How to Engage with Instagram Influencers and Measure Success

NEW YORK, March 11, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- With the proliferation of social platforms and engagement over the last few years, small businesses that execute an Instagram influencer outreach campaign can effectively increase brand awareness and drive discoverability.  Many brands have begun to grow their influencer network but few have figured out how to use this social platform to successfully recruit brand evangelists.

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In the second article of a two-part series posted on PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit,  Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Markerly, Sarah Ware, provides ways to engage with Instagram influencers and identifies tools that track measurement.

Engagement: Focus on initially building authentic relationships with these influencers by following, sharing and commenting on their posts. This step should be done before making direct contact requesting a share of your content. Consider providing turn-key content to the influencers so they can easily share your message to their followers.

Measurement: Although Instagram does not yet offer a complete analytics solution for its users, monitoring and analyzing the data that is available to you is the best way to measure the effectiveness of influencers and your own content.

• Search feature. Instagram's search feature is a useful tool for discovering photos or people by using keywords. Ensure your campaign uses a branded hashtag and when you search for that keyword you will see how the content has been shared.
• Hashtags. Use hashtags to optimize your photos and video which will expand the reach beyond your followers. The ideal number of hashtags should be three to five and must be relevant to your content.
• Third-party monitoring. There are a multitude of tools that monitor Instagram analytics that showcase the likes, comments and shares that your post receives.

For further discussion on how to measure the effectiveness of influencers, click here: http://bit.ly/1C6Jx2W

CONTACT:  Amanda Eldridge, Director, Strategic Channels, +1-201-360-6906, amanda.eldridge@prnewswire.com

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