In fact, often times people and businesses don’t even add a caption; they just list out a series of hashtags instead. We’ve put together Instagram hashtag best practices and tips as a follow-up to the posts on Facebook and Twitter hashtag best practices.

As with any social network, there is a right way and wrong way to use hashtags on Instagram. With the Instagram hashtag max limit set to 30, let’s find out how exactly you can make the most of them.

If you’re looking for a more strategic way to use hashtags, you can discover all your competitors’ tactics using our new hashtag analysis tools. Uncover the hashtags you are, are not, and should be using!

Chanel decided to use no words, only hashtags when posting this video. However, Chanel failed to use proper capitalization which makes the hashtags intimidating.

Instagram Hashtag Best Practice #1: Use multiple #hashtags, but under 10 is best!

According to our 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark report, 75.1% of posts on Instagram contain hashtags, which means it’s important for you to get in the game and stay there with hashtag use.

If you’re still establishing your brand on Instagram, use as many relevant hashtags as possible in your posts. If you don’t have many followers on Instagram, try driving traffic towards your Instagram account from your other social media platforms. According to research done by SocialFresh, it’s best to limit to 10 Instagram hashtags per post to deter the perception that your post could be spam. After researching the habits of various brands on Instagram, the optimum number of hashtags for likes is seven hashtags before they negatively affect engagement.

On Instagram, people often search for specific hashtags and scroll through the image feed. If they like what you posted, they will actually click “like.”  If they like what they see, they might also click on your username to check out your feed and follow you. As in this case, hashtags help you reach a broader audience and gain followers.

Not sure whether to post your hashtags directly in your post copy or save them for the first comment? Take a look at this informal study on Instagram hashtag placement from Agorapulse that concludes that there isn’t a huge difference between the two. You can tuck your hashtags away in the first comment for a cleaner aesthetic, or include them in your post for extra insurance.

Instagram Hashtag Best Practice #2: Use your SEO keywords

A great place to start when deciding which hashtags to use is your SEO keywords. Search your keywords on Instagram and see what others are posting. If the majority of content is relevant to your post, and it is an active hashtag, use it! Just remember, research is key–don’t use hashtags that aren’t active or relevant.

(Need a primer on sprucing up your SEO? We covered optimizing your SEO to maximize traffic here.)

Instagram Hashtag Best Practice #3: Create custom hashtags

If your brand is already established on Instagram, it is time to consider custom hashtags. Make sure any custom hashtag you create is unique, memorable, and speaks to your brand. Most brands create custom hashtags that are a play on their name, e.g. #ArtoftheTrench (Burberry), #InstaKors (Michael Kors) or #ATiffanyHoliday (Tiffany & Co.).

Oh and don’t forget, like Twitter and Facebook, make sure your hashtag is easy to spell, and use capitalization for readability.

Instagram Hashtag Best Practice #4: Create an Instagram campaign using hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to prompt your followers to get involved with your brand. By doing so, not only are you helping your brand reach your follower’s followers, but you’re also developing a relationship with loyalists by inviting them to feel like they are a part of your brand. Starbucks does a great job of this.

Instagram Hashtag Best Practice #5: Don’t forget about the classics

There are a few incredibly popular hashtags on Instagram. If executed properly, they can really help your brand engage with existing followers and attract new ones.

• #Regram: Use this hashtag when you are posting something that was previously posted by a fan. This is a great way to make your brand loyalists feel like they are a part of your brand. Not only will they feel more included, but they’re likely to share with their followers that their post was “regrammed” by your brand! When using #regram make sure to give credit where credit is due. Always ask the original creator for permission (by leaving a comment) and use “Photo Credit:@username”.

• #LaterGram: Use this hashtag when posting something from a while back that was never posted before. For example, if I worked for Burberry, and it was the Monday after #FashionWeek, I might decide to post a picture and include #LaterGram. There are over 32 million public posts on Instagram with this hashtag–wow!

• #ThrowbackThursday or #TBT: It’s Thursday and a throwback is in order! With nearly 340 million posts, it’s a great way to bring back old memories. #TBT has become a popular hashtag on several social networks, including Instagram. Join the retro fun!

• #NoFilter: Use this filter when posting an image and applying none of the Instagram filters to it. These are great if you are posting about your brand in a scenic setting. It’s one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram with almost 170 million public posts.

Instagram is a powerful tool for consumer-oriented brands. With more people responsive to visual posts on all social platforms, it is obvious why Instagram has become one of the main platforms by which consumers engage with brands. Use these Instagram hashtag best practices (and share your own!) to get the most out of this social network and watch your brand make an Insta-statement! #InstaTagFTW

Now, if you’re looking to use hashtags to extend your reach, increase your followers and create better content on Instagram, give our 14-day free trial a spin. No credit card, just analytics.

This article was originally published on November 16, 2014 and has since been updated. 

The post Hashtags 101: Instagram Hashtag Best Practices appeared first on Rival IQ.

3 Reasons Rival IQ Can Take Your Business to the Next Level

With Rival IQ, your marketing team will have the data and insight to assess your current marketing strategy and pivot if need be to stay ahead of the competition. In addition to in-depth analytics, Rival IQ provides material to help your team create a strong digital marketing strategy.

#1. Stability, Growth & Happy Customers

Founded by marketers and data geeks in 2013, Rival IQ has quickly become one of the industry leaders in comparative analytics. We are proud to have customers in more than 30 countries who genuinely love our product and customer service. For the six months ending May 31, 2016, our Net Promoter Score (NPS) was 52.7 in an industry where the average is 19 (as reported by Satmetrix 2015 Consumer Net Promoter Benchmarks). We’re not perfect, but we do our best to provide first-class support.

“Without Rival IQ, I would be missing the real perspective that matters in my marketing efforts.”

#2. Making Data Meaningful

Anybody can help you track numbers. The key to success is translating the those numbers into actionable insights.  Those insights help improve decision-making and marketing content strategies, creating the best chance to engage your audience in a way that makes a difference to your business. Using benchmarks and comparative analysis, we enable digital marketers to uncover new opportunities, identify trends, and track results across all major social channels and the web.

#3. We Help You Win

We deliver analytics and competitive intelligence to help your team make better informed decisions, improve social media engagement, SEO and SEM results, and better understand your market. This means higher productivity, more efficient use of budget and headcount, and increased time spent on activities that deliver results to your business.

The post Get Comprehensive Marketing Insights with Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

The Broncos’ Social Landscape Challenge

The competitive nature of the National Football League is not limited to the playing field. While the players battle on Sundays, the front office staff are in a 24/7 competition to attract and keep the attention of fans. The difficulty lay in the overwhelming number of media sources where their fans can go for information about the team.

With so many options for fans to follow the team, the Denver Broncos realized that developing a strong social media presence was crucial part of fan engagement. Building a greater following and engagement meant competing against many well-known local and national sports news sources. “We want to be the answer to the question, ‘Where do you want to get your news about the Broncos?’” said Ben Hunt, director of digital media at the Denver Broncos.

The team first wanted a better understanding of other NFL teams as well as local and national press, and bloggers, which required better tracking and measuring—their current methods were highly manual and time-consuming. After reviewing and testing several tools, they selected Rival IQ for its ability to track and measure content—beyond mere numbers and sentiment.

“Rival IQ gives us a great, detailed view of the landscape of where our fans go to find out about the team, and has been critical in helping us make gains in audience engagement.”

Rival IQ: The Broncos’ Social Media Solution

The Broncos social media team evaluated multiple social media analytics tools, and tested all of them for six months. They concluded that Rival IQ provided the strongest tracking and content performance measurement, helping them get a view of the social media landscape by monitoring their own performance, gaining insights into what content is most effective and understanding the varied competing news sources.

It’s All About the Results

Now regarded as one of the leaders in social media among their peers in the NFL, the Broncos’ reach has grown to more than 7 million followers—a 43.8% increase since they started with Rival IQ. Because Rival IQ brings the data to them, the Broncos’ social media team has time to spend on higher value activities.

“Rival IQ saves us time because all the information we need is in one spot,” said Hunt. “Plus, it is very easy to use. The interface is much simpler than competitive products while still giving us the ability to do everything we need to do.”

Key to their social media tracking and planning process is the ease of search. “Rival IQ is one place we go to get everything done for tracking,” Hunt explained. “It’s helping us plan our content and react quickly to what’s trending.”

Hunt especially values email updates, which save time: “We receive reports multiple times per day on what is happening in the market. We no longer have to look up all that information manually, using multiple tools.”

Using Rival IQ, the marketing team has been strategically working to further grow its presence and engagement. In addition to informing the team’s social content strategy, Rival IQ has also helped them identify the team’s best time of day and how to better leverage trending hashtags.

The post How the Broncos’ Social Following Grew by 43.8% appeared first on Rival IQ.

A comprehensive competitive analysis completed two to four times a year is one of a content marketer’s greatest marketing assets. It can give solid benchmarks, an understanding of what messaging strategies work within an overall landscape, and ideas for new marketing opportunities that might have otherwise been missed.

Our client success team hears this question all the time: “What’s the best way to analyze our competitors’ content?” We’ve written a few blog posts on different aspects of a competitive analysis, and now we’ve put together a full white paper designed to guide content marketers through the entire process.

First, we walk through the process of building a competitive landscape with or without Rival IQ. Many marketers already have a strong understanding of their closest competitors, but we offer a fast and easy exercise using Google that could expand that landscape.

Next, we provide a template for a competitive communication audit. This step compiles and compares the following across competitors:

• Social bios and “about” sections
• Social handles, URLs, and usernames
• Website taglines
• Brand messaging

Like with building a competitive landscape, content marketers don’t need Rival IQ to complete this step. However, our exports provide the fastest way of comparing social and website positioning.

Once the competitive communication audit is complete, we guide content marketers through the process of taking inventory of their competitors’ content. We focus on the most common types of content marketing that are the easiest to publicly analyze. This includes blog posts, websites, social posts, videos, and meta descriptions.

After a list of competitors’ content has been compiled, it can be analyzed. Content marketers are judged on three main success metrics:

• Social engagement: If content resonates with fans and customers, those posts will feature more likes, comments, and shares.
• Keyword ranking: Great content is built with SEO in mind and should improve search ranking for targeted keywords.
• Backlinks: External links increase content visibility and boost search rankings.

Rival IQ helps gauge the performance of social posts, keyword performance, and more. Other tools, like Ahrefs.com or Open Site Explorer can discover backlinks to specific pages or entire websites.

After those steps are complete, content marketers will apply what works and end efforts that are under-performing, which will improve their marketing efforts. Additionally, marketers can build informed benchmarks by which to measure their own marketing performance. Download your free guide on how to perform a competitive content audit:

The post How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis appeared first on Rival IQ.

Know How Your Followers Feel

See if you are getting more Facebook love than your competitors! You can now track Facebook Reactions — “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry” — across your competitive landscape using Rival IQ. While tracking total engagement is important, tracking reactions allows you to see how your content is resonating with your audience.

Facebook Engagement Goes Beyond the Like

As you know, Facebook recently launched Reactions, an “extension to the like button.” Now users (finally) have the opportunity to express happiness, sadness, anger, or awe towards any post in their news feed. 

For social media marketers, it is important to have a clear understanding of how your content is performing and what is happening across your competitive landscape. By tracking Reactions in your Rival IQ reports, you can gain more insights on your audience and details around post engagement. 

Start Tracking How Your Content is Resonating with Facebook Reactions

Tracking post reactions in Rival IQ is simple. You can measure reactions in aggregate or by type. For example, if you are looking to just measure negative sentiment, you might choose to only view “Sad” and “Angry” reactions. 

To get started, just go into your Rival IQ account and visit the Facebook Social Posts dashboard. Under Top Landscape Posts, click Manage Columns to pick which reactions you want to track.

Measure and Report

Want more? Get rollup metrics about Reactions in Detailed Metrics and Custom Chart Creator. Just like any other metric in Rival IQ, you can customize, Favorite and export (or schedule) any Facebook Reactions chart within Rival IQ. Answer all your Facebook engagement questions and stay ahead of the competition with your favorite analytics tool!

Up Your Facebook Marketing Game Today

With this new feature, you can make more data-driven decisions when crafting Facebook posts and content. Start using Reactions to better understand your followers and the content that makes them go “Wow!”

Not a Rival IQ user? Get started with our 14-day free trial!

The post Facebook Reactions Now Available in Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

Maybe you handle SEO yourself, or perhaps you hire professionals to do it for you. Either way, your search rank is something to be treasured, cherished like a beloved pet – but being one of the top dogs in your field does have its downsides.

As the SEO industry has grown to support sites in the quest for better rank, its evil cousin crept out of the woodwork. Negative SEO can destroy years of hard work – and if your ranking has started to slip, you could be one of its victims.

“Could” being the operative word – a sudden fall in rank or traffic could be due to any number of factors, and negative SEO is only one of them, but it’s still something you need to be aware of. Here are some common forms of negative SEO – and what you can do to defend against them.

#1. Link-Based Negative SEO

When it works, negative SEO does exactly what the name implies – negatively impacts the search ranking of the target website. The impact can be small, or it can be utterly devastating – a successful attack could even force a business to close.

Google does not publish the long list of factors influencing site rank for any given term, but we know that incoming links play a significant role.

Numbers matter, but quality is king – so it’s no surprise that the simplest and most common form of negative SEO exploits the way the Google algorithm assesses the links pointing to a site. Google likes high-quality, “organic” links – the best are links that look natural, from well-regarded, trusted sites hosting relevant content.

A link to your site from, let’s say, Forbes.com, will be regarded by the algorithm as “good” – their reputation is outstanding; if a Forbes author valued your content enough to link to it, Google assumes others would want to read it too. Incoming links from authoritative general or industry sites have a positive impact on where you rank for certain terms.

But a link from a low quality affiliate site, wouldn’t have the same appeal. If you suddenly acquired a thousand links from SpammyLinkLand.com (I made that up, but you get the idea), Google – assuming it was doing its job as intended – would be anything but impressed.

If you suddenly find yourself with a few thousand links pointing your way from low-quality blog comments, junk forum posts or obvious link farms, you might be the unwitting victim of a sneaky attack.

Activity like this gives off the whiff of someone trying to cheat the system – automated mass-creation of backlinks in the hope of making the target site appear more popular or relevant. Google penalizes sites trying to game the system by lowering their rank.

You could get an automatic penalty based on the poor quality of the mass of links, or a manual penalty because a human thinks something looks suspicious. Manual penalties are much harder to repair.

Unfortunately, the algorithm can’t tell who was ultimately behind the creation of these links. Was it the site owner, a rival, a bored black-hatter or a disgruntled ex-employee? Too often, the site is punished even if the owner had nothing to do with the spam.

For a negative SEO provider, this is a golden opportunity to do some serious damage.

Backlink Defense Tips

• Regularly monitor your backlinks, using either Google Webmaster Tools (free, less capable) or a paid option such as Ahrefs or Monitor Backlinks.
• Google isn’t flawless, but it does spot a lot of these links for what they are and disregards them. If they’re not hurting you, you can take a more leisurely approach to removal.
• If you identify harmful backlinks, politely ask the sites hosting them to remove them. Even if you know it won’t work, do it anyway. A tool like Rmoov (free for basic users) is helpful if you’re doing this.
• If necessary, employ the Disavow tool on Webmaster Tools. This informs Google you do not want the links specified to be taken into account when determining your ranks, but it should be used with extreme caution, and only after requesting the links be removed.
• If you were given a manual penalty, do what you can and file a reconsideration request to Google, along with documentation showing what steps you have taken to fix the issue.
• Talk about what’s happening on social media and raise awareness among your peers. They may have experience of similar attacks, and helpful advice for recovery – and the more people talk, the sooner Google might get round to finding a foolproof solution for this.

#2. Negative Click-Through

Another type of negative SEO focuses on making Google think your site isn’t providing users with what they’re looking for.

Amongst the many, many factors influencing your ranking, click-through rates from Google searches matter. If a thousand users search for a given term and click on Site A, the Google algorithm assumes that Site A is delivering what people are looking for, which has a positive influence on site rank.

But if those same thousand users search and do not click on Site A, Google may assume it is not what people want to see when they search for that term. This could result in a fall in rank.

A typical negative SEO attack aiming to exploit this would see the attacker using bots to automatically carry out searches for a term that the target site ranks highly for. For example, if an attacker targeted Hillary Clinton’s official website, he would program bots to search for “Hillary Clinton,” then click on every result except www.HillaryClinton.com.

One bot (or person) doing this wouldn’t make a difference, nor would ten; for this particular example, the attacker would probably need hundreds of thousands of bots sending queries repeatedly over a long period of time to make an impact.

Even then, Google is (probably) smart enough to recognize such a large-scale attack and disregard it.

But for a smaller site competing within a very specific niche, a few thousand search-and-no-clicks spread out over a week or month might be enough to shift the site’s ranking. And this sort of smaller attack may not be detected.

Negative Click-Through Defense Tips

• Again, be vigilant. Keep track of your click-through rates with our Google Analytics reports to identify what’s happening.
• Score well in other ranking factors to help shield you from attack damage.
• Don’t be tempted to buy a couple of thousand search-and-clicks for yourself to counter the attack. Google is likely to flag this as attempted manipulation, and it could dig you even deeper into a hole.

#3. Review-Based Negative SEO

Customer reviews count. Sometimes they make a big difference, sometimes they don’t; in SEO, you have to assume there are no insignificant factors.

Everything is important, and reviews are no different – especially if you don’t really stand out from your competition in other areas such as backlinks and site content.

Your reviews – either on Google Reviews or on respected sites such as Trustpilot or Yelp – don’t just influence whether or not a potential customer will choose you; they could also determine whether that customer even knows you exist.

In a garden-variety assault on your reviews, a competitor or someone else with an ax to grind would leave a few negative reviews of your business. Because the review sites rank businesses based on star-ratings or similar, low-star reviews would make you slip down their ratings – and drive down your Google rank in turn.

The primary damage from negative reviews directly influences potential customers on the review site, and the impact on your search rank may result in a drop in traffic, which affects your rank.

But the real damage to your rank could come from something far more insidious. Fake positive reviews could be the ticket for someone aiming to hurt your search rank – doubly so if they’re planted on Google Reviews.

Seeding a ton of glowing positive reviews is a risky strategy for a competitor. The algorithm could miss something like that and your attacker could accidentally help your rank. But it’s more likely Google will notice and think you’re writing yourself amazing reviews . This sort of suspicious activity could earn you a manual penalty – even if you had nothing to do with it.

Negative Review Defense Tips

• Secure your WiFi. You don’t want a particularly smart local rival to sit outside your home or business, banging in fake reviews on the same IP address you use to manage your business.
• Keep an eye on your reviews and be ready to quickly request the removal of any you feel are fake.
• Stand out above your competitors in other ranking factors – this will lessen the blow of any negative reviews.
• Sign up to receive email alerts on Webmaster Tools – these will tell you if you’ve been given a manual penalty.

#4. Duplicating your Content

People stealing your original content and reposting it on other sites is obnoxious – we all like to receive due credit for our work, and this kind of behavior takes that away.

But it doesn’t just harm our egos – it could also damage your bottom line.

Google’s end goal is to present users with worthwhile, original content; as such, duplicate pages without canconical tags are a no-no. The algorithm does not normally apply penalties just for duplicate content – every website almost certainly has at least some of it, and most is ignored.

But where it deems the duplication is being done for nefarious reasons, such as to quickly rank a large quantity of pages, action may be taken. This can range from ranking drops all the way to removal from the search results – and the Googlebot isn’t perfect.

If someone has set up automated scrapers to harvest your content and repost it elsewhere – essentially, making it look like an organized spam campaign – you could find yourself caught in the net and penalized when someone steals your content without your permission or knowledge.

Alternatively, a negative SEO attack could aim to exploit the way Google deals with showing duplicate content to search users. It knows we don’t want to see the same stuff in our results, so it picks the site it considers most likely to be the originator of the content and lists it – and hides the rest.

So an attacker could, for example, copy one of your blog posts and upload it to a site that they think would score higher than you. If the Google algorithm rates this site as more trustworthy than yours, it may assume it was the originator of the content.

The traffic would go to them – and your original post would be shuffled into obscurity.

Duplicate Content Defense Tips

• Regularly check for your content being duplicated. This can be done manually, or with a tool like Copyscape.
• If you find scraped content on another site, contact the webmaster where it’s posted and politely request the content be removed.
• If this doesn’t work, Google recommends filing a DMCA request – as the original creator of the content, copyright law is on your side.
• If you receive a manual penalty – you’ll know about this if you have email alerts turned on – submit a reconsideration request with as much detail and documentation as you can.

Negative SEO: It’s a Problem, but You Can Recover

Though there are no laws specifically aimed at addressing negative SEO, legal options using existing laws are being explored.

That’s no consolation for anyone struggling to fend off this sort of attack right now. The good news is that a business can usually recover from a negative SEO attack and get back to where they were before.

The bad news? It remains a problem, and it’s unlikely we’ll see any sort of permanent solution from Google any time soon.

The post Negative SEO: Did Your Rank Drop Without Reason? appeared first on Rival IQ.

Now, you can consolidate and simplify all your web and social reporting. You’ll be able to measure the impact of your social media, email campaigns, blog posts, and more — all in a single place.

Google Analytics Simplified

Collecting and analyzing data from multiple platforms can be both time consuming and confusing. Rival IQ simplifies Google Analytics with clear, comprehensive visualizations that enable you to access the insights that will shape your strategy and share your success.

We make it easy for anyone on your team to generate and analyze Google Analytics reports. Our reporting templates make it quick to get started.

With this integration, you’re closer than ever to having all the metrics you care about in one place — with access to clean visualizations, scheduled reporting, and team-wide access.

Analyze Beyond the Basics

Broaden your understanding of your social marketing efforts by adding Google Analytics to your reporting. We’ll show you the action beneath the surface so you’ll see what’s working and where to improve.

We know how important it is for social media marketers to be able to show the impact of their efforts on overall website traffic and online conversions. Sure, social media metrics are an important part of the puzzle. But, with Google Analytics integration, you can go beyond the basics and draw insights on the overall impact of your digital efforts.

Stay Current, Stay Ahead

We want our customers to always be in the know. Each Google Analytics report can be easily exported as a PowerPoint, PDF or CSV. You can even create custom reporting configurations or filters to fit your reporting needs!

Take reporting one step further by scheduling your Google Analytics reports using Rival IQ to stay up-to-date on your most important metrics. Have metrics in hand when you need them without spending any time compiling data. Learn more about Scheduled Exports.

Up Your Marketing Game Today

By viewing comprehensive Google Analytics data right within Rival IQ, you will save time analyzing and reporting. We have you covered with easy-to-read graphs, sharable filters, and saved configurations. By having all your data in one place, you can easily compare your web performance to your social performance.

Our goal is to help you make more data-driven marketing decisions. We designed these Google Analytics reports to take the guessing work out of your social media strategy and help you analyze your successes and identify areas for improvement so you can stay ahead.

P.S. Thank you to everyone who helped us test and improve our Google Analytics feature. If you would like to help us beta test new features in the future, feel free to email us at support@rivaliq.com!

The post Google Analytics in Rival IQ: Simple, Powerful Reporting appeared first on Rival IQ.

Using data to improve your social strategy just got a whole lot easier! Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Social Posts, the most impactful tool we’ve ever built. Social Posts crunches on thousands of posts to summarize every piece of your landscape’s social performance. And, to help you dig deeper, we make it easy to search posts from companies across your landscape.

We know how important social content is for social media marketers. With Social Posts, we made it easy for you to you analyze what social content is working across your landscape and answer key questions that drive your social strategy and tactics.

Social Posts Gives You Deeper Competitive Insights to Improve Strategy & Execution

Using data to inform your social strategy can be difficult and very time consuming. Social Posts simplifies your analysis with easy to navigate visualization and actionable insights. With Social Posts, you can analyze popular hashtag usage, the most effective social channels, the best time to post, what to post, and more.

Social Posts summarizes social activity and engagement by pulling every single post in your competitive landscape and presenting it in one, comprehensive view. Sort through hundred of thousands of social posts from across your landscape using the breakdowns that matter most to you — hashtag, keyword/phrase, emoji, and more!

Just take a look at all the different ways auto companies tried to optimize on #LeapDay!

With Social Posts, you can now easily track social campaigns. Just enter a hashtag into our search box and we’ll deliver your full Social Posts Analysis, but focused on the posts using your hashtag or keyword of choice. Marketing is all about staying ahead of the competition by effectively fostering your customers’ interests. Now you can easily discover and analyze your competitors’ social campaigns so you can one step ahead.

Check out the engagement on Mini USA’s #BrandNewMini social campaign

With Social Posts, you’ll have all the details you need to make data driven decisions that inform your social media strategy, improve your execution, and stay ahead of the competition.

Stop Guessing – Make Data-Driven, Strategic Decisions with Social Posts

We created Social Posts because we wanted to help fellow social media marketers answer these key social media marketing questions:

• What is my competition posting and how do my posts compare?
• Where are my competitors posting and does this impact my campaigns?
• When are my competitors posting and can I optimize my posting times?
• How often are my competitors posting to social media, and should I post more or less?
• What is and isn’t working for my competitors? What can I learn from their success and failures?

By providing you with a powerful metrics tool to answer the questions above, we know you can confidently optimize your social media strategy and tactics. By answering these key questions, you can:

#1. Gain deep awareness. Your competitors share all of their digital campaigns on social. Now you can map out their entire campaign efforts and gain a better understanding of their digital investments.

#2. Inform your strategy. Know which channels you should invest in and how much to invest — helping you budget and allocate time effectively.

#3. Improve your tactics. Know what post types, hashtags, and posting times are most fruitful for your company and across your landscape — enabling you to share content your customers care about when and where they are most engaged.

Rival IQ alerts even ensure that you always know if something about your performance or a competitor’s performance deserves immediate attention.

Flexible Analytics and Streamlined Reporting

You can use Social Posts to create custom charts to fit your own reporting needs. All of these reports can be easily exported as a PowerPoint, PDF, or CSV to suit whatever analysis and presentations your team requires. And don’t forget — you can always favorite the charts you find most valuable and streamline your reporting!

Make your reporting even easier by scheduling reports for delivery right to your inbox. Scheduled Exports ensure that you have your valuable metrics in hand when you need them without you spending any extra time compiling data. Learn more about Scheduled Exports.

Up Your Marketing Game Today

Our goal is to help you make more data-driven marketing decisions. Social Posts is designed to take the guessing work out of your social media strategy and help you analyze your successes and identify areas for improvement so you can stay ahead. Happy Analyzing!

P.S. Thank you to everyone who helped us test and improve our Social Posts feature. If you would like to help us beta test new features in the future, feel free to email us at support@rivaliq.com!

The post Social Posts: Insights, Hashtags, Search, and More appeared first on Rival IQ.

5 Ways to Think Like a Data-Driven Marketer

1. Identify your Goal(s)

Before thinking about metrics, it is important to identify your goals. Well thought out goals are measurable, restrained to a time frame and tangible. Once you have identified your goal(s), you’ll have a clear sense of what you are hoping to accomplish with your marketing efforts. Clarifying your goals will also help you identify which analytics tools will best help you understand whether you’ve achieved your goals and measure success.

Examples of Measurable Goals:

• Increase average post engagement on Facebook by 5% from Q1 to Q2 2016.
• Increase email open rate for monthly newsletters by 2% from January to February 2016.
• Increase trial users by 20% by end of Q2 2016.
• Increase sales revenue by 10% from Q2 to Q3 2016.

2. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you have clearly defined goals, you need to determine which KPIs will help you determine success. KPIs are metrics you can track and measure such as pageviews, average order value (AOV), etc. At the highest level, you shouldn’t have more than 4 to 6 KPIs.

Even though metrics can be really fun to look at (geek out, friends), analyzing every single data point available to you can actually result in ‘analysis paralysis.’ Eliminate unnecessary metrics that don’t help you determine the success of your goals.

With that said, while it is useful to have a few top-level KPIs to track outcomes, it is really important to know what underlying metrics are driving each of those KPIs. That way, when you see deviations or anomalies in any of your KPIs, you know what metrics to dig into more deeply and really examine.

Keep in mind KPIs are unique to individual businesses and their goals. Looking at “best practices” is great, but don’t pigeonhole yourself.

Examples of KPIs for a SaaS Company Like Rival IQ: Trial Sign-ups, Churn, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Lifetime Value (LTV)

3. Know Your Benchmarks

The key to measuring success is benchmarking. Benchmarks can help you understand where your performance has been in the past, and help you create realistic expectations for the future. So first and foremost, get to know your numbers (e.g., daily, weekly, yearly, etc.). These are your benchmarks. While 100k new leads during December sounds amazing, you need to put the numbers in perspective with a benchmark. The best perspective you can get on data is comparing current performance to prior performance. If your monthly average benchmark for new leads is 500k, then 100k new leads during December really wouldn’t be impressive.

But, what do you do if you are a startup or don’t have any historical data to work with because you’re just starting up your analytics? This is when I recommend looking at industry benchmarks, you can find tons of industry benchmarks on websites such as Kissmetrics and MailChimp.

At Rival IQ, we have metrics meetings to track our progress and document our benchmarks every two weeks. We look at our metrics with a 90 day view which allows us to see the overall trends for our KPIs. It’s harder for us to compare YoY data because we are still a fairly new company with quick growth which means our metrics from 2015 are (hopefully) going to look much different than our metrics in 2016. MoM metrics, however, are very useful because we can track our progress as we grow.

4. Anticipate Anomalies

With normal reporting, you gain context. Context allows you to easily identify anomalies in your data. Exceptions are moments or time periods during which your metrics are either higher or lower than expected.

Always research these anomalies. You might uncover marketing efforts that worked really well or earned attention (blog post, influencer mention, etc.)  Researching these anomalies will help you anticipate them when projecting your marketing/sales/financial performance next time around. Who knows, you may even uncover unknown issues or new opportunities worth addressing.

I remember sitting in our year end meeting at Rival IQ and looking at our sales metrics. Thanks to our historical data, we knew our sales tend to drop around Thanksgiving and remain low through the end of the year. So we weren’t alarmed to see the dip in sales when reviewing our November and December metrics.

By anticipating, you can manage exceptions more effectively!

Photo from RivalIQ

5. Compare & Contrast Externally

Why do all the companies in your competitive landscape have high engagement and follower counts on Instagram, but not Twitter? The best insights come from understanding your customer behavior across your competitive landscape.

Compare and contrast how your customers have responded to different kinds of content to understand what works and what doesn’t. Tracking the way your customers interact with your content and that of your competitors helps you refine, test and repeat. Knowing what performs the best will reveal what resonates with your audience — allowing you to answer questions such as:

• Which types of campaigns perform the best in my landscape?
• Where are my competitors investing?
• How should we adjust our budget?
• What should we test next?

Let Your Inner Data Geek Shine with Data-Driven Marketing!

Metrics are not meant to only measure success, they are meant to give you insight into the thoughts and behaviors of your customers. By following these five steps, you can effectively harness the power of any marketing analytics tool in your marketing toolkit!

The post How to Master Data-Driven Marketing appeared first on Rival IQ.

With the big game right around the corner, I decided to do my own pre-game analysis of the two teams. What better way than breaking apart their social media strategy, am I right? Given I am a huge Niners fan and a social media geek, this was a great way for me to get to know both teams before Super Bowl Sunday in my hometown. In the end, I was left with 5 key social media learnings we can all benefit from when thinking about our marketing strategy!

5 Social Media Learnings from Super Bowl 50 Teams

#1. Your Audience is Broader Than You Think

The Panthers are working hard to capture their audience across all demographics. They are focusing on a variety of social platforms — from the more traditional choices (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) to ones that we would less expect such as YouTube, Pinterest and Google+. In contrast, the Broncos are focusing primarily on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The platform that surprised me the most was Pinterest. Despite having barely 5,000 followers on Pinterest compared to their almost 1M followers on Instagram, the Panthers are investing more time in posting to Pinterest (65 pins) than Instagram (48 posts). While their pins are targeted towards the type of content known to work on Pinterest, food and fashion, the engagement rate is nowhere near their performance on Facebook and Instagram.

This leads me to wonder: Why Pinterest? Is it to engage a new type of fan? Or simply the fans that are often forgotten? Pinterest is known to attract young women, brides-to-be, stay at home moms, creative women, women who like to explore new recipes, fashionistas, etc. So, it comes to no surprise that the Panthers’ top performing Pinterest post features a woman and a recipe.

The Panthers’ Pinterest activity got me thinking: If I was the social media manager for an NFL team, would I invest in Pinterest? I decided to put the question out on Twitter as a poll and this is what I found:

I then decided to go digging around to see which NFL teams are investing in Pinterest and interestingly enough, the Panthers surpass all the other teams in the league in regards to activity by a factor of 2!

At the end of the day, we need to realize our audience is broader than we think. We often forget about the audience that isn’t as obvious or loud — leaving them as an untapped market.

#2. Having a Huge Audience is Great, But Engagement Matters More

Way too often companies invest in growing their Twitter following or Facebook likes — not realizing that high quality fans are better than a lot of fans who could care less about the content you share. It’s like sales: would you rather have a bunch of leads who may or may not care to hear from you or fewer leads but higher quality with a high probability to close?

When diving deeper into the audience size and engagement across all social platforms for the Broncos and Panthers, I realized that a larger audience doesn’t always mean a higher average engagement rate. Despite focusing heavily on just three social platforms, the Broncos have a larger cumulative social audience. This holds in regards to audience size on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram individually — with the Broncos truly leading the fan war on social.

So, do those fans mean higher total engagement? Well, For each of the three key platforms, I dug into the data further and look at the average engagement rate per post. The results were completely opposite. Across every platform, the Panthers secured a higher average engagement rate than the Broncos — almost an average of 40% percent higher across all social platforms! Even though the Broncos post more content and have a larger fan base, the fewer posts to a smaller fan base foster a larger impact for the Panthers.

Average Engagement Rate per Post Over Last 7 Days

Does this mean that the Broncos’ fans aren’t as loyal as Panthers’ fans? No, not at all! But, there is something to be said about not only focusing on audience size. Look at the type of engagement rate you are fostering because that tells you if you are truly engaging your fans on social with the type of content you are sharing.

#3. 2016 is All About Video

By now you have probably heard someone say: 2016 is all about video. Well, they aren’t wrong! With the rise of new video sharing platforms like Periscope, and the integration of video into apps such as Snapchat and Instagram, video is becoming an important part of many organizations’ social media strategy. Video allows fans to experience the life of brands they admire — may that brand be a celebrity, a sports team or a super cool startup.

With the Broncos and Panthers being very visual brands with a lot of personality thanks to their players (you have to Google Cam Newton fashion), both would benefit a lot from the integration of video into their social strategy. While the Panthers post very often on YouTube (almost two times per day) and post videos every now and then on Instagram and Facebook, the Broncos have posted twice in the last three months on YouTube and not many videos on other social channels.

YouTube Posting Frequency Over Last 90 Days

This leads me to recommend a very important piece of info for both teams: add video to your social and share a variation of those videos across all appropriate social channels! I am sure an abbreviated version of the YouTube content published by the Panthers would make for great content on Instagram or Facebook.

#4. Images Speak Louder than Words

Social media is all about visual content. Nonetheless, images ensure high engagement across all social channels. Both the Broncos and Panthers so an amazing job of posting powerful shots of their players getting ready for the Super Bowl, with some humor mixed in between. The images are high quality and do an excellent job of firing fans up and getting them excited for the big game. I highly recommend looking up images shared by both teams — the quality of the images is amazing and the images are often taken mid-action which helps fans feel like they are getting an inside look on everything that is going on behind the scenes.

As marketers, we need to realize the best marketing pulls our customers into the brand and helps them experience it. Glimpses inside your organization make loyalists feel more a part of it.

#5. Different People Interpret Hashtags Differently

When looking through the top content posted by both teams over the last seven days, I noticed something interesting. Each team had chosen a hashtag they own. In the case of the Broncos it is #BeatThePanthers (pretty straight forward) and the Panthers are coining #KeepPounding. The Broncos are evoking a sense of competition vs the Panthers putting the focus on their own performance. So, what other hashtags have the teams been using? Well, obviously I had to find out.

Top 3 Most Used Hashtags Over the Past 7 Days in Our Super Bowl 50 Landscape

So, I dug a little deeper to see what other hashtags the teams have been using. #VictoryMonday and #SB50 seemed like obvious choices, but what about hashtags you wouldn’t expect. I noticed that during the past 3 months, both teams decided to jump on the #NationalHugDay and #NationalHatDay bandwagon. The Panthers turned #NationalHatDay into a win a hat campaign, while the Broncos enjoyed showcasing Division Champions hats. Both put their own spin on the hashtag.

The most interesting hashtag, #FootballIsFamily, made me realize something that many of us marketers forget: people interpret things differently. For the Panthers, every post that contained #FootballIsFamily was about the team. Whereas for the Broncos, it was all about the players and their individual families. It comes to show you, no matter how simple a hashtag may be, you will get a variety of content.

Take conferences for example. Some people may only post pictures of the speakers while others may only post pictures of themselves with people they meet at the conference. People interpret things differently — as marketers, we try to drive the action of our customers the way we desire, but it’s ok to have some variation!

#BeatThePanthers vs #KeepPounding: Who will it be?

We will find out! As far as social is concerned, social media marketing is constantly evolving and becoming tougher. But, at least now you have some social media learnings up your sleeves thanks to these two teams! #GoNiners

The post Social Media Learnings from Super Bowl 50 appeared first on Rival IQ.

We are excited to announce the addition of two new Rival IQ features today: Pinterest Analytics and Multi-User Accounts.

As you know, our goal is to make you and your team more efficient. That means bringing the data you care about into Rival IQ for a comprehensive view of your web and social media analytics.

Pinterest for Complete Cross-Channel Analytics

Many of you requested Pinterest data for a comprehensive view of your cross-channel and competitive performance.

Rival IQ’s Pinterest Analytics is an easy way for you to analyze your brand’s performance with a competitive lens. Rival IQ maintains up-to-date data on boards and pins for you and your competitors.

We realize how important Pinterest analytics are for marketers, especially B2C marketers. Now you can easily analyze your Pinterest performance in Rival IQ with a complete snapshot of:

• Audience: Size and growth
• Activity: How often you are posting
• Engagement: Know your top content and get complete post details to view per-post metrics including repins, pin comments, and engagement rate

Analyze and Report on Your Pinterest Performance

We want our customers to stay ahead of the competition. Our Pinterest alerts ensure that you always know if something about your performance or a competitors’ deserves immediate attention.

Each Pinterest report can be easily exported as a PowerPoint, PDF or CSV. You can even create custom charts to fit your reporting needs! Also, don’t forget you can always favorite charts you care about to streamline reporting.

Take reporting one step further by scheduling Pinterest reports for delivery into your inbox. Have metrics in hand when you need them without spending any time compiling data. Learn more about Scheduled Exports.

By viewing comprehensive Pinterest performance data right within Rival IQ, you will save time analyzing and reporting. You no longer have to worry about digging around in Pinterest’s native analytics system. We have you covered with easy-to-read graphs, selectable date ranges, and competitive insights. By having all your data in one place, you can easily compare your Pinterest performance to your performance on any other social channel within our system for a complete cross-channel view.

Multi-User Accounts Enable Collaboration

In addition to Pinterest Analytics, we are also excited to launch Multi-User Accounts. Until now, the only way to share a Rival IQ account with a colleague was to share a login. Many of you asked us for a better solution to get your whole team plugged in. Well, here is the solution you have been waiting for!

You can now enable multiple team members, each with their own login, to collaborate on a shared set of landscapes. By creating Multi-User Accounts, you can not only promote collaboration, but also make your work a whole lot easier by having:

• Individual logins for each employee. Say bye bye to shared passwords!
• Individualized customer support. By knowing which team member contacted us, we can make sure he/she is the one we reach out to.
• Custom Scheduled Exports. Individual employees can schedule exports important to them to be sent to their personal inbox.
• Better access control. When someone leave your company or agency, you can easily revoke their Rival IQ access.

Up Your Marketing Game Today

Our goal is to enable you to make more data-driven marketing decisions. We hope Pinterest Analytics helps you not only get a holistic understanding of your cross-channel performance, but helps consolidate your reporting while collaborating with team members using Multi-User Accounts.

Happy Analyzing!

P.S. Thank you to everyone who helped us test and improve our Pinterest Analytics feature. If you would like to help us beta test new features in the future, feel free to email us at support@rivaliq.com!

The post Introducing: Pinterest Analytics and Multi-User Accounts appeared first on Rival IQ.

Inline Livestream

The skyrocketing popularity of live-stream apps must have made quite an impression on Facebook developers. After beta testing a new live-streaming feature on the celebrity crowd, Facebook will be releasing it into the wild for anyone to use. (it’s available for U.S. iPhone users now).

I’ve participated in several of these chats, and they are pretty impressive. Since they pop up right in the feed of your most engaged users, and don’t require logging into a different program or opening another window, there’s an immediate feel to the feature. It just seems easier than everything else.

The video itself is beautiful – high def, and smooth, without the glitches and freezes that plague most of the other livestream options. It’s a one-person stream – no option to add others to the conversation, but viewers can type in questions and comments. Strangely, that is a little less smooth. While participating in a marketing livestream with about 40 viewers, the comment stream hit that wall. I could still comment, but the feed did not refresh, so I could not see comments typed by others after a certain point.

On December 2, Robert Reich went live from his office at Cambridge to talk politics and answer questions. So far, 82,742 people have watched. If I remember correctly, about 40k were watching live (I was one of them).

This is a huge opportunity for brands to get personal with their followers. Marketers are all over Periscope, Meerkat and Blab, and they are great…but not ubiquitous. Facebook already has 1.55 billion users. BILLION. Your audience is already there. No need for them to download a new app and learn how to use it, locate your stream, and figure out what the little hearts are for. They just click on a video that’s happening right now and start typing in the same window they are accustomed to.

This feature is still largely unknown, so it is the perfect opportunity for companies to be early responders. Pick a hot-button subject your audience asks about a lot, and publicize your upcoming live chat a few days in advance.

Amy Sweezy, Broadcast meteorologist WESH (NBC) & CW18 Orlando and author of It Never, Ever Snows in Florida – screen capture of livestream charity event video on December 11, 2015.

Collages

Facebook is calling another cool new feature “Collages.” Making a collage from a photo album is easy. Social influencer Brian Fanzo created this video collage from his visit to the Dell Social360 Event. Photos merge together in succession (you can change the order) and you can add title text that floats on top.

Brands can take advantage of this feature to highlight events, introduce the staff, show products, or tell a story by holding up cards. You might even invite your customers to send in photos relating to your brand – people wearing your logo shirts or using your products. This Facebook marketing feature is a great way to humanize your brand and show some personality — not to mention getting readers to participate.

Response Time

If you’re using Facebook for customer service, the new response time feature will come in handy to let readers know how soon you will reply. Your response time choices are:

• Within minutes
• Within an hour
• Within hours
• Within a day

You can also let visitors know when you’re not monitoring the account, say if the staff is off for the holidays.

Inbox Update

You’ll also notice some big changes to your inbox. It’s easier to see previous conversations with people who message you, and a column on the right of the message displays the public information of the person’s profile, like location and company. You can add notes to the message to identify loyal customers, shopping preferences, or other information that makes future interactions more intuitive.

Page admins also have the ability to prioritize messages for followup by importance, so your reps can see which interactions need immediate attention. If you think it’s sounding almost like CRM is in the works, well, we can only speculate.

Change the Way You Do Facebook Marketing

After all the insults Facebook has dealt business while tinkering with display and feed changes, the new features are a welcome and much-needed addition. Get cozy with them fast – you know how quickly things change. Early adopters tend to win on the web, and inline Facebook videos could become the next big thing. What are some Facebook marketing features you really enjoy using?

The post New Facebook Marketing Features You Should Try in 2016 appeared first on Rival IQ.