40% of brands makes Instagram part of their social marketing
News on Social Marketing, according to Brafton News, Instagram’s success in the last year has made it a perfect and easy way for marketers to share content and improve visibility on the web. By sharing visual content with their fans and followers, 40 percent of top brands have made Instagram a part of their social media marketing strategy, as reported by Simply Measured.
Although other social platforms still leads Instagram in terms of landing high volumes users, it has positioned itself to become a critical part of social strategies with its significant growth since it was launched in 2010. Moreover, in terms of its integration with other platforms, Facebook’s acquisition of the company has come without any problems.
Marketers can now add some personality to their social media content with Instagram. To show a brand’s authority in its industry, sharing links to website content is critical. However, a report from Buddy Media found that consumers respond well to visual content helping a company give its prospects, fans and followers a closer look into a business. Additionally, visual content shared on Twitter generates twice as much engagement as other Tweets.
Brafton recently reported that Instagram now has more than 80 million users, sharing more than 4 billion images on the platform since unveiling its Android app earlier this year.
Read more at Top brands making visual content a part of social marketing with Instagram
Marketers and users using Google+ can now customize their URLs
News on Social Marketing, according to Brafton News, as it looks to become more relevant in social media marketing, a critical move was made in the progression of Google+. Google’s Saurabh Sharma wrote that users and marketers using Google+ Pages can customize the URLs for their accounts. For businesses, they can now put their company name within their URLs, while users can use their own names.
According to Sharma, the tool will soon be available for more users but did not provide any details for a full rollout. The custom URLs have already been rolled out initially to select partners and verified user profiles like Toyota, Hugo Boss, Britney Spears and David Beckham.
To help users make sure that the Pages or popular profiles they follow are real, verification and custom URLs are important especially with the rise of parody accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
Seeing the move as a good step for the social network, both marketers and active Google+ user’s reactions were mostly positive.
Google+ was a bit behind with its release of custom URLs, compared to other social network. Facebook unveiled its version of custom URLs more than three years ago, while for Twitter, a page’s URL has always been based on the name of the account.
Read more at Google+ rolls out custom URLs users, marketers, boosts social branding on platform
Google+ targets 400 million users by the start of 2013
News on Social Marketing, according to Brafton News, most top brands are being attracted to Google+ with 75 of the top 100 U.S. businesses maintaining presences on the site, according to a report from BrightEdge. However, compared with 481 million Facebook users who have Liked at least one brand, only 15 million Google+ users have placed one of these companies in a Circle.
Facebook and Twitter still leads Google+ as 90 percent and 80 percent of top brands use these networks, respectively. According to BrightEdge, the additional SEO lift provided by Google’s social network, is one of the main advantages for companies using Google+ for social media marketing
Because of Google’s integration of social data into search rankings, Google+ will have a greater impact compared to other platforms which offers SEO value because of increased inbound links and visibility.
Brafton reported that Google is projecting more than 400 million Google+ users by the start of 2013 as the 250 million-user mark has been surpassed by the network. Google+ has grown in terms of general consumer activity even as it continues to attract more marketers.
Read more at Top brands flock to Google+ but their fans slow to follow
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