Opinion: Your branding has to be extremely strong on Instagram Instagram is all the buzz these days in the marketing community. However, it seems like a lot of marketers and business owners are still unclear on how to fully leverage this platform. One possible reason why Instagram marketing is still so mysterious is that it seems deceptively primitive—slap any image onto the platform, write a short caption and you’re done.

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For any holdouts to the red-hot strategy, here are the key considerations to keep in mind before taking the leap. The buzz about influencer marketing is hard to ignore. A frequent topic of conversation in marketing departments these days is how the public themselves are the new marketers, how brands don’t even need celebrities anymore — although they could be effective influencers. The key to a successful campaign, according to

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Will an algorithm help grow new users? They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. For the past couple of years, Facebook and Instagram’s product teams have relentlessly chipped away at Snapchat, copying features like stories, stickers and lenses to appeal to teens and younger users to its platforms. But with stalling growth and growing pressure from investors, Snapchat is now the one stealing … sorry, borrowing from Facebook. On Wednesday, Snapchat finally

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My interest in luxury brands’ social media challenges started last year. I was doing some research on how brands are handling customer service interactions in social channels, and in covering the broad swathe of retail verticals, I ended up on Hermès’s Facebook page. The company was getting slammed by PETA activists, mostly over some video footage of a crocodile farm in Texas. Can’t have crocodile-skin bags without killing some crocodiles, and the

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Yelp is becoming increasingly competitive as a playground for local and international businesses alike. Having your business featured on Yelp can sometimes seem like an impossible task. The competition might be fierce and unrelenting in the efforts to push for the number one spot on Yelp. Yelp is becoming increasingly competitive as a playground for local and international businesses alike. The service is featured on both Google’s and Yahoo’s search

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So you have been posting some amazing snaps to your Instagram profile which you think are your best work but you are struggling to find people to agree with you. This may have less to do with what you are posting than it does when you are actually posting it. There are several ways to figure out when is the best time for you to actually post to Instagram, depending

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Meghan Roark isn’t too proud to admit she has an addiction. Her habit? Makeup. Roark, 27, who works in retail in Abingdon, Va., estimates she spends $300 (U.S.) a month on cosmetics and skin care. She watches at least three hours of tutorials each week on YouTube, learning new techniques or keeping up on emerging brands. Her morning makeup routine takes 30 minutes and involves up to 15 products. Young

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Measuring and benchmarking are practices embedded into our daily business lives. In e-commerce, we compare our fulfillment and delivery speed against key competitors. The sales performance is judged well beyond simply meeting targets and growing year over year — comparison to rivals is also considered. The same applies to marketing, where over the last 10 years, we have seen a lot of evolution in marketing-driven demand generation. Thanks to funnel benchmarks set

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When done right, using hashtags in social media can be fundamental to generating exposure and audience engagement. Hashtags are an integral part of any social media marketing strategy. They function as a way of labeling your content and help to make that content discoverable to users. When done right, using hashtags in social media can be fundamental to generating exposure and are a great way to generate the right kind

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The popularity of influencer marketing shows no signs of slowing down. Interest in the term influencer marketing increased 90x from 2013 to 2016 and it doubled in first nine months of 2017. Reasons for ever-growing popularity of influencer campaigns are numerous ranging from their versatility (this type of marketing works for every business) to noninvasive nature. Since an increasing number of businesses is including influencer campaigns into their marketing strategy (or you already have),

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