Why you should be working with celebrities and influencers

Celebrities and influencers often have a larger and more engaged audience than traditional media, which is why working with them is becoming vital for a brand’s PR strategy!

Companies large and small are now reaching out to celebrities and influencers for collaborations in order to target new audiences, generate sales and increase engagement.

Depending on a brand’s business objectives and budget, it’s important to choose the right people to promote your brand, whether they have millions of followers or smaller ones with a more niche audience.

There are many benefits to working with celebs and influencers, here are just a few reasons why we think you should introduce celebrity and influencer outreach into your PR strategy this year:

Reach millions of people

Celebrities and influencers can have millions of followers, all who actively take an interest in what they post and the products they use. A single social media posts can often have a higher reach than most magazines and online publications! Choosing someone who aligns with your brand and whose audience you want to reach can lead to attracting exactly the right type of new customer.

We recently arranged for Vicky Pattison to go to our client’s Bali retreat – Bliss Sanctuary for Women, which meant all of her social media posts tagging in the brand were seen by her 4.6 million followers!

Target an engaged audience

Their whole job relies on how engaged their followers are and how many people they can reach, so there’s no denying that celebrities and influencers like to encourage engagement on their platforms.

Followers of celebrities and influencers follow them for a reason, they care about what they post and trust their opinions.  

People no longer trust adverts in magazines and so hearing recommendations from a real person talking about how they love your brand is much more likely to provide results in terms of people buying your product or service.

We are currently working with our client OzKleen on securing ‘cleanfluencers’ which although have a smaller niche following, are exactly the target audience of people who would go out and buy OzKleen’s range of cleaning products based on a recommendation from their trusted cleanfluencer.

Increase website traffic and sales

Social media is a great tool for directing people to your website, especially when celebrities and influencers who have more than 10K followers can include a swipe up link to your business or product, sending people immediately to your website. You need to make sure your website is user friendly, explains your USPs and looks professional, because the last thing you want is thousands of people heading over to your website from your celebrity/influencer campaign and being put off by your website, or not being able to find what they’re looking for!

As a result of all our research and our targeted approaches to celebrities, we secured a celebrity endorsement from Jennifer Metcalfe who posted on her Instagram and Twitter channels about the amazing results she’d had from using our client’s product: Regrowz for Women. This increased traffic to the Regrowz website by an amazing 3,535% overnight all thanks to one post from Jen - a phenomenal result for a new product and website!

Increase your social media followers

When people are tagging in your brand to their posts it directs traffic to your social media pages and increases your followers overnight. Working with our client Bliss Sanctuary for Women, we sent 6 celebrities to the sanctuaries for one week which resulted in an increase of 12,000 followers over just one weekend! By continuing to source and arrange for celebrities to visit Bliss over the past year, we have increased their followers by 30,000+ followers in total.

They create beautiful content

One of the best things about working with celebrities and influencers is that they are amazing at taking their own photos! They do it every day and know the best angles, shots and how to pose. When working with them you can instruct them on certain content and themes to align with your brand objectives. This is great because not only do they post the images/videos on their own channels, but it provides you with content for your own feed.

We organised a Gin Cruise for our client Exmoor Distillery and invited local bloggers and influencers to document the trip. This resulted in stunning high res imagery which we were able to use on social media and in traditional media.

They are transparent

Celebrities and influencers often only work with brands they like, trust and align themselves with. They will more often than not decline an opportunity if they know their followers will not agree with it or see it as not the right fit for them. This is good news because it means you’ll only be working with people that really support your brand, which will reflect in the posts they do for your brand.  

Celebrity and influencer campaigns can have a huge impact and can easily achieve overnight success for your brand! It’s all about knowing the right people to use, focusing on your objectives and making sure you get the most out of the collaboration.  

At SBPR we have just launched our ‘How to work with Influencers’ Course which will take place on Thursday 20th August, which will teach you all you need to know about working with celebrities and influencers to get your brand seen by millions. Tickets can be purchased at: https://www.sunnybirdpr.com/how-to-work-with-influencers.

Join the Syndicate - Your Exposure Depends on it!

Syndicated press. What is it and how can you use it to your brand’s advantage?

Content syndication is a method of republishing content on other sites in order to reach a broader audience.

For example, you might have noticed our Alcohol Awareness Week case study for our client Chris Hill featuring on other news sites such as WhatsNew2Day, Evoke, Headlinez Pro and TW News following its publication on the Mail Online.

Syndicated content not only increases your reach and brand awareness, but it also builds links within other sites and can help drive more traffic to your company domain. This method of exposure is particularly useful if you’re a smaller publisher or business who wants to reach a larger audience through a more authoritative site.

So how can we use knowledge of syndicated press to our PR advantage? Let’s look at the different ways in which press content can be syndicated!

Organic Syndication:

It may be difficult to believe, but there are plenty of news sites out there in the internet space that operate solely on their own and don’t require the manual upload of stories from say a journalist or blogger.

Instead, these little news-gems upload stories automatically by analysing the web for the most recent, most read and most topical stories from a mixture of different press including national, specialist and regional news.

This means that by getting your brand story onto the Mail Online for example, your story, in the eyes of online algorithms, becomes one of the most read and topical news stories available on the web.

This is the time when these sub-sites begin taking that content from the Mail Online domain and republishing the story to their own readers. They might syndicate pieces of content in their entirety, edit articles down to a shorter piece, or just publish a selected excerpt.

The exact details can vary from one publication to another but the more sites that do this, the more coverage you’ll get and the higher your reach and domain authority will be as a result!

To readers, it looks like any other article written on a news site – the only difference is that the content is listed as previously appearing elsewhere, which is usually indicated on the page, like this:

Publicist/Journalist Syndication:

Syndication in the media industry is not as new as it sounds. Many of the current publishing companies such as Newsquest, Reach PLC and Johnston Press still regularly push out the same content to different new sites they own.

This can be anything from a regional output to an international output depending on the company’s size. However, understanding how they work can be very beneficial when looking to maximise a story or brand’s exposure.

Let’s look at the way the publicist Newsquest, operates in terms of their syndication.

Newsquest, a relatively smaller publisher than TI-Media or the Daily Mail Group, syndicates stories by region. This means that by publishing a story on any title from their South West title base for example, will result in a further appearance in each of the below titles, maximising your story’s reach and domain authority with up to 13 pieces of regional coverage rather than just one.

Other publishers such as Reach PLC now even have a ‘shared content unit’ which details a full team of journalists whose job is to push out non-location specific news content to regional press across the UK in both print and online formats.

Understanding the operations of these publishers is handy a tool for any writer or small business looking to build a higher domain authority and enhanced SEO.

So why try it?

If your brand has excellent content but limited traffic and exposure online, then your ideas are somewhat wasted by living where eyeballs are minimal.

Syndicating your content to a third party or making use of how the UK publisher companies operate, can get better use out of it, placing it in front of the types of audiences you want to attract to your site!

Not to mention that with a large website audience, syndication websites often have large social followings as well. Between their own social promotion of syndicated content and their audience’s subsequent social shares, you can gain a lot of visibility by syndicating on top of your own reach.

This can help your online audiences grow at fraction of the cost and effort!

The SBPR Social Media Challenge

Every January the Sunny Bird PR team take on a social media challenge, which sees the team go head to head to win a holiday abroad!

At the beginning of this month, each team member presented their yearly review of the SBPR social media channel they manage, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We analysed our engagement, reach, impressions and followers and pinpointed the content that worked, and the content that didn’t work so well from 2019. Using this information, and up to date research into social media trend forecasts for the year ahead, the team have now prepared their January social media strategy for each channel.

What is the Challenge?
The challenge is for each team member to organically increase all the social media statistics on the channel they manage by 100% compared to December in just one month. This means doubling engagement rates, post reach, post impressions and follower increases.

Of course, successful content is not one size fits all, each social media platform has different algorithms and measures of success. If the team are going to succeed, they will have to work hard, do lots of research, carry out lots of split testing, create bespoke content and unmissable opportunities for their audiences to engage.

Why do we do it?
With social media algorithms constantly adapting and changing, no business can afford to be complacent with their social media strategy. At Sunny Bird PR we pride ourselves in being social media experts, which means we always reflect and put into practice our own up to date knowledge across the SBPR social media platforms as well as providing this service to our clients.

Who’s doing it?
Laura is all business on LinkedIn and her tactic is: “To engage more with other users on LinkedIn to create meaningful connections and improve the engagement on our own LinkedIn page.”

Josh will be putting all of his creativity into 180 characters on Twitter where he will: “Include call to actions within each post to maintain engagement.”

Grace is going to be stunning Instagram with beautiful imagery and engaging stories: “I am going to create aspirational imagery to feature on the feed with informative captions and lots of well thought out hashtags.”

Annabel will be sharing all of our news and updates on Facebook, and asking for our community’s feedback: “My Facebook content will start conversations through sharing Sunny Bird PR’s knowledge and asking our followers for their opinions in 2020.”

How will we stay on track?

Every Monday in January the SBPR team will meet and discuss what they have achieved for their social media channel in the previous week, analysing each post and engagement, discussing how they can improve for the next week – if we want to smash our goals, we should be improving by 25% week on week!

These meetings are an opportunity to celebrate successes, offer honest critiques, and where the whole team can make suggestions for improvements. By discussing our progress as a team, it means we all gain a strong insight into each social media platform – preparing us for when we switch up our platforms in 2020.

Our next social media course is from 10AM-2PM on Thursday 20th February, tickets are available on our website www.sunnybirdpr.com/social-media-course. At this course we will share our tried and tested social media tactics to help you maximise your social media presence and use it to the best of your advantage. This half-day course will teach you everything, from paid for advertising to organic reach and all the jargon in between.  

Building A Community on Social Media

When it comes to creating a direct line of communication with your audience, there is no tool more valuable than social media.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t just platforms for you to share your brand’s content with your audience, they also provide you with a way to communicate and engage with your brand’s followers creating your very own community. Brands that do this successfully are rewarded with organic brand champions and ambassadors as well as a sounding board offering a valuable insight into what is, and isn’t, working for their brand.

Two brands that have successfully created engaged social media communities are Jimmy’s Iced Coffee and Bliss Sanctuary for Women.

On Jimmy’s Iced Coffee’s social media accounts the team frequently share content posted by their community, and they respond to every comment in their unique and funny brand voice.

Bliss Sanctuary for Women make sure that their posts address their audience in first person, and use images of real guests who have visited their sanctuaries.

The social media shop window

You should approach your brand’s social media in the same way that you would your shop window if you had one. It is the first thing a potential customer sees when deciding whether they will engage with your brand.   

This means that social media isn’t just a shop window for content, it offers your potential customers an insight into how you deal with customer service issues too. If a potential customer browses your social media pages and sees that you are not creating a community with your audience, not answering their questions or listening to their opinions they are likely to take their business elsewhere.

So how can you build your community through social media? We have compiled some tips below to help you get started:

1.) Actively communicate

It might seem obvious, but communication is the foundation of all successful social media platforms. Brands which respond to comments, ask questions, and involve their followers with brand decisions gain not only the trust, but the respect of their followers.

2.) Be consistent with your engagement

Consistency is key when it comes to social media. Set aside half an hour at the start of every day and half an hour at the end to completely dedicate time to your social media engagement – this might be answering your audience’s comments, tagging them into posts, following new accounts or sending responses to messages.

3.) Step outside your own feed

Social media isn’t just about the space that your brand calls home, but the space that your followers, competitors, fans and collaborators curate too. Take the time every day to comment, like, share and engage with the content produced by these accounts. Both the Instagram and Facebook algorithm will prioritise your content if it detects that you are making meaningful connections with your followers – which means the more conversations you are having, the more your content will be seen.

4.) Make use of social media tools and trends

Instagram stories are more than just a feature to post quick snippets and videos. You can use stories to host polls, schedule Q&As, quiz your audience and much more. Stories that ask for involvement from the audience stand out, and when your followers see that you are asking for their opinions, they will want to be involved. 

5.) Keep it real

Making the most of real-life events and moments for social media content is an essential way to raise your brand’s value in the eyes of your customers. Showing your customers that your brand exists outside the screen builds your credibility, and keeps your brand feeling human. From working with influencers, highlighting your staff, shooting content at events and inviting your community to try products, there are many ways that you can bring your brand to life in your content.

For example, if you are a fashion brand, you could consider using a social media influencer that your community admires to promote your product. This activity could be as simple as sending an influencer a gift and asking them to share it on their social media platform.

An engaged social media community is an invaluable asset for businesses and can help to increase brand reputation, grow brand value in the eyes of the customer, and to receive constructive feedback. By dedicating your time to building your own community, we guarantee that you will see positive, tangible results for your business.

If you would like to learn tried and tested social media tactics to help you maximise your social media presence, grow your online community, and use it to the best of your advantage, then join the SBPR team on Thursday 20th February 2020 for our Social Media Masterclass.  Our half-day course will teach you everything, from building your community to increasing your organic reach and everything in between.

https://www.sunnybirdpr.com/social-media-course

Beating the Algorithms - What's New?

Social Stats

90.4% of millennials, 77.5% of Gen X and 48.2% of Baby Boomers are active social media users! 

Social media platforms are changing their algorithms all the time and to help you stay one step ahead without spending hours online, we thought we'd share our research with you...

Lizzie on LinkedIn

"LinkedIn doesn't move quite as rapidly as the other platforms but it has added a new video button which is key for mobile posting.

As with Facebook or Instagram, native videos (uploaded directly onto LinkedIn in real time rather than from your camera reel or desktop) will be boosted by LinkedIn and will reach more of your connections than a non-native post or a non-video post. 

And while we're on the subject of videos, never share posts that send people onto different sites (like YouTube etc) unless you absolutely have to/want to, LinkedIn wants to keep everyone on LinkedIn and anyone signposting elsewhere will not be viewed favourably!”

Alex on Instagram

“As apps continue to develop their in-app services, it’s no surprise that Instagram has been developing into the shopping arena. This month, the social media giant has been testing an in-app checkout which allows influencers to tag the products they are wearing, or using, to direct their followers to an in-app purchase page where items can be bought within the app.

Currently, this development is only in the early stages of public testing, but if it is rolled out, it could be a game-changer for brands working with influencers. Whether it’s bloggers or A-list celebrities there’s no denying the weight influencers carry on Instagram. If companies are able to shift this relationship from brand awareness when a well-known Instagrammer tags in the brand, to actually driving sales it could significantly change the scrolling and shopping experience for all parties.”

Laura on Facebook

“Facebook’s ever changing algorithms have taken another turn, where the process that ranks all available posts on a user’s news feed is now based on how likely that user is to have a positive reaction. Facebook’s algorithm now prioritises content posted from friends over publishers, with a focus on 'meaningful interactions'.

You should tailor your content to promote positive engagement, and be a conversation starter in order to get your content seen. Plus your content should always be relevant to your core audience. Make sure you don’t ask people to engage, your content should inspire people to like, comment and share without you having to ask.

It’s also apparent that videos need to be over a minute long and viewers need to watch until the end for it to be ranked higher."

Rachael on Twitter

"Twitter has an ‘algorithm feed’ and a ‘real time’ feed that you can select depending on your preference. The real time feed is in reverse chronological order like the good old days! 

Unfortunately, most people land on the algorithm controlled feed so we still have to work hard to get our posts ranked highly. With 500 million tweets posted a day, it is hard to stand out from the crowd much like the other platforms but ‘rich’ content including polls and gifs will help you to get up there."

We offer social media courses as well as tailored group sessions and one-to-one training for social media. So if you would like any support from strategy, to content creation, scheduling, engagement, advertising or analytics call the team on 01202 293095 or email hello@sunnybirdpr.com 

Beating the Algorithms on Instagram

Instagram is arguably one of the fastest growing and developing social media networks out there, having grown from 700 million users to 1 billion in just two years. This puts it just behind Facebook in the social media rankings for active users.

Of that 1 billion people 34% of them are millennials, an audience that are far more clued up and cynical of brands on social media than their baby boomer parents. With 4.2 billion likes taking place on the platform each day (more than any other social media channel) Instagram is officially the happiest place on the Internet – providing brands with an invaluable route to reaching their millennial target audience in an organic way, cutting through the cynicism that millennials feel towards brands on social media and actively engaging them.

Because of this, 86% of top brands have Instagram accounts, but Instagram isn’t only great for huge corporates, it’s also equally brilliant for smaller brands and businesses who have a real opportunity to build a great network of customers on the channel. The great thing about Instagram is that it is an up and coming channel for businesses and brands, meaning that it’s far easier to master than Facebook for example, with less algorithms pushing brands to the bottom of people’s newsfeeds.

With these elements in mind we recognised that Instagram was a key social media channel for our business, with many sales of tickets for our courses coming directly from Instagram. In the month of January, we aimed to improve all our Instagram stats (post reach and post engagement on our best performing post, followers, overall post likes, overall post comments and our story reach) by 100% in comparison to December’s stats.

Getting the Strategy Right

In order to get 100% improvement across all stats we couldn’t rely on luck, so we formulated an Instagram strategy based on previous analytics. In order to compile this we looked back at the best performing posts for the last 6 months (these can be accessed through your Instagram insights) to understand what our audience liked to see. From this, we found that images tagging in lots of people and including our clients got great engagement and was something that we wanted to replicate. We believe firmly in not reinventing the wheel – if something has worked well recently, learn from that and replicate it in your future posts.

Interestingly enough, the posts that we had expected to perform just as well the second time didn’t do as well as we had anticipated, our likes improved in comparison to week 1 of December, but not enough for us to be hitting 100% by the end of the month. This might not be the same for every business account – some might find that replicating content is a great strategy to grow their channel and discovering whether it’s right for you is all about testing it out and seeing what happens! We learnt that it wasn’t right for our feed, therefore it was back to the drawing board and time to do some serious research with three weeks left to up our stats.

Improving Your Instagram Reach

Your Instagram reach is the amount of people that see your posts, whether that be on their main feed or on their explore page. Much like Facebook, Instagram reach differs from engagement as many people might see your posts without interacting with them. Reach is important to building a following on Instagram and getting in front of both new and existing followers and fans of your brand. The good news with Instagram is that reach is relatively easy to improve if done in the right way. In order to increase our own reach, we took several different tactics.

Hashtags

Firstly, we built up a bank of hashtags for our brand. Building a bank of hashtags isn’t as simple as tagging everything with #ootd or #love. Hashtags are under-used as a brilliant resource for brands. Research taught us that hashtags should be carefully selected. We created some guidelines for hashtag selection, these were:

1.       Hashtags should be community minded – simply selecting the hashtag with the most posts is rarely the right way to go for your business. Instead, find hashtags that generally have less than 50k uses to reach a really targeted and specific community of people.

2.       Hashtags must be targeted for the business – getting in front of people that aren’t interested or engaging with your content is pointless for hitting your business objectives. Hashtags should be targeted to reach people that you know for a fact will be interested in what you are posting about – whether that be new customers, other brands or organisations that you want to work with.

3.       Hashtags should be changed every month – like all elements of social media you shouldn’t stick with something because it worked once. You must constantly analyse your hashtags to continue to improve and grow. Plus, if you keep appearing on the same pages at some point that audience will tire of seeing your posts and it’ll be time to target someone new!

Instagram now allows hashtag analytics which is great to see. On your ‘insights’ page, you can view how many people found your posts via a hashtag and see which are performing best for your account. This can help you refine which hashtags you use and help you to improve your reach.

During our research we found lots of rumours that you should only use five hashtags on your posts or Instagram will flag you as spam. However, we tested this theory by posting with only five hashtags and posting with up to 30 hashtags (the maximum you can have on Instagram). Consistently, our posts with more hashtags on performed drastically better than those with only five hashtags, putting to bed those rumours.

Instagram Pods

One of the new tactics that Instagram users are taking to get around algorithms for reach is ‘Instagram Pods’. These are a relatively new phenomenon in the industry, having come about to get around the fact that Instagram prioritises content that gets lots of engagement, very quickly. Essentially, Instagram pushes to the top of your feed the posts that have had a ‘flurry’ of likes and comments very soon after being posted. Instagram pods are groups that Instagram users have formed, in which they agree to engage with each other’s posts as soon as they have gone live.

This is a tactic that we tried in the office, getting everyone to like and comment on the posts as soon as we have posted – and it worked! The first post that we tried this out on went on to become our best performing post of the month.

One key thing to bear in mind if you are going to try this tactic is that Instagram only really ‘counts’ comments that are longer than four words, and sadly, emojis don’t count either.

Tagging in Other Users

Using high-profile users to get in front of their followers is a great tactic to improving your Instagram reach. Sharing content from bloggers and tagging them in or tagging in prominent thought-leaders in your industry can improve your reach if you’re lucky enough to get a like back. When they like or engage with your content, your post will appear on the ‘explore’ page of their followers.

Improving your Instagram reach very much sits alongside improving your Instagram engagement and the two stats go hand in hand – improving your reach will improve your engagement and vice versa.

Improving Instagram Post Engagement

Post engagement is a key metric for achieving most business objectives on social media, and engagement is the buzzword of the moment – but how can you improve it? Well, Instagram, like Facebook, is all about building a community and encouraging organic engagement. Here’s how you can do that…

Engage with Others

Engagement is a two-way street, and you can’t expect to get tons of likes and comments on your posts if you’re not engaging with others. Following key Instagram users, whether that be new customers, other brands or existing customers, and engaging with them regularly will help you to build a community of loyal followers that regularly comment on and like your posts. Engaging with others is a long game, and miracles don’t come overnight. It’s not as simple as just liking a few other people’s posts, it’s about building an ongoing conversation with people that are key for your business.

Engage with Your Own Content

Whilst engaging with others is vital, it’s even more important to engage with your own content! It might sound silly but many brands put up a picture on Instagram and expect it to get loads of comments and likes, when the process doesn’t work quite like that. When people engage with you by commenting on your posts, demonstrate that you are active by commenting back quickly. Not only will they appreciate your time and energy, but by asking an open-ended question it keeps the conversational ball rolling, getting you even more comments and thus improving your reach.

Bring Value to Your Audience

Why should people actually engage with you? Do you have an answer to that question? Nowadays, you have to earn your engagement, and no one is entitled to it. In the social media industry, there are three elements to producing brilliant content that adds value to your audience’s day: entertainment; inspiration and education. If your content falls into one of these three categories then you’re on to a winner! Here’s a breakdown:

1.       Entertainment – is what you’re posting going to brighten someone’s day? Make them laugh or cry (in a good way of course!). Users will actively come to your channel if they know you to be entertaining.

2.       Inspiration – whether we admit it or not, most people use social media to improve their appearance in their social circles and show off the best parts of their life. Posting inspirational content encourages shareability, as users engage with your inspirational content to inspire their own followers in turn.

3.       Education – are they learning something? Remember, you are the expert in your own industry, and you can help to teach them something with your channel. Plus, this is a great opportunity to show off your own achievements whilst also adding some value for your audience! For us, sharing a great article that we secured for a client with some information about how we did it performed well.

Understanding how to bring value to your audience comes down to understanding them and what they want to see from you. By heading to your insights tab and checking out the audience insights you can find out more about your followers in detail. Then it’s all about brainstorming what type of content that audience would like to see and creating it.

Using Long Form Content

Adding value to your audience goes hand in hand with creating long-form content. The longer that a user spends on your post, whether that be reading the caption or writing a response, the more Instagram likes it and the higher up the feed it will end up. You can engage people for longer by using long-form content that they spend a long time reading, but make sure it’s adding that value for it to actually keep your followers engaged.

Use People’s Faces

Users like the personal touch on Instagram, a behind-the-scenes look at the human face behind the brand if you like. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that posts with faces in get 38% more likes than those without.

Our Most Engaged Post

Following our research, we put all our points into practise. We created a bank of relevant hashtags for our audience, wrote some long-form content that taught our audience how they could do their own PR and shared it alongside a picture of our lovely Account Manager Alex. We tagged in prominent journalists and brands including our client, Jimmy’s Iced Coffee and posted it. We then had the whole team like and comment on the post. As you can see from the below – it worked! The post went on to become our best performing post EVER and drastically improved on our best performing post from December – our likes increased by 142%, our comments increased by 366%, our profile visits increased by 350% and our reach improved by 111%!

Getting More Instagram Followers

We hear very often about businesses who are setting out just to get more followers on Instagram, especially as Instagram reserves the coveted ‘swipe up to buy’ feature on Instagram stories for those with more than 10k followers.

Having loads of followers isn’t relevant if the audience isn’t engaged, and we would encourage always prioritising genuine engagement over follower count. However, we totally get why businesses would want to improve their follower count, whether that be so that they have the same amount or more as competitors or whether it’s just to access the swipe up feature.

We believe that the best way to improve your follower count is to build an actively engaged following, thus killing two birds with one stone. Here’s how we improved our followers by 226% in January:

1.       Following and unfollowing – there is an easy way to get your name in front of potential customers, and that’s by following them! We aim to follow 50 new people a day where we can, which really improves our follower count. However, we don’t want followers that won’t engage with us, therefore we’re super careful about who we follow. You could follow those that like similar brands to yours, those that follow influencers that you work with or even those that actively engage with your competitors. Taking this approach will help you to up your followers without sacrificing engagement.

2.       Increase your post reach – it goes without saying that the more people you get in front of, the more followers you will get. Using the above tips to increase your post reach will help you to organically boost your followers.

3.       Get in front of the right people – using the right hashtags and engaging with the right people as mentioned above is key to building that highly engaged following that we all want!

Improving Instagram Story Reach

Stories is an entirely different ball game from feed posts which we have been discussing in this blog so far. Stories are a hugely growing feature of Instagram, in fact, they’re growing 15 times faster than feed-based posts! We found stories the most challenging element of Instagram to master as they are a relatively new feature and there isn’t too much research out there yet. In the end, we managed to improve our story reach by 27% - it was the only stat not to hit 100%. Whilst we didn’t quite hit our target, we were pleased to have improved the reach at all due to how challenging it was. Here’s how we did it…

How Do Stories Work?

Stories are prioritised on your ‘storyline’ (the bar of stories across the top of your feed) by the brands and accounts that you engage with most. The more of someone’s stories you watch the higher up they will appear. In order to get around this, improving your stories reach must be approached as a long game. Consistently posting ultra-engaging and super-targeted content on your stories will make users realise that they want to be checking out what you’re up to, and the more they visit your stories the higher up they will appear. Therefore, creating story specific content (not just sharing your feed posts to your stories) is really important.

Make Use of Story Features

There are certain features available on stories that aren’t available on feed-posts, such as GIFs, location tags and hashtags. Making use of these distinguishes your stories from your feed posts and engages users far more than generic stories, meaning they won’t click past your content so fast!

Tag in Other People

On stories you can tag in other Instagram users, who can then share your content to their own story. This is a great way of not only improving your story reach but also getting on the feeds of brands that you admire and in front of those all-important potential customers.

Our best performing story was one that tagged in Sunny our MD, who has a highly engaged following on Instagram, which she then shared to her feed. This prompted lots of her followers to then visit our profile and engage with our feed posts too.

Summary

Overall, Instagram is a great platform for reaching a millennial audience in an organic way and cutting through the noise of advertising on Facebook. Remember though that millennials aren’t the only people on Instagram, so it’s all about checking out those audience insights to see who is following you.

Since doing this research and putting it into practise, our Instagram is consistently achieving almost 100% better than it was before the research, and the great part is that many of these tips are things that can be put into practise quite easily and quickly. For example, having a bank of hashtags in the notes on your phone that you can copy and paste onto all Instagram posts.

Like all social media, what worked for us might not necessarily work for you – so make sure you test all these tactics thoroughly to understand what works best for you and your business.

Using Google Maps for Business

Google My Business is an application which helps your business appear on Google Maps. It’s not only a great application to find a business, but also improves your searchability. Having a Google Business listing means you can control what people see about you - it’s easy to make changes to your business listing whether that’s updating your working hours, changing your address or phone number.

For this blog, we’ve put together some of the ways in which you can optimise your Google page and the reasons why every business should be signing up for a free listing.

People Will Find You

Signing up for a local business listing on Google is free. Signing up makes it easier for people to find you and therefore brings in new customers. If someone is looking for a particular business or service, and your company pops up, Google will feature basic information that people can then use for quick reference. Google will not only list your business location, but it will also display your business hours, general information and it may even feature user reviews.

Reviews

It’s essential that you get customers to review you on Google as this will increase your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), drive website traffic and improve your Google rankings. Potential customers find reviews really useful and they can encourage people to actually click through to your website.

Improve Your SEO

Creating a Google Maps page will improve your SEO and therefore your Google rankings. As a result, you will gain more website traffic by allowing a click-through to your website. Once a new listing is created, a Google Maps location synchronises with a traditional Google Search for easy access and searchability. Google My Business compliments your existing website by giving your business a public identity and presence with a listing on Google.

Keywords

Use specific keywords related to your business to help SEO. If you’re an IT company you could use keywords such as software, computing or digital which makes it easier to search when people visit Google’s home page. Like your website, your Google listing is just as important when it comes to featuring key words in the description.

Photos

Businesses with photos on their listings receive 42% more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35% more click-throughs to their websites than businesses without photos, according to Google. It’s important to refresh the photos on the page and ensure that it fully represents your brand. Although not necessary to change regularly, you must keep them updated.

You can sign up for your own Google My business page by following this link.

Get Yourself on the Radio!

With the rise of Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube it’s very easy to think that radio is dead, but in fact it’s still a huge part of how we consume media. With 90% of the population of the UK tuning in to the radio at least once a week, it’s a platform that shows no sign of slowing down and certainly can’t be ignored in your publicity campaigns!

Getting a handle on how to get yourself or your brand on the radio can be challenging, but with some top tips from our recent meeting with Sky News Radio Editor, David Terris, we’re here to help. Here’s our top tips on how to make the most of radio…

Be topical

When you’re deciding whether to pitch your story to radio it’s important that your news is current, topical and has mass appeal. If it ties in with an awareness day (you can find a full calendar of those here), a breaking celebrity story, new Government legislation or just a topic that people are talking about at the time, it will be much more likely to get picked up by the station in question.

Provide the full package

Providing radio journalists with all the assets they will need is key when pitching. If your story is great but you don’t have excellent case studies, data and a spokesperson you may well see a lack in pick up from the station.

Radio stations prioritise stories with data attached to them above all else, and absolutely LOVE a survey story with regional results. We recommend pitching to journalists with the full results, brilliant case studies and a broadcast trained spokesperson ready to go should your story get picked up.

Be diverse

Gone are the days of having perfect pronunciation and Queen’s English on the radio. Having a ‘voice for radio’ can help your case studies to get you on air. Regional radio stations in particular like to hear from a broad range of regional accents, so don’t shy away from showing off your accent loud and proud!

Give them a call

As David Terris, Sky News Radio Editor says: “We should all be talking to each other more on the phone”. Picking up the phone to a big-shot journalist can be intimidating, but ensuring you are prepared with a succinct pitch and all your assets will make it a much easier experience – and who knows, you may even enjoy it!

Timing is everything

So you’ve got your assets ready, you’ve prepared your pitch and you’re ready to pick up the phone and shout about how brilliant your story is. What next? Well, radio journalists have certain times that they like to receive phone calls ready for their planning meetings. David Terris says 9.30am is the best time to send an email, before their morning meeting, and following up with a call after 10.15 will make you much more likely to get an answer.

Be prepared

Clear your diaries for the day if your news breaks! If your story gets picked up, you and your spokesperson could be called into a station for an interview at a moment’s notice.

Don’t forget podcasts

With many more people enjoying their TV and Radio ‘on demand’ don’t neglect podcasts! Sky News Radio for example puts out a daily news podcast, a weekly politics podcast and their entertainment podcast ‘Backstage’ fortnightly. These can be excellent opportunities to get yourself and your brand longer and more in-depth pieces of coverage than the brief news snippets you hear on live radio.

Don’t stop pitching!

Getting amazing broadcast coverage can take a lot of hard work and perseverance. If your story doesn’t get picked up don’t be disheartened. It could be that a breaking news story came through or it just wasn’t right that day. David Terris says: “Don’t stop pitching!”. Just because a story doesn’t break, doesn’t mean your next story won’t!

To find out more about how to do your own PR, including getting yourself and your business in front of broadcast, print and online journalists make sure you check out our Reaching Millions – PR and Publicity course! You can find more information here.