Making the best of Instagram

Instagram is a relatively young social network, compared to some others. It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and inaugurated in October 2010.

These gentlemen are now proud multi-millionaire stakeholders in Facebook after Facebook paid a whopping $1bn in cash and stock for this young site in April 2012. Ever since; Instagram has been growing faster than Facebook.

It remains a very interesting and growing medium of connecting with your already socially engaged friends or followers and in the case of a business, clients and potential customers. Millions of people visit the site every month and over a billion photos are liked on the platform every single day.

According to a ranking published on the 3rd of June by eBizMBA.com, Instagram is the 72nd most popular site with estimated unique monthly visitors of over 100,000,000 and as at the time of writing this, Alexa.com ranks it as the 33rd most popular site in the world, while a similar service known as Pinterest is the 27th most popular site. This goes to prove the rising popularity of photo sharing and image based social networks.

People love pictures. It is often said that pictures speak a thousand words and this has been proven true time and again. Recall the last time you visited your favorite social network; pictures and other images posted by those within your social circle attracted you the most.

A Social Media Marketing Industry Report says that 42 per cent of experienced marketers plan to increase their use of Instagram (up from 38 per cent in 2013).

As a unique and unparalleled social media site, Instagram offers both its users and businessmen alike the wonderful opportunity to use their mobile phones for taking interesting photos, antiquating them with the help of vintage frames and camera filters, and then sharing these among their friends, fans and target audience on their personal or business Instagram account including the option of sending to other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

As a popular platform for online marketing, Instagram has acquired a special status among worldwide B2B marketers, business people as well as savvy individuals.

Experts unanimously agree that Instagram has a great marketing potential for the enhancement of your brand’s human value. Instagram can be readily used for sharing highly valuable information in a pictorial form and for making profitable connections at personal level with other users and businesses that share a common interest.

If you are yet to learn the works associated with it, you need not really worry as you will soon be looking at some best practices in Internet marketing by using Instagram for lead generation and the promotion of your business.

Today, compared to images; consumers are driven more by content. Yet, the vital mistake made by B2B marketers is that many of them apply strategies related to content in photo-sharing. This is in itself a rather costly hazard.

When you attempt to create images for content marketing and social media, it is important to ensure that they also possess a visual appeal in order to draw the attention of and influence your prospects through Instagram marketing.

Before you make a quick attempt to snap and antiquate your photos, it will be necessary for you to identify the following:

• The specific audience you desire targeting and what their precise wishes are.

• Best possible marketing strategy for engaging them through your photos.

• What exactly inspires people and makes them talk about the photos and your business.

Since Instagram happens to be a site for photo-sharing, it cannot be purposely used for marketing online videos. However, your brand image can still be leveraged using Instagram as well as for reaching out to your audience.

There is hardly any need for becoming dead serious or rigid, as a little bit of good humour will go a long way in providing your customers with something that will be memorable and thought provoking when they think about it.

You really need to be highly creative and proactive with Instagram marketing, especially if you desire to keep your audience well engaged as well as foster a true spirit of long lasting loyalty.

There are several proven ways in which Instagram marketing practices can be effectively used for creating emotional and personal connections with a diversity of consumers who may have a keen interest in your brand as well as product or services. Yet, it may not be totally correct to simply presume that Instagram solely stands for showcasing a catalogue for your product or service; the site’s a lot more than just that, anytime!

While researching for this piece, I stumbled on an interesting case study published by Forbes.com, of how a direct marketing nutritional supplement company called SHREDZ, founded by Arvin Lal, used Instagram (with over 700,000 followers) to become a multi-million dollar company.

Here is the interesting aspect, the company earned $90,000 in 2012 (the first year of its operation), $5m gross revenue in 2013 and already topped $2.7m through the middle of March in 2014.

What makes those numbers more impressive is that Lal and his team have achieved such remarkable revenues without any outside invested capital; only 21 employees (most of them living in-house within the SHREDZ office, which is a converted apartment complex) and purely digital promotion (emphasis mine).

This is the sort of the success stories I expect to see in Nigeria as the influence of the web grows.

BY CHUKWUEMEKA FRED AGBALA JNR.

What to do when you lose your phone

Losing a smartphone is one of the worst nightmares that can happen to you, especially if the device is one of the high-end handsets that cost you a fortune.

Recently, a friend came to me looking utterly distraught. “My phone is gone!” he declared. I could see tears rolling down from his eyes. His sadness and worries were clearly visible and palpable.

The phone that he had lost was an expensive Android phone he had bought about two weeks earlier. With the technology offered in the latest smartphones, he had his entire business and personal life uploaded to that phone. His emails, photos (some of which were pretty sensitive) and contacts were all there. This is not to mention how easily one could get into his social media accounts, as well as online and mobile banking accounts through the phone.

My friend obviously had a million reasons in this world to feel like a chicken with its head cut off. He had gone to the bank and placed the phone on a bench as he was filling out some forms.

A couple of minutes after leaving the banking hall, he remembered that he no longer had possession of his phone. He rushed back to the bank, but his frantic search for the phone was not successful. The staff at the bank even went over the CCTV footage but owing to the large amount of human traffic in the banking hall, nothing conclusive was found.

My friend had an Android Device Manager in his phone. Android Device Manager has some remote phone tracking capabilities. My friend had already tried to call his phone number, but there was no response.

This could have been coincidental because the phone’s battery was already dying at the time he was at the bank, however, it could probably be that whoever had picked it had already removed and most likely replaced the SIM.

Since the phone was synced to his online Google credentials, Android Device Manager would help to locate the phone when the phone was connected to the internet through mobile or Wi-Fi. It is also possible to lock or wipe my friend’s credentials remotely using Android Device Manager.

We, therefore, used my friend’s details to log into Android Device Manager Web portal. Unfortunately, we could not trace the phone. This could have resulted from the person resetting it to factory settings. If this had happened, then we would have better luck finding a pin in a haystack than tracing the phone!

Nonetheless, we used Android Manager to set a message on the phone’s lock screen. The message was simple “if you find this phone; please contact me on XX-XXX-XXXX a cash reward of ….. Naira will be given.” We even changed the phone name to read the same message.

If we did not get a reply in the next few days, we would have to remotely wipe the data on the phone, block the phone and deactivate the SIM.

My friend, on the other hand, had already given up and was planning on saving up for a new phone. Nonetheless, two hours later, the kind stranger who had picked the phone called. We planned a meeting where he obtained his reward, and we received the phone.

There are a few lessons that we can pick up from this experience.

In case you lose your phone:

• Do not panic; calmly retrace your steps to where you last remember having the phone. Try calling your phone and ask around if anyone has seen it.

• Ensure that the phone is locked; this is a precaution that you ought to take before you lose the phone. Locking your phone with a PIN or password will keep the personal details safe in the event of your phone disappearing.

• Install a tracker app in your phone; having Android Device Manager or Find My iPhone may not be adequate. There are several third party apps that are excellent phone trackers. Such apps will be of great help in finding your phone. Use the phone tracker software to find your phone.

• Leave a message on the phone; the phone tracing app should easily help you put a message on the phone’s lock-screen. Let anyone who finds the phone know how he or she can reach you. The message had better be simple and straightforward. Incentives such as cash can be promised for returning the phone.

• Do not judge; it would be wrong to assume that whoever has your phone stole it. It could be that the individual picked it up with no bad intention. Your interactions with the finder should, therefore, be positive.

• Contact your mobile provider; this is especially important if you are on a post-paid talk-time plan. Calling the mobile provider will not only deactivate the SIM but will also help you block the phone.

• Finally, when meeting the person who finds your phone; be cautious. Meet in a public place and have a friend or two to accompany you.

Someone reading this might be asking; is this possible in Nigeria? I’d say yes because aside my friend, someone has actually returned my phone that dropped while stepping out of the car and after we met and he is back, I gave him a cash reward

Becoming An Authority On The Intetnet

BY CHUKWUEMEKA FRED AGBATA JNR.
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Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata Jnr.
Every other week, I get to speak to various groups and one question I hear often is how can I build a brand on the Internet or to put it succinctly, how do I differentiate my brand online?

My answer is always centred on marketing. The fact is that life is all about marketing, whether it is a father and daughter relationship or a boss and an employee relationship; each party is busy trying to sell one idea or value to the other. If you understand this basic content, then you are well on your way to becoming an authority on the Internet.

There is a rather close link between becoming an authority and Internet marketing. This is why I will refer to it a number of times in this piece because that is one point I will like you to grasp.

Internet marketing is the provision and promotion of products and services online. Many business owners, particularly those that run small businesses, may genuinely find Internet marketing a rather daunting and tiresome task because of the lack of knowledge on how to go about it.

In order to succeed with Internet marketing, businesses need to devout quality time to it. Sometimes, the more enterprising business owners do take a sluggish start at internet marketing, only to steer back into traditional marketing after a while.

It cannot be denied that Internet marketing plays a vital role in the success of businesses worldwide today and Nigeria is not an exception. To help you make a success of internet marketing, there are certain things that you need to know and do.

Since Google apparently occupies the top spot when it comes to the Internet, I will primarily focus on what it demands from the website owner regarding what an individual or business can do to promote its brand and authority online.

It will, however, be a serious error of judgment to totally neglect other search engines, especially Yahoo and Bing, as these two smaller giants also drive a considerable amount of routine search traffic in their own right.

1. Content marketing

Would you like to become an authority online? Then think content at all times. Now here comes my favourite example. Imagine the internet without content i.e. text, images, audio and videos; how boring do you think the internet would be?

Content is undoubtedly the overall reigning monarch on the Internet and this includes social media channels as well. Google has effectively tied content to authorship which is a cool way to become an authority.

Furthermore, it has also become crucial to ensure that this content is yours and that it is unique. Copying another author’s articles or having it published across a multitude of sites could spell disaster for your own search results.

Focusing on these guidelines could put you on the way to achieving a sound internet strategy for your business. Businesses should, thus, be forward-looking in adopting internet marketing and not remain behind just because the use of internet marketing in our clime is not yet at an advanced. Learn what you need to learn about it and move ahead to integrate it into your business marketing plan and ultimately implement your strategies.

2. Authorship

I talked about authorship briefly above and I want you to understand that it is schemed to form a crucial link in the search engine algorithm criteria for those who will like to become authorities through Google’s search engine.

Google has hundreds of algorithm signals that determine how a particular content should be ranked on the search engine. In a recent statement, a prominent senior executive of Google firmly asserted that those in possession of verified authorship by the company are the ones who will be given top search result ranks.

Verified authorship is not a difficult feat to attain once you can connect your Google+ profile to your website and blog. Google authorship then automatically links your Google+ profile to the content you publish online.

Google Author Rank is also a possible algorithm signal that may impact the search engine ranking of content verified as yours. To cut the long story short, this is simply a good strategy in building your online authority.

3. Building of links

Many will argue that link building is not as effective as it used to be in the past. Previously, it was an SEO expert practice to encourage generation of maximum links. There was less regard for where these links were generated from.

Today, however, Google, for instance, sees things differently, and will not even momentarily hesitate to have you removed from its search results if there are too many “unnatural” links pointing to your website.

Now, you need good quality links that relate directly to your own site. One thing you must also avoid is broken links which is why the tool mentioned in the tool of the week section is quite necessary.

4. Social media

I decided to talk about social media last because it has become over flogged albeit still very important for anyone looking to build an online brand. Social media platforms have since graduated from the erstwhile restriction for use as a social contact medium into full blown use in the business world.

It has now become ever more pertinent to be able to show your presence on various prominent social media channels to promote your products or business as well as brand and events. These social media channel include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and others.

These sites provide you with fresh and easy means of interaction with your current as well as potential customers. It is, however, more than a simple matter of profile creation and occasional sending out of updates. There are distinct principles behind the social media science that inculcate attraction and retention of the attention of your audience.

Because of the last point above, a lot of business owners that patronise the social media are frustrated as they hardly see any difference for the better after patronising all these social media channels without anything to show for it at the end.

Many business owners still need to learn or be taught the secrets of how to use the various social media channels to achieve business success in their internet marketing drive as there are a lot to learn in this regard.

These are some of the strategies that I have personally applied and keep applying towards strengthening my online authority and I believe that they might be of help if you are willing to give it all it takes.

Becoming An Authority On The Intetnet

BY CHUKWUEMEKA FRED AGBATA JNR.
Leave a Comment

Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata Jnr.
Every other week, I get to speak to various groups and one question I hear often is how can I build a brand on the Internet or to put it succinctly, how do I differentiate my brand online?

My answer is always centred on marketing. The fact is that life is all about marketing, whether it is a father and daughter relationship or a boss and an employee relationship; each party is busy trying to sell one idea or value to the other. If you understand this basic content, then you are well on your way to becoming an authority on the Internet.

There is a rather close link between becoming an authority and Internet marketing. This is why I will refer to it a number of times in this piece because that is one point I will like you to grasp.

Internet marketing is the provision and promotion of products and services online. Many business owners, particularly those that run small businesses, may genuinely find Internet marketing a rather daunting and tiresome task because of the lack of knowledge on how to go about it.

In order to succeed with Internet marketing, businesses need to devout quality time to it. Sometimes, the more enterprising business owners do take a sluggish start at internet marketing, only to steer back into traditional marketing after a while.

It cannot be denied that Internet marketing plays a vital role in the success of businesses worldwide today and Nigeria is not an exception. To help you make a success of internet marketing, there are certain things that you need to know and do.

Since Google apparently occupies the top spot when it comes to the Internet, I will primarily focus on what it demands from the website owner regarding what an individual or business can do to promote its brand and authority online.

It will, however, be a serious error of judgment to totally neglect other search engines, especially Yahoo and Bing, as these two smaller giants also drive a considerable amount of routine search traffic in their own right.

1. Content marketing

Would you like to become an authority online? Then think content at all times. Now here comes my favourite example. Imagine the internet without content i.e. text, images, audio and videos; how boring do you think the internet would be?

Content is undoubtedly the overall reigning monarch on the Internet and this includes social media channels as well. Google has effectively tied content to authorship which is a cool way to become an authority.

Furthermore, it has also become crucial to ensure that this content is yours and that it is unique. Copying another author’s articles or having it published across a multitude of sites could spell disaster for your own search results.

Focusing on these guidelines could put you on the way to achieving a sound internet strategy for your business. Businesses should, thus, be forward-looking in adopting internet marketing and not remain behind just because the use of internet marketing in our clime is not yet at an advanced. Learn what you need to learn about it and move ahead to integrate it into your business marketing plan and ultimately implement your strategies.

2. Authorship

I talked about authorship briefly above and I want you to understand that it is schemed to form a crucial link in the search engine algorithm criteria for those who will like to become authorities through Google’s search engine.

Google has hundreds of algorithm signals that determine how a particular content should be ranked on the search engine. In a recent statement, a prominent senior executive of Google firmly asserted that those in possession of verified authorship by the company are the ones who will be given top search result ranks.

Verified authorship is not a difficult feat to attain once you can connect your Google+ profile to your website and blog. Google authorship then automatically links your Google+ profile to the content you publish online.

Google Author Rank is also a possible algorithm signal that may impact the search engine ranking of content verified as yours. To cut the long story short, this is simply a good strategy in building your online authority.

3. Building of links

Many will argue that link building is not as effective as it used to be in the past. Previously, it was an SEO expert practice to encourage generation of maximum links. There was less regard for where these links were generated from.

Today, however, Google, for instance, sees things differently, and will not even momentarily hesitate to have you removed from its search results if there are too many “unnatural” links pointing to your website.

Now, you need good quality links that relate directly to your own site. One thing you must also avoid is broken links which is why the tool mentioned in the tool of the week section is quite necessary.

4. Social media

I decided to talk about social media last because it has become over flogged albeit still very important for anyone looking to build an online brand. Social media platforms have since graduated from the erstwhile restriction for use as a social contact medium into full blown use in the business world.

It has now become ever more pertinent to be able to show your presence on various prominent social media channels to promote your products or business as well as brand and events. These social media channel include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and others.

These sites provide you with fresh and easy means of interaction with your current as well as potential customers. It is, however, more than a simple matter of profile creation and occasional sending out of updates. There are distinct principles behind the social media science that inculcate attraction and retention of the attention of your audience.

Because of the last point above, a lot of business owners that patronise the social media are frustrated as they hardly see any difference for the better after patronising all these social media channels without anything to show for it at the end.

Many business owners still need to learn or be taught the secrets of how to use the various social media channels to achieve business success in their internet marketing drive as there are a lot to learn in this regard.

These are some of the strategies that I have personally applied and keep applying towards strengthening my online authority and I believe that they might be of help if you are willing to give it all it takes.