Instagram Blogging-What, How, Why?

The key purpose of Blogging is promotion. May be the promotion of your ideas, thoughts, experiences or of your business & its products or services. 

Normally blogs are hosted on websites or blog sites and consist of more than 500+ words. But with time, a shift has been observed with the concept of microblogging arising. Micro-blogging, is a concoction of blogging and instant messaging, which allows the users to post and share short messages in the form of texts, videos, images, audios, and hyperlinks, with the audiences online. Instagram blogging can be termed as microblogging and has a 2200 character limit to be posted along with lots of images or videos.

 Instagram blogging is very simple and easy, yet interesting. Following the simple steps mentioned below you can make the most of Blogging on Instagram For Instagram Blogging, you need to open a business profile on Instagram. 

• Promoting posts through this business profile helps you take your content to the influencers and target people
• Putting a contact button and adding links within your posts & stories helps readers to reach you with ease
• Checking insights and analytics of the blog post helps you understand readers’ response and interest in it

To create an Instagram blog, you need to take the following points under consideration:

• Opening an Instagram business account - A business account can be opened by switching your personal profile also.
• Choosing a proper niche/calling for your Instagram blog - It will define your Instagram blogging.
• Coming up with an appealing Bio and a profile photo - Whenever anyone visits your profile, the first thing they notice is the profile picture and the bio which you have written. Making it interesting is what will gather more audiences.
• Writing your Instagram blog posts keeping in mind your niche.
• Giving importance to the photo captions, and making it captivating - It will help connect the audiences with your blog post.
• Using relevant hashtags - To get discovered which can increase your followers
• Geo Tagging your posts - It helps you gain followers and attract influencers.
• Using Instagram Stories and Instagram Live - To grow your account, by connecting with other users, following them and liking their post by commenting on it.

One thing which is to be made sure is that you have to stick to the niche which you have chosen for your Instagram blog. Your niche can be travel, food, money,  business, etc. Although you can have a broader niche category like Lifestyle, later you can narrow it down to traveling. The main point is to keep your Instagram blog consistent for your audience. This will ensure that you create a successful Instagram blog and attract users in large numbers. 

Although the Instagram blog helps you to share the views to the users, it also gives you a chance to get paid for your post. You can use Instagram TV to promote your products. If you are a travel blogger, you can earn revenue by hosting travel tours. Bloggers generally earn their revenue through brand partnerships. Food bloggers can write cookbooks and start events to earn revenue through Instagram blogging.  

An Instagram blogger can make up to 200$ for one sponsored post, who has about 15K engaged followers. In short, you can monetize your Instagram blog by partnering with the famous brands, creating sponsored posts, using affiliate links by being an affiliate for someone else’s product and services, or even selling your products. Instagram blogging can be fun if you have a lot of followers or if you are an influencer because you’ll get paid for posting something you like.

 Now let's discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Instagram blogging. 

Advantages of Instagram Blogging:

• You don't have to worry about writing a 500+ words blog as you can limit your blog to 2200 characters. 
• Your Instagram post and Instagram stories will direct the audience to your linked website.
• The increase in the website traffic can help in the increase of sales.
• You can communicate directly with users, via direct messages, comments, and likes, thereby strengthening the relationship between viewers, followers, and audiences
• You can monetize Instagram posts and earn revenue.

Disadvantages of Instagram Blogging:

• Instagram Insights is limited and is not as precise as Google or other analytics.
• Content on Instagram isn't owned, unlike your website or blog. If the site gets shut down or gets hacked you can lose your content, without having any backup.
• Instagram blog might not gain you much revenue unless you are famous or have lots of followers.

To have a Good Instagram blog, with many followers, you need a lot of patience and effort. If you want to try out something creative and interesting, Instagram blogging for you. But, if you want to have a living through it, a traditional blog is what should be preferred, unless you are an influencer or your products are being promoted by one.

How to Make an Effective Direct Response (DR) Tweet Copy In 2020?

Twitter is an exceptionally amazing social media tool when it comes to marketing, sales and customers' opinions. The popularity of Twitter is known to us all, so if you want to broadcast your ideas, you have to advertise a campaign for a company or an individual, Twitter can do it like a wildfire. But there are ways to do it properly when it comes to Digital Marketing, so the effect is strong and can gain lots of customers.

A while ago, Twitter researched ways to improve the campaign performances and increase ROI with Tweet copy, by looking at 9000 direct Response (DR). A few weeks ago, Twitter came up with an initiative explaining what makes an effective tweet copy. These tips will help you in making the tweet copy more effective for your campaign, and boost your tweet performance in 2020.

Twitter’s Creative Lead “Joe Waddington” has called this particular initiative ‘Good copy, Bad Copy’. How simple and interesting is that! When you watch the video, you’ll notice how easy it has been explained to increase your tweet performance for the business and campaigns, by tweaking certain things. Let’s rehash the tips explained in the video for an effective Tweet copy.

1. Exclude the CAPS: Although the text in capital implies gathering attention or emphasizing the importance, it also means shouting. You don’t need to shout on Twitter to promote your tweet to boost your campaign. It has been observed that promoted tweets with 20% or more characters in capital letters have 2% higher cost per acquisition (CPA) and a 9% lower click through rate (CTR). 

Avoiding caps and going with the normal makes it better.

2. % beats $: Various studies have shown that people prefer % signs over the $$ signs. When they see tweets with %, they click more on those tweets. Tweets who promote discounts in % have 40% lower CPA than those who advertise discounts in $$.  

To promote your business, a sale or a campaign using a % sign will help the tweet perform much better. Try it and see if it changes anything for you.

3. Hashtags: Hashtags are important! But one should know when to use them and when to avoid them. Having 1 or 2 hashtags is more effective in promoting content than having many hashtags. You don’t want the audiences to click on the hashtag, right? You want them to engage in your product or website or campaign. As per a study, tweets with one or more hashtags had 24% higher CPA and 3% lower CTR. 

Keeping the tweets simple, concentrated and well-focused will aid in better Tweet copy performance.

4. Use URL: If you want to direct the customers to your website or a campaign page, mention a URL at the end of the tweet, rather than mentioning hashtags. 

5. Website Cards: Make use of Twitter Website cards for your promotion. It is an efficient way. Also, these can be used organically! To make the website cards work, you need to put a URL at the end of the card, and completely avoid the hashtags.

We can see in the mentioned video, that the good copy looks better for a tweet and can result in the higher promotion of the tweet and product. Follow these simple and useful tips and can see the result for your campaign performance. Even though it all looks simple and known, the final effect can be immense.

Why is Video Better When it Comes to Content?

I am a content writer and I have to write blogs, articles, content for infographic and presentations for many topics to post on various sites, portal and social media platforms. It’s not an easy task, I tell you, because you need to just force your mind running for the needed content and new ideas. 

Sometimes, I get this idea, what if you put the content in the form of a video, to advertise a product, or give a demonstration about some software rather than writing it in a lengthy format? If I’ll put myself in the audience’s shoes, I’ll prefer a video over a written blog or an article, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read my posted blogs!

Avid readers and the people who want to get some knowledge because it’s mandatory for them for some reasons, tend to read articles and blogs, to be honest. How many of you prefer a movie made on some book series over the actual books? More than half of the population will be choosing the former. Video content has that effect on audiences. 

What makes video content on top of the chain of contents and better than other contents is the question. To answer that we will need to consider many reasons. 

One of the reasons is - Video content is concise and has to be made short to gather the interest of the audiences. A single 1-minute video contains about a million more words than the same written content of 1 minute. If the content isn’t made interesting, not many will want to view it based on the comments and reviews it gets on social media. 

Second reason is - the audio and visual format. It gathers the attention of the viewers more than the words after words of a document. A connection is formed between the audiences and the speakers’ expression and body language, which intends them to consider subscribing or buying that product in the end which is shown in the video. About 65% of the population learn about things better through a video.  

Third reason is the ability of the video content to describe something as how it is. For e.g, if you want to change oil or want to know practically how every engine part works in a car, then it is best understood through an explanatory demo video, rather than a blog or an article. The understanding and recall of the information is easier when it is a video content.

Fourth reason is the sharing capacity of any video over social media. We have people of all ages today who tend to use their mobiles for mostly everything when it comes to the digital media. And who really wants to read a written content on a small screen of a mobile, where you need to adjust the zoom according to your need in order to read something which is continuous and long? That’s why videos are the preferred choices in this scenario. 

Let’s consider the fifth reason why video content scores higher than written text content is, it can include presentations and infographic in an audio-visual form. This makes video the king between all the content mediums. 

Sixth reason is the reason for increasing the SEO of any website, and improving the traffic because google loves video content and it’ll consider the algorithm and rank the page higher. It’ll also increase the ROI. All you need to do is make the video SEO worthy by adding tags, description, thumbnail, title etc. It has been studied that 70% of the marketers consider that B2B video content gives higher conversions than any other content. 

People are lazy, to be very honest. Most prefer shorter and easier ways to do things. Video content is the option which fits exactly into their needs. Due to all the above discussed reasons, one can invariably conclude that Video content is better than Text and Written content.

IGTV, Can it Become an Important Video Sharing Platform in 2020?

“Everyone uses YouTube daily! But have you tried IGTV? To me it sounds
like some abbreviation for a company like HCL, DXC, etc. right?” - One
of my friends threw this question to me. 

And I started explaining -

Well, it’s not. IGTV stands for Instagram Television. It is an online

video posting platform, like YouTube, where Instagram users

can post their videos which can be longer than 1 minute,

anytime they like. We can say it’s a single platform for YouTube and Instagram users.

Instagram has been introducing new features and adding options to make IGTV more significant for the online audiences. One of the features is Monetization in IGTV. It seems that the low popularity of IGTV is due to the lack of monetization. According to the Instagram staff, monetization is being introduced in IGTV and is in the testing mode. It is a way of Instagram to lure the creators to gain income from IGTV videos. Another consideration which has been thought about is how IGTV will be splitting the revenue? In 2019, Instagram alone brought in $20 billion revenue. Now, we can expect Instagram to follow the 55/45 split like YouTube and Facebook, but then it’s just a probability. Let’s assume what if it happens? Then definitely IGTV can become the next bigger thing for video sharing platforms.

Instagram TV was launched in June 2018, by the Instagram CEO Kevin

Systrom. Watch the full announcement.  The unique feature about IGTV is that

it’s made primarily for vertical content, although, it can now support horizontal

videos too. Also, you can promote your content for free through Instagram. 

Instagram is smart!! To prevent its users from leaving, Instagram

has cleverly connected the Instagram photo app and IGTV together.

It allows all the posts from IGTV to be distributed to the main Instagram

app and to the followers of the users. Even if you don’t want to use

IGTV app, you can post your IGTV videos from the Instagram

app or from your profile on the Instagram desktop version. 

IGTV has specific requirements for the video postings. These can be listed as below-

1. Video length: The length of the video must be 1 minute long. Maximum upload length limit for mobile devices is 15 minutes, and 60 minutes, if uploading from the web.
2. Video file type: The supported file must be in MP4 file format.
3. Resolution and size of the video: 

• For uploading vertical video an aspect ratio of 9:16 should be considered, while for uploading a horizontal video, an aspect ratio of 16:6 must be considered.
• Videos should have a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS (frames per second) and minimum resolution of 720 pixels.
• The maximum file size for 10 minutes or less video is 650MB, whereas the maximum file size for the videos up to 60 minutes is 3.6GB.

4. Video Content: IGTV has a video content policy, where they can remove a video if it doesn’t follow their community Guidelines. If anything is against the guidelines, it can be reported in for its removal.

5. Cover Photo Size: IGTV recommends 420px by 654px (or 1:1.55 ratio) as the size for the cover photos. Right now, you can't edit your cover photo, after you've uploaded it.

Now, every social platform has restrictions. IGTV too have.
What you can or can't do? What you can do on IGTV is post videos to feed,
but you can't change the caption of the post once it’s live. Furthermore, the
captions to each of these posts are pulled directly from the title of the video,
so it is best to name videos similar to captions for Instagram, as opposed to
what you’d title a Facebook video. You can't pay to boost IGTV videos or
posts, although you can link the video to your story. Also, you can’t share
YouTube content unless it is IGTV video format compatible. The
good point to note is, the content on IGTV doesn't expire like Instagram stories.

IGTV is not very well known to everyone, but there are few famous brands
on IGTV promoting their contents namely Bacardi, Warby Parker, Louis
Vuitton, Buzzfeed, Netflix, NASA, Sephora, NatGeo, The Lily News etc.
It seems to be a great way to promote your content in an AV. So, why not give it a try yourself?

IGTV is Instagram’s way of keeping users on the app, instead of letting
them leave to go watch the same thing on YouTube or some other
social video watching platform. It is a
way to make vlogging more efficient, easier and immersive.
And with monetization feature introduced in the preliminary phase,
IGTV can be a hit!