Two smarter ways to manage your Instagram brand account

For those fed up with being stalked by their parents on Facebook, or for that wider audience of social media users who follow the latest trends, Instagram has become the ultimate space to hang out and share on smart phones and tablets alike.  On the back of this migration, many fashion forward brands have started to clue up and find ways to connect with this influential audience of digital natives.

Instagram, however, is an app that mainly works on mobile devices so it can be hard for businesses to monitor what’s been said about their brand on the channel.  As a result, it can be difficult to get the big picture as to how their audience is reacting to their content week-to-week.  It can also be more time consuming to whizz through comments and respond quickly.

Thankfully, the clever people at Hootsuite (the industry-standard social media management tool) have hooked up with a range of app providers who provide smart tools for managing Instagram right on your PC or Mac desktop.   

First off, you can try out an Instagram app that’s been developed by Min Li.  To activate this free app go to the App Directory area on Hootsuite and search for Instagram, then simply click ‘Install App’ to add it as a new stream on your Hootsuite dashboard.  Once installed, this app allows you to:

• Share your Instagram photos to your social networks.
• View your photos and a feed of photos for the users you follow, popular photos and your 'likes', all in your dashboard.
• View and post comments and 'likes'.
• Keyword search and clickable hashtags to view related photos.
• View user information; number of photos, plus follower and following count.

I especially like the Share option which now makes it really easy to push out your Instagram photos to your wider network in a couple of click.

If your Instagram account is already going great guns, you may also want to consider installing the Statigram Instagram app which is available for $4.99 per month via the Hootsuite App Directory.  This app provides added value to the above free option by enabling you to:

• Stream and monitor users of interest, including reciprocal relationships (followers you don’t follow back and followings who don’t follow you back).
• Analyze monthly summary statistics or get granular with monthly history and monthly rolling analysis.

Both these tools take your Instagram management to a whole new level and make it much easier to plan and manage campaigns on this channel.

The only thing you can’t do is upload images directly to your Instagram account.  You’ll still need to do this via your mobile phone app.

If you don’t already use Hootsuite to manage your social media content, then I highly recommend that you check it out.  I’ve found it to be an incredibly powerful tool that is constantly adding value by providing more new features and plug-in app options such as the ones I’ve just mentioned. There is also a free option available for businesses with up to 5 social media accounts.  So really there is no excuse not to try it and start getting smarter with your social media management in 2014!