer comments, and if your staff is more used to speaking with disgruntled clients over the phone, they can resolve issues privately that way. Set a social media management rota for customer support It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got one social media manager or fifteen customer service advisors; set a clear rota so you know who’s managing your accounts at any given time. There are tools for customer service on social media like Mention, Brand24 and Sprout Social, but they’re expensive and can cause confusion if multiple employees are dealing with the same customer. Instead, set a rota and give each of your employees the responsibility of one of your social networks during operating hours. You can try free social media tools like TweetDeck to manage comments and inquiries effectively, and you can integrate your social media customer service with your existing lead generation and complaints procedures to ensure a straight-forward handover. The key to providing excellent service is consistency, so make sure you write down notes and have everyone on the same page to avoid confusion and to help resolve issues as soon as possible. Turn on notification alerts to stay on top of social media customer service If you’re running a business on your own but you spend a lot of your time on the go, then a wise move would be to turn on notification alerts so you know as soon as a customer gets in touch. On Twitter, you can turn on Notification alerts by going to Settings and Privacy, tapping on Notifications and selecting the Push notifications you’d like to receive. You can turn on alerts for Direct Messages or Mentions, and even filter them so only genuine interactions come through. On Facebook, go to your Business Page, Settings, Notifications and choosing the types of alerts you’d like to receive. Facebook gives you a huge range of options, offering more control over the type of customer service you’d like to deliver. If you want to respond to every customer interaction, then you can turn on notifications for Check-ins, Mentions, Reviews and Comments, or if you’d like to take a backseat and only respond to direct interactions, you can turn on notifications just for Messages. On your phone, these will be sent to your Messenger app. You can turn on push notifications for comments, tags and messages on Instagram by going to your profile, clicking the tog, and turning on notifications there. LinkedIn offers a similar feature – just tap the Notifications bell, then the More icon and run through your Notifications settings. It’s important to remember turning on notifications could “blow up your phone” if you’re suddenly inundated with messages, so look at filtering options and choose the most appropriate settings. Trigger auto-replies to improve customer service on social media Autoresponders can help to speed up your social media response times, as you can link users to your FAQs or give them your number; great if you’re out of the office or closed for the night. While they’re not the right option in

There are those who argue that the total social media followers on social media channels is nothing but a vanity figure. And in some ways, they’re right. If you’re sweeping Twitter and following every account possible, seeking only a follow-back in return, then yes, your follower count is an empty figure, made up of bots, phonies and those get-rich-quick scammers. Plus, what’s the value of a following that includes little to no target customers?

Get great looking graphics without spending a lot of money. Learn four simple social media graphic design hacks that will help you create awesome images.