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Yes, that’s right! You can now schedule your Instagram content and Postcron will do the hard work for you: no notifications or reminders!

Now, first things first: 

Before you start scheduling your posts, make sure the profile you’re looking into posting to is an Instagram Business account as opposed to a Personal profile, as auto-posting only works for this type of account. If your account is a Personal profile, you can easily convert it into a Business account, which not only will allow you to post directly, but will also give you access to a lot of extra perks that we mention below.

You can also keep it Personal and use notifications to push your Instagram posts through. Or you can even have both options in hand, as scheduling Instagram Stories is only available through notifications. It’s completely up to you and you should definitely tailor Postcron options to fit your needs! 

Another thing you should take into account is that in order to direct-post to Instagram, you’ll need to link a Facebook business page to your Business Instagram account. We’ll walk you through converting your profile and linking it to a Facebook page below. 

Why should I have a Business Account? 

According to Instagram, having a business profile will help your customers easily connect to your business as it allows you to include additional information directly to your profile. You’ll be able to add a phone number, an email address and your business’s physical address. It’s mandatory to include at least 1 contact option. Once you add your contact information, a Contact button will be displayed near the top of your profile. When potential customers click that button, they’ll see options like Call, Email and Get Directions, depending on the contact information you provided.

Additionally, with a Business profile, you get access to Insights on the Instagram App. These insights will help you learn more about your followers and how they engage with your business. You’ll also have access to a Professional Dashboard, where you can track your performance, access and discover pro tools, and explore educational information curated by Instagram.

Converting from Personal to Business

• On the Instagram App, go to your profile and tap the Menu located in the upper right corner.
• Then, tap on Settings, on the bottom of the screen.
• Now, tap Account, click on Switch to Professional Account, and follow the steps.
• Make sure you choose Business instead of Creator to enable direct-posting.

Connecting your Facebook Page to Instagram

• To connect a Facebook Business Page to your Instagram account go to your profile on the Instagram App and select Edit Profile.
• Then, under Public Business Information or Profile Information, select Page.
• Now, choose either Connect Existing Page, or Create Facebook Page, if you’d like to create a new one, and follow the instructions.

This can also be done directly from Facebook. In that case, you should:

• Open your Facebook Page, select Settings from the left menu, and then select Instagram. 
• To add an Instagram account to your Page, select Connect Account.
• Enter your Instagram account’s Username and Password, and select Log in. If you do not have a business account, you will be prompted to convert your personal account.

If the page you’d like to connect doesn’t appear in the drop-down from your profile, refer to Instagram Help Center to troubleshoot it. 

Connecting a Facebook Page to your Instagram profile will make it easier to use all of the features available for businesses across the Facebook family of apps. Keep in mind that at this time, only one Facebook Page can be connected to your business account.

Now that you’re all set up, you just need to connect your Instagram account to Postcron, and you should be good to go! 

How to connect my Instagram account to Postcron for direct-posting:

On Postcron’s dashboard click on the Instagram icon under Add Accounts and select Business. If you haven’t granted Postcron the required permissions to post on your behalf, you’ll be prompted by Facebook to accept them. Once that’s done, you’ll see the Instagram accounts connected to your Facebook profile through your Pages. Select the ones you want to add to Postcron, and click on Add. That’s it.

Scheduling posts to Instagram with Postcron: 

Now that you’re all set up, it’s time to start scheduling. First select the accounts you want to post to on the account selector:

Then, attach either an image or a video to your post by clicking on the corresponding button. Instagram is a media-centric platform, so adding media is mandatory. To add a copy to your post type or paste directly into Postcron’s text box. You might also want to include emojis to your post’s copy by clicking on the emoji button. 

Keep in mind that Instagram allows you to include up to 2200 characters and 30 hashtags to your post, and you’ll find counters on the bottom right corner of the publisher to help you keep track of that. 

Once your post is looking good, you have three scheduling options: Post Now, Schedule and Predefined Times to set the date and time you want your post to be published and leave it to Postcron. 

How to create the best images to share to Instagram?

When designing images to share to Instagram, and other platforms, you might face two major difficulties:

• Knowing the ideal sizes for each social network.
• Making eye-catching, attractive images.

Both of them are essential and will definitely help your posts have a real impact on your audience! To achieve that without resorting to complicated tools that demand some graphic design expertise, you can try lifesaving photo editing tools like Arstudio. They will allow you to make interesting and good-looking designs in a matter of minutes! And the best thing? ArtStudio is completely free!

Maximize your income on social media, with a minimum effort! Get started with Postcron today, and schedule all of your Instagram posts. We’ll do the rest for you!

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Social media has grown so much over the years that today it is an essential place for advertising your products or services. However, entering this virtual reality world might get you feeling dizzy and even lost. There are so many different social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok… That you might ask yourself: Which ones should I start off with? How many times a day should I post? What kind of posts should I make? 

Many businesses already have a social media strategy running but they notice after a while that it doesn’t present them with the results they expected (that if they even measure them!). This might be the outcome of not setting a clear goal before starting your campaign. We’ve listed some goals you might have below, so you can begin by giving this a proper thought:

• Increase community engagement. Asking questions, using hashtags and posting user-generated-content it’s a great way to make your followers feel interested in participating in your campaign. 

• Generate leads and sales. Making sure to alert your customers about special discounts, new releases and updates. 

• Increase brand awareness. Your social media accounts must reflect your brand’s personality in a way that it’s easy to identify and that distinguishes your brand from others. 

• Expand your audience. It’s all about growing numbers in this one. More followers, more likes, more shares! 

• Boost web traffic. Adding your links to posts is the best way to make leads find their way into your website!

Whichever goal you set, once you’ve decided what you want, it will be a lot easier to define your content strategy! 

Aside from posting regularly, it’s very important to make an impact and to enhance the social media image of your company. And while it’s great to maintain an active presence online, it is ideal that it doesn’t take up much of your time. The best way to make sure you don’t end up sitting in front of the computer staring at a blank post is to plan ahead and organize your content.

This is why we’ve decided to share these four tips with you, so you can improve your campaign and make sure you have all the tools you need!

1. Social listening

We’re not just talking about hearing what your friends have to say about that new jacket you just bought. Social Listening means actually monitoring conversations people have on social media. It is searching for hashtags, keywords and mentions that might be relevant to your business. This is important because you want to be aware of what is going on in your surroundings to ensure your content is relevant by always posting useful and interesting information, and to follow your competitors strategies in order to gain wisdom from them. 

There are a lot of social listening tools out there. Pick the one of your choice and begin your research! 

In short, make sure to pay special attention to:

• Mentions of your product and/or brand

Or really any information going around on social media that you feel it’s relevant to your marketing strategy, and that could improve your content. It can be anything from a single hashtag on Twitter, from a discussion about your product on a random online forum.

2. Analyze what you’ve found… and use it!

Here it’s important to notice if what you found carries sentiment or feedback about your product. Are people saying good things about your service or complaining about it? Write it down, and even discuss it with your team. Listening to your customer’s suggestions might be a great place to start improving your brand, or making some adjustments.

It’s also important to notice which trends are going around. This might be just the inspiration you needed to launch a new product or service and to identify the new audience you are trying to reach. 

You also need to be on the lookout for new customers, so make sure to track phrases potential buyers would use. Are people asking or suggesting something specific? Again, report it back to your team. Make sure you are not missing any leads! 

Last, but not least, keep an eye open for any updates relating to the industry. Perhaps there is a new competitor in town, or perhaps your customers have come up with a new way to call your product.  Anything that should be on your next social listening is important to keep track of. 

3.  Update your Content Calendar and schedule your posts!

Here’s when you get to work with what you found. Set up your content for the week or month. If you have already done this step, this is when you can include new hashtags to your posts, proofread your text and make sure your visuals are ready to go. 

We know many starter businesses don’t have much time to work on their content, so remember you can also work with user-generated-content, memes and beautiful images created easily. On the last item, we recommend using our image editing tool, ArtStudio, where you’ll find several layouts and models to work with!

Once you get everything ready, you can easily set up a spreadsheet or .csv file with your posts and schedule them all at once using Postcron. You can literally schedule a month’s worth of content in a few minutes! And from then on, Postcron does it for you!

Depending on the size or niche of each enterprise, the daily number of posts and even the social network may vary. But until you reach your ideal combination, you might want to start with:

• Posting 3 or more times a day on Twitter
• Posting 2x a day on Facebook
• Posting 1x a day on LinkedIn
• Posting 1 or 2 times a day on your Instagram feed and up to 4 times on your Stories.
• Posting 5 or more times a day on Pinterest

4. Turn your customers into friends. Engage with your audience! 

Take some time to reply to your comments. Respond to questions, like and share posts of your interest. The more you engage with your customers, the more they will be interested in engaging with you. 

It’s really important to give your customers a positive experience, and a great way to do this is to communicate with your audience and to make them feel like a real person is engaging with them (even if you are simply using response templates to speed up your work). 

We strongly encourage you to do this, especially shortly after you’ve posted something, to keep your audience online and spark curiosity from other followers. 

In conclusion…

As you can see, it’s much easier to navigate through the social media sea when you know your headings. Hopefully, we’ve enlightened your journey with this article.

Once you set up your goal, organize your tasks and get everything ready, you’ll be able to put your social media game on the spot, where it always should have been.

We wish you the best of luck!

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A recent Local Consumer Review Survey revealed that 91 percent of 18 to 34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. In fact, research shows that the purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270 percent greater than a product having no reviews.

The importance of reviews to a brand’s online reputation cannot be understated. Reviews, positive or negative, build customer trust, convert visitors into leads, and boost a brand’s local search ranking. Further, customer reviews offer marketers valuable insight into what customers think about their brand. Simply put, your current and future customers care about online reviews. 

Emails have always been an effective marketing tool for businesses. An effective email campaign can be used to power a firm’s online review strategy. This is because a majority of customers prefer businesses communicating with them through emails. Refer to this chart. 

Source: https://theblog.adobe.com/consumers-are-still-email-obsessed-but-theyre-finding-more-balance/

What’s more? A Clutch survey of 1,000 online shoppers revealed that nearly one-quarter of online product reviews are prompted by email marketing. Emails make the review collection process outbound. So, rather than waiting for a review, you get to initiate the conversation and proactively ask your customers to leave you a review. 

Find out how you can take full advantage of email marketing to accumulate customer reviews and build a five-star online reputation. 

• Personalization Is the Key

Statistics reveal, on any given day, there are nearly 124.5 billion emails sent and received each day. So, there are chances your email may not even be opened. Not everyone you send a review request email to will respond. However, personalizing your emails can help you stand out in the customer’s inbox, improving your chances of getting a review. 

In a survey conducted by OneSpot, a leading individualization platform for content, marketers shared that they find dynamic and real-time personalization in emails to be the most effective review generation tactic. In fact, organizations personalizing their emails generated 17 percent more revenue from their campaign compared to marketers who did not.

Personalizing emails is one of the smartest tactics you can use to drive impulses and encourage customers review your product or service. Just mentioning their name or company name isn’t enough. Show how much you care about your customer’s choices by mentioning the specific product or service they opted for. Thank them for using your product and ask them how their experience was. 

Check out how HopScotch, an ecommerce app for kids’ apparel, keeps its email short, simple, and to the point while making the customer feel special.

Tools like HubSpot Personalization Tokens make it easy for marketers to add tokens that are personalized to the email recipients. Using this tool, you can add the recipient’s name and contact details, company, deal, or ticket properties to send personalized emails and request your customers for a review.

• Segment Your Customers Based on Their Email Activity

The needs and expectations of a first-time customer are different from those of a repeat one. Repeat customers are more loyal to your brand and may patiently share their views about the product, regardless of how many questions you ask. However, the same review format may not be work for a new user.   

Hence, it is important to segment your email list based on your customer’s location, age, purchase history, and the date they subscribed. Email list segmentation will help you introduce a targeted campaign to gain insightful customer reviews. Befriend email marketing services like GetResponse, Constant Contact, and MailChimp to segment your email list and send appropriate review request emails to customers based on their actions at your store or on your website. 

• Make it Easy (and Tempting!) for Customers to Leave a Review

One of the best ways to improve customer response to your review requests is to make the process easy for them. You can simply add a review link that customers can click on to leave product feedback. Alternatively, you can generate a Google review link that will take the customer to your Google My Business page, allowing them to post a review and know more about your business.

Check out how Sugar Cosmetics offers a link that customers can effortlessly click on to leave a review. 

Embedding the start or emoji rating in your follow-up emails is another way of persuading customers to leave a review for your business. 

Adidas sends emails with a link to their landing page which is highly interactive and visual, reducing click fatigue and making the reviewing process quick and easy.

An attractive incentive like a voucher code or a discount can give customers the push required to leave a review. This tactic also drives customers back to your website once a reviewing process is completed. Check out how Tower, UK’s leading kitchen appliances firm, uses this tactic to its advantage.

Customers love seeing how their reviews have been put to use. For instance, a customer testimonial page on your website, featuring real reviews from your product users will not only boost your reputation and customer engagement but also encourage new customers to leave a review. Bonus: You also get UGC (user-generated content) for your brand.

Carefully determine when you want to send a post-purchase email asking for a customer review. The timing of this email hugely depends on the nature of your product. 

For instance, ecommerce stores selling apparel or shoes can send a review request email within a week after the product is delivered. This is because, by this time, the customer would have surely used the product at least once. 

On the other hand, products like an anti-aging cream or health supplements warrant a longer time between the purchase and review request email. The same goes for electronic goods or books too. In these cases, the customer takes a few weeks to fully experience the product and write a detailed review. 

Understand how your customers are likely to use the product and fully engage with your brand and carefully decide the window when they are most likely to respond to a product review request. Use email automation to send relevant and timely emails to your customers. 

• Don’t Forget to Test the Effectiveness of Your Emails

You don’t know what type of messaging will work for which customer. Hence, it is important to test different emails with your target audience and assess whether or not they are successful in getting a review. A/B testing your review request emails can not only increase the chances of customers opening your email and leaving a review but also boost your website traffic and sales. 

Test your email’s subject line, length, word order, content,  visuals, and CTA to determine the top-performing email templates. Online tools like Campaign Monitor and Sendinblue can offer you useful insights about your email campaign, enabling you to write engaging review request emails. 

For instance, did you know that the subject line length can significantly improve your email’s CTR? A survey by Return Path shares that subject lines 61 – 70 characters long have the highest open rates. A/B testing your emails will point out to such factors and help you create winning emails that generate quality reviews. 

Summing Up

Customer reviews, whether positive or negative, offer insights into how your customers are perceiving your brand. However, the sheer thought of encouraging your customers to leave a review can be pretty overwhelming. 

Your email list is an excellent resource that can help you get valuable customer reviews for your business. When done right, effective email marketing can make the review collection process easy and less stressful. Consider the aforementioned email marketing tips to nail your online review strategy and strengthen your brand reputation.

About The Author:

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of The 20 Media, a content marketing agency specializing in content & data-driven SEO. Pratik has been featured on sites like Forbes, Moz, SEW, The Huffington Post, KISSmetrics, Entrepreneur and Fast Company to name a few.

Find him on Twitter @DholakiyaPratik for a quick chat. 
Linkedin – Pratik Dholakiya // Facebook – @pratik.dholakiya

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