Should You Use Instagram Stories for Your Business?
Instagram Stories have been around for a while now, and the effect of it is huge.. but businesses in Oman are not using it much as yet. The reason could be that it has left many brands, influencers, and content creators confused: should we be using Instagram Stories for business?
In our opinion, since Instagram in General and Stories, in particular, are huge in Oman Social Media, If you’re not using Instagram Stories for business, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity. Not only are Instagram Stories fun and creative, but they’re one of the best ways to grow your engagement, build brand awareness, and even drive sales!
How not to get scammed with fake social media influencers/accounts?
How not to get scammed with fake social media influencers/accounts?
Fake social media accounts and influencers are increasing in numbers and for companies, it’s very difficult to identify who’s fake and who’s genuine. These fake accounts and influencers could cost brands a lot of money.
How to avoid getting scammed?
It’s very important for brands to discover how to always pair up with the right influencers and generate great results from marketing campaigns.
Who are the fake social media influencers?
These people or accounts build a large following base by buying followers from different sources. Buying followers is actually not hard and also, it’s cheaper than you might think. For example, you can use websites like BuzzDayz to buy 15,000 Instagram followers for $55 with minimum efforts.
Using such services, someone could become a micro fake Instagram influencer or to create an account with 40,000 followers and 300 likes for each first ten posts for just around $140.
During the last couple of years, this trend has increased in Oman. Even some marketing companies are fooling brands with fake followers and likes. We’ve come across a few of these kinds of influencers and accounts in Oman digital space but if you know the tricks it’s not that difficult to identify them either.
7 ways for you to spot fake influencers or fake profiles:
- Monitor the engagement ratio in relation to the followers
- Check if the influencer is posting consistently
- Monitor whether the followers grow over time
- Check the influencer's strength of interests
- Check if their Instagram profile is a Business profile
- See if they engage in conversations with their followers
- Do a Google research about the influencer.
Having mentioned all of those, Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to promote or launch your business on social media space.
So let’s stop fake social media influencers ruin your marketing goals and by following simple steps like above we can make Oman social media marketing and advertising space a fraud-free place.
How will Oman welcome WhatsApp new updated version with limiting message forwarding for 5 times?
Now you will no longer be able to forward WhatsApp messages to more than 5 times. Announcement from WhatsApp on Monday 21st January 2019 said it was restricting worldwide how many times any given message can be forwarded from 20 to 5.
Spreading of Mendacious campaigns and fake stories on WhatsApp has become a big problem around the world. Unlike other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, WhatsApp messages are private and encrypted. Hence it’s very difficult to track the origin of the message.
WhatsApp spokesman said, “We’ll continue to listen to user feedback about their experience, and over time, look for new ways of addressing viral content.”
Countries like Oman with a fewer number of social problems may be affected by this release negatively as friends and groups are restricted to forward their messages. WhatsApp is already playing a major role in the communication system in Oman, not only among friends but within companies. Due to it’s fast and convenience many companies in Oman are using WhatsApp as a communication method. So we will have to wait and see how the local market will adapt to this new version.
The company will release an update with forwarding limit, first to Android devices and then to IOS devices accordingly. Oman is expected the new release in near future.
41 Social Media Tips for Omani Small Business Owner
- What’s your social media goal? If you don’t know where you want to go, it’s pretty hard to get there.
- Promote your most popular posts – and that goes for blog posts as well as social media posts.
- If you hate tracking, at least track with Facebook Insights. It’ll show you a lot about your Page progress.
- How do you get the conversation going on social media? Try humor and controversy. They’re very powerful.
- Social media is a powerful thing, but never mistake fooling around with being productive. Stay focused!
- Click FB Insights’ “Posts>When Your Fans are Online” to see your audience’s peak posting times. (Post during these times!)
- Look for questions repeated over and over on your chosen social networks. Provide the definitive answer.
- Analyze your own tweets. Which types got most retweeting? Most Interaction? Questions, graphics or ?
- Don’t be shy with your social media presence. Go for it – but be authentic – and be social!
- Still trying to be everyone’s “friend”? Each connection counts – and speaks loudly about who you are to your other connections.
- If you want your social content to social content to attract, do your best to share quality tips that are really unique.
- Make sure you speak with an identifiable, individual voice when posting social content. Your posts should never sound “canned”.
- Be consistent and post regularly during your audience’s peak posting times on any social networks you’ve chosen to frequent.
- If you use Pinterest regularly, make sure you also access http://nitrogr.am/ for powerful, easy to use Pinterest analytics.
- Use http://nitrogr.am/ for easy hashtag monitoring. (Let your social networking friends know about this, too.)
- Posts people skip most? Highly personal negative posts complaining about illness and problems. (Do you agree?)
- Include a mix of rich media in your social content. Video, photos, Instagram and Vine looping video clips.
- Vine video clips loop. Instagram video clips don’t. Vine streams on Twitter; Instagram videos on Facebook.
- Vine videos are 6 seconds long. Instagram are 15 seconds. How can you use this information for your marketing?
- Tapping your screen for a Vine video starts filming. Tapping your screen for an Instagram video just adjusts focus.
- Be sure you don’t use any banned hashtags with your Instagram photos or videos: http://thedatapack.com/banned-hashtags-instagram/
- Use Instagram hashtags to crowd-source user-generated content as well as extend your own reach.
- Remember that Instagram hashtags are not case-sensitive and don’t work with spaces or special characters.
- If your preferred social platform doesn’t have good native analytics, look for third party sites that provide it.
- Give your new product campaign a name – and start talking about it on your social media.
- Make sure all new product posts are made regularly. Don’t let gaps occur. Keep it fresh in people’s minds (without overdoing it.)
- Don’t tell everyone too much at once about your upcoming project. Mystery breeds interest! Hints and teasers are part of the fun.
- Use surveymonkey.com to create free surveys. You can ask questions for your new product idea and share the link on social media.
- If you’re advertising on Facebook, remember your ad images, including the thumbnail, cannot include more than 20% text.
- Take advantage of the fact you can now use text, arrows and calls to action in Facebook Cover –photos.
- Facebook Profile photos are square and display at 160 x 160 pixels – but remember Facebook wants you to upload at 180 x 180.
- At the very least, include a Facebook app tab leading to your sign-up page or form (and use a clear, easy-to-read call to action.)
- You can display 3 custom app tabs of your choice in your Facebook header section. Make the most of this “real estate”!
- Only your short description displays in your Facebook header section, but fill out your Profile 100% for max searchability.
- Select “Replies On” in your Page Admin panel “Manage Permissions” section to increase the conversation on your Page.
- If you consistently get endorsements that are not relevant on LinkedIn, be aware you can remove endorsements completely.
- Check “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” in LinkedIn to see who is finding you – as well as the keywords they used.
- In your LinkedIn Privacy and Settings page, "Select what others see when you've viewed their profile” to keep it private - or not.
- In Google+ posts, encase text in asterisks for bold and underscore it to create italics. (Share this tip!)
- Did you know Google+ makes animated .GIFs from your photos? Just type the keyword “motion” in your Photos section to find them.
- Use the Google+ Ripples feature to track your posts by clicking the top-right arrow in your post.
