Seen Moment

To continue learning the tricks and tips that can help you maximize your brand's visual marketing initiatives head out to our new blog!

Measuring engagement goes beyond likes and comments, but most marketing teams lack the ability or time to find meaningful metrics.  Sorting through hundreds and thousands of posts is not scalable, so the team here at Seen has been running experiments to better understand how we bring to the surface the most valuable and actionable data points for marketers.  Throughout the next few weeks we will be sharing various types of analysis on Instagram that will help you and your team develop and grow your customer base in this channel.

Relative Engagement - Measures the percentage of measurable actions (likes and comments on Instagram) on a specific post relative to the following of that user at that moment.

Where to consider application of Relative Engagement…

Identify key influencers amongst a brand hashtag, campaign, or trending topic

Measure your brand’s posts success by topic and category

Predict the efficiency of your post and your influencer’s post

Spot posts that are critical for engagement

The competition for consumer attention is fierce and crowded, especially during the holidays.  Hershey’s saw this situation during the 2013 Holiday season as they faced the challenge of promoting their limited-time Peppermint Bark Bells sold exclusively at Target stores. The Hershey’s team, like many others, needs to connect with their target audience on mobile devices, and mobile ads are not effective.  Hershey’s tapped into the Seen Snapfluence network to reach these customers with authentic visual content.

How did it work?

Who?  25 Influential female visual content creators on Twitter & Instagram What? Photos and videos posted showcasing the variety of uses of Peppermint Bark Bells - check it out here. When?  4 weeks during peak holiday shopping Results

Over 1 million Twitter & Instagram users reached by posts

Target participation in campaign

Sold out candy!

Over 100 pieces of proprietary content

It’s not your father’s trade show anymore.  The old show traditions are out and consumer expectations are up.  Today we have the opportunity to build client and customer engagement that is not only memorable, but also able to expand and extend the reach of your show dollars beyond the show floor. Ford is no stranger to the show circuit and has become a thought leader in building show experiences that are worth sharing. Ford may be a Global brand, but that doesn’t make building a memorable experience any easier.  This year at CES 2014, the Ford team brought to life a show experience with its products.  Here are a few successful ways that the Ford team has integrated a visual consumer experience to capitalize on their show investment.

Hashtag Exposure - Ford integrates the show hashtag in as many places as possible.  #FordCES can’t be missed by booth viewers near and far.  As we all know, we are trained to include the tag associated with the moments we experience.  Ford didn’t leave any guess word by the show attendees as to what it was.  Takeaway:  Make the #hashtag as visible as possible to encourage sharing with brand integration and mentions.

Visual Content Displays - Everyone loves to see their content featured by their favorite brands.  Ford utilized several large screen displays featuring dynamic content being shared with their show tag #FordCES.  This content is easily curated by their show workers and immediately available to be displayed on the screen.  Takeaway:  Display screens are an effective way to bring to life the booth and encourage attendees to share.

STEP THREE: Understand your brand’s activation and participation.   Brand participation on Instagram can be really amazing or really annoying.  Understanding and optimizing how and what your customers want from the brand on Instagram are critical to creating an amazing experience.  Here are some important aspects to consider when planning a brand’s activation and participation.

Content Strategy:  What do the brand’s customers want to see from it.   Are you trying to support lifestyle?  Show off products?  Very few brands have products that fans and customers want to see being shared.  A great way to think about the content that a customer would like to see is to think about what a brand’s product enables a customer to do or achieve. 

A great example of a company that understands what it enables for it’s customers is @patagonia.  Patagonia shares incredible photos of experiences that its athletes, customers and others are having.  In most of the photos you won’t see mentions of their products or even know where they are in it, but they capture an experience that their customers can identify and aspire to have.

A few more of our favorite brand’s Instagram:

Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams - http://instagram.com/jenisicecreams/

GoPro - http://instagram.com/gopro

Sightglass Coffee - http://instagram.com/sightglass

Sharing Cadence:  After you understand the content that will resonate with customers, the next consideration is how often to post.  There is no perfect science to deciding this, but there are ways to understand what works.  A simple question to ask is, “How often would I want to see this content?”  We’re amazingly good judges (if we’re honest) of what will work.

More quantitatively it is good to chose a cadence and then stick to it for a period of time so that you can measure the engagement during different times of day and days of the week to see if there are patterns in the engagement that give indicators to what is working.  Use a simple formula like Relative Engagement to aid in your analysis.

Relative Engagement = Likes + Comment Count / Follower total 

Participation:  An even more powerful engagement activity than sharing content can be acknowledging fan and customer content.  If you are tracking a tag related to your brand, take a few moments each day or week to drop a comment in to a fan.  There is strong evidence that brand affinity, loyalty and sharing goes up when you acknowledge a fan’s post.

Similar to having posts, it is also helpful to have consistency and strategy go the amount of participation and the voice.  

We love photos, but talking in terms of photos and numbers is easy.  Thinking about the moments in the photos is more interesting and valuable for marketers. 

Try this:  If you’re an Instagram user, go ahead and look back at the last photo you posted.   Where were you when you posted that picture?  Describe the scene of that photo out of the context of it being you.  What is it you we’re trying to communicate to the rest of the world about who you are?  

Quick Search: With this context in mind, its time to do a short analysis of the photos related to your brand.  There are several ways to look up the tags that will be related to your brand for free.  We’re happy to offer our service to you to search and save those searches for free.  Either login or head over to our quick registration here and get going.

Analysis:  Don’t be overwhelmed with analyzing too much content.  This part of this exercise is designed to get you a higher-level understanding.  A deeper dive can be done later on.

Now that you have this content in one place, take a look at what is happening in these pictures similar to how you looked at your own photos. 

Are there patterns that stand out?

Is it what you expected?

Can you pick out 3-5 moments that tell the story best?

Documentation:  The last activity that can help confirm your findings is to create a short presentation for your team about your findings.  We suggest making the focus the Customer Journey.  Put these moments in a story that is about where and what the customers we’re doing. 

Great discussion questions are:

Is the moment being shared one that we expected to be shared?

Do our product and marketing efforts align with  the moments that our customers are sharing?

What do these moments say about how our customers view our brand in the context of their lives? 

Is our brand naturally paired with other brands or specific surroundings?

Seen Self Promotion – There is a TON more data and information we collect and analyze that can make understanding these moments easier and more meaningful.  We offer our assistance on several levels of accomplishing this.  Don’t hesitate to contact anyone on our team directly or info@seenmoment and we’ll get right back to you.

Just last week, business analytics tool SumAll named Instagram the best platform for brands. According to SumAll’s CEO, “With increases in fan/follower engagement nearly three times that of other networks studied, Instagram is the clear winner for 2013. If a company has a visual product to sell and it’s currently not on Instagram, that company is missing out on significant brand awareness and revenue.”

If you’re a brand with a visual product, event or experience and you haven’t considered Instagram as part of your marketing strategy, let us tell you something: You should think it about it. Maybe it’s a fit and maybe it’s not, but either way, it’s best to know.

From the Indy 500 to Visit Austin, we’ve seen the impact an Instagram campaign can have for a business. And that’s why we want to help you build your brand on the platform. Beginning today, we’re sharing five steps for success to help your brand get started. The first step is below, but you’ll have to stop back each day this week to get the rest. 

Ready? Here we go!

STEP ONE: Decide where Instagram fits within your overall marketing strategy. Are you hoping to build brand awareness? Drive sales? As with any other marketing tool, the first step for building your brand on Instagram is deciding where the platform fits within your overall marketing strategy. This step is essential because Instagram may not be a fit for your brand. Consider the following questions to determine if it’s the right platform for your brand:

Are your current or potential customers on Instagram?

What is the story you want to tell your customers about your brand?

Can you consistently maintain a presence on Instagram?

What are the business outcomes and metrics that you are trying to achieve with this inititative?

If you've gone through the questions and answered “yes” and know what the story is you want your brand to tell, then it’s time to go all in. 

Next, make an assessment of your goals, then determine how Instagram can be used to help you achieve them. From there, you can decide how you'll use the platform to show your business and connect with customers. 

For example, the Indy 500 is challenged with a very diverse fan base. Ranging from 60-year-old males who don’t know a think about social media to 20-somethings who fancy themselves amateur smartphone photographers and grew up on social media. Rather than targeting a single slice of their fan demographic, the Indy 500 bridged the social gap by combining online and offline engagement tactics. How did they do this? By creating an interactive map that featured fans’ Instagram and Twitter photos hashtagged with #Indy500orBust and giving them a chance to win the ultimate Indy 500 experience. As a result, they took one of the most diverse fan bases around and leveraged social engagement to create a unique fan experience that delighted, inspired and engaged a widespread audience based on their shared passion for the Indy 500.  

If it’s right for your brand, joining Instagram can be a new way to inspire, facilitate and create moments for your customers to interact with you.

On Friday, the Internet came to a screeching halt and turned its hearts and attention toward 5-year-old Miles, a cancer patient who was fulfilling his wish of becoming BatKid for a day. Thousands joined in to turn San Francisco into Gotham City for the day, and millions more followed along #SFBatKid’s adventure online. Photos shared on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag captured the moments as Miles saved a damsel in distress, put the Joker away, and went to City Hall to get the key to Gotham. We wanted to take a look at all of the photos and follow along BatKid’s journey, so we turned to our platform to see more. Here are some of the insights:

More than 21K photos have been shared on Instagram & Twitter with #SFBatKid

The photos were shared to over 120.5M followers

You can see all of the #SFBatKid photos on our SFBatKid Gallery

We have been working closely with our customers to provide the best tools to create amazing moments and story-worthy engagement.  Below is some information about how we have integrated video and interactive maps of where your fans are sharing to our campaigns.  Here’s a snapshot of what’s new at Seen:

Instagram Video

Visual storytelling is powerful marketing and a video is worth twice the engagement of a photo. Promoting a live event? Have fans sharing Instagram video with your campaign hashtag? Now, you can incorporate video into your campaign gallery, live event displays and embedded displays.

Ford leveraged the Seen Presentation Gallery at the SEMA Show to highlight events and activities happening live at the conference.

Map Display

Enhance your campaign with our Map Display that plots geo-tagged content on an interactive map.

Infographic: Snapshot of Influencers

Earlier this year, Kevin Systrom said that Instagram has changed the way people see the world. It’s not hard to pinpoint why: According to a new Pew Research report on online photo sharing, “Pictures document life from a special angle. Mobile connectivity has brought these visuals into countless lives in real-time. This all adds up to a new kind of collective digital scrapbook with fresh forms of storytelling and social bonding.”

More than just changing how we see the world, Instagram has also changed how we interact with it … and smart brands have responded accordingly. Brands have grown comfortable with using Instagram to identify and interact with fans. Now, the question has become: How do they activate these fans to help tell their story?

The answer? Influencers. The connected, authentic and genuine group of Instagrammers who have amassed an audience of people who pay attention to and respond to their photos. Their photos amaze, active, motivate and inspire – exactly what many brands join Instagram in hopes of doing.

Until now, Instagram influencers have been a largely untapped group. So, we did some digging to find out which users have emerged as influencers in their communities. Additionally, we asked a few brand marketers about the value influencers bring to Instagram marketing campaigns.

When we launched our first photo monitoring dashboard in 2012, our goal was to help brands identify and interact with the people shaping their business’s story online – one photo at a time. When brands asked to take their interactions with fans beyond likes and comments, we responded with Venueseen Campaigns, the first all-in-one management and CRM tool for running Instagram campaigns. Fast forward one year later and we’ve helped brands of all sizes, including the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, David’s Bridal, Dodge Ram and Bath & Body Works, implement Instagram and Twitter photo campaigns.

Through working with these companies, we’ve learned that one of the biggest challenges for brands is effectively activating their campaigns. That’s why today we’re launching Snapfluence, a new influencer network that will connect brands with targeted, popular Instagram users who are already living the brand’s lifestyle. In addition to launching Snapfluence, we’re also changing our name to Seen to better reflect how our full suite of products gives brands the tools to run more strategic, effective photo campaigns. Here’s a bit more about each:

Snapfluence

Until now, Instagram influencers have been a largely untapped network. It’s hard enough to search Instagram, let alone identify the influencers who are genuinely excited about your brand and invite them to participate in a campaign. Snapfluence eliminates that problem, helping brands expand their campaign's reach and generate better results by connecting them with people who already love their product or service.

Beginning today, brands can go to Snapfluence.com or Seen’s website to request more information about connecting with influencers. Influencers can go to Snapfluence.com to fill out an application to join.

Once an influencer is approved to be a part of the network, they’ll be matched with a brand whose product or service aligns with their lifestyle and interests.

Snapfluence then offers two kinds of engagement: Brands can connect with influencers for a one-time campaign, or they can partner for long-term ambassador programs.

The benefit is twofold: For brands, Snapfluence takes the guesswork out of identifying the right people to connect with, providing an efficient and effective way to activate an Instagram campaign. At the same time, influencers have the opportunity to connect with the brands they genuinely love (Not to mention the potential for payment, free products and exposure!).

Seen

With Seen, brands can engage with their loyal fans in a personal, meaningful, and measureable way. From start to finish, Seen Campaigns, Insights and Influencers gives brands a full suite of tools to effectively launch user-generated photo campaigns on Instagram and Twitter:

Seen Campaigns lets brands tell their story visually through the eyes of their customers. Whether for a product launch, brand awareness campaign, or event, brand managers can use Seen photo and video campaigns on Instagram and Twitter to drive customer engagement.

The Seen Insights platform studies user-generated photos on Instagram to give brands meaningful data about their fans through hashtags. From product development feedback, to gaining a deeper understanding of brand perceptions, Insights gives brands access to valuable, actionable insights.

Seen Influencers uses Snapfluence to connect brands with targeted influencers to activate and amplify their campaign.

Ultimately, Seen helps brands connect their campaign strategies back to big picture marketing objectives that ladder up to overall company goals.

Social media shouldn’t be about amassing likes or comments. It’s time to move beyond that and embrace “real marketing” -- real content created by real fans providing real results. And that’s what Seen and Snapfluence empower brands to accomplish.