Are you thinking about joining Instagram?

Instagram is a great visual tool to tell a brand’s story. If Instagram fits into your social media strategy, it’s a valuable way to share quality images and content and reach a new audience and customers – both locally and globally. It is one of my favourite social media apps to use for sharing photos and video. I have discovered several new trails to explore using the #ExploreBC hashtag and following other hiking related accounts.

Fun facts about Instagram:

• The average number of photos posted each day on Instagram is over 60 million, and over 1.6 billion likes each day.
• It is only available on mobile, however, you can use a laptop or PC to view images, like and comment but you cannot upload photos.
• You can now edit comments on Instagram.   
• This summer, Instagram released a new version to the App Store for iOS with improved photo-editing tools such as crop, blur, straighten and border and a few new tools, including a filter strength, shadows, contrast, brightness and saturation.
• The maximum amount of hashtags you can use in a post is 30 (please don’t use this many).
• When people with private profiles tag posts, they won’t appear publicly on tag pages.
• You can only tag your own posts, not other people’s photos or videos.
• Numbers are allowed in hashtags, however, spaces and special characters, such as $ or !, do not work.
• It is the seventh largest social network and growing rapidly.

There are other reasons to include Instagram to your social media profile, like driving traffic to your website, reaching a targeted audience and growing your brand. You can share “behind the scene” photos of your business, new products or services, events and more. Only use hashtags that are relevant to your posts and let your customers know you are on it! Do you have any suggestions for businesses using Instagram? Please comment on this post and share your ideas.

Follow me on Instagram!

3 reasons to increase your Twitter followers

The ability to follow more people
Have you ever tried to follow someone but Twitter wouldn’t allow it? Twitter has limited the amount of people you can follow to prevent spammers from following every single account. Each account can follow up to 2,000 people, however, once you are following 2,000 people, the number of additional followers will depend on how many people are following you. There is no limit on how many people that can follow you, but you do need to continue to grow your follower base so you can follow new people without any limitations. There is no public formula on the amount of followers vs. people you follow, and every account will vary. This is a good time to do some house cleaning on your Twitter account and stop following inactive accounts. You can follow up to 1,000 new followers per day (that is a lot of time spent on Twitter for one day). I have been on Twitter for over three years and I am still not following 1,000 people!

The ability to increase awareness and grow your audience
If you are on Twitter to promote yourself or your business, then you will want to follow people that fall into your target audience. To increase awareness, follow people and start conversations with them to catch their attention. Tweeting useful information, news and tips in your industry will give people a reason to follow you. You can expand your reach by using #hashtags or if other people retweet one of your tweets – which is likely to happen if you are tweeting out helpful content! Growing your audience on Twitter and tweeting on a regular basis will increase awareness for your business and also direct traffic to your website if you include links to your website.

Making new connects on Twitter
Twitter is a great place to make new connections, especially with others in your industry. A number of times I have met people at business events and they have recognized me from Twitter that lead to great business relationships and friendships. I follow people that have the same interests as me, people that I am interested in and people I can learn from. Follow people you want to meet (please don’t follow Justin Bieber in hopes that you will meet him), but if there is a company that you would like to work with, start by following them on Twitter and striking up a conversation. You never know what it could lead to.

There are a lot of reasons to increase your followers, but quality precedes quantity. You want followers who are interested in what you have to say, and if your tweets are interesting and relevant then your followers should start to go. Good luck!