Like Instagram Stories, Instagram Live is a relaxed place and you can get as creative as you like! But with all that room for creativity, it’s a good idea to have a solid game plan. Next, schedule your Instagram Stories by selecting the time and date from the drop down menu beside the Save Story button.

Many of the best social media management apps include tools that automatically shorten your URLs. When you share links on social media, you don’t always want to show the original URL. Maybe the URL is way too long and would clutter up your post so you’d prefer a shorter link. Perhaps the URL points to a website that you don’t manage and you’d like to find a way to track stats. From finding the best time to post or schedule content to using geo-tags and feed preview, Iconosquare can greatly increase your fan engagement rate.

Another reason Instagram is so great for ecommerce has to do with the platform itself. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, Instagram has recently introduced a ton of new business-facing tools — and there’s definitely more to come! Whether through links in Instagram Stories or shoppable Instagram posts, soon enough many of our online shopping experiences will start on Instagram. Because of this visual nature, Instagram holds massive opportunities for ecommerce businesses looking to showcase their products. Aaron Orendorff is the VP of marketing at Common Thread Collective, an ecommerce growth agency helping DTC brands scale beyond $2M-$30M. Previously, he served as Editor in Chief of Shopify Plus; his work has appeared on The New York Times, Forbes, Mashable, Business Insider, and more.

Thankfully, most of the great marketing tools for Instagram are either free or affordable. In this post, you’ll learn about great Instagram marketing tools and their importance to building a brand following. Read more about buy Instagram Followers here. Visual content has the potential to attract the attention of your audience. Ripl knows that, and they have developed a platform for the creation of video, animated, or static posts that you can schedule and publish on your social media channels. Built for Twitter, this platform engages with your audience through direct messages from a Twitter bot. Moreover, it allows you to improve your online presence through social media listening and community management.

Create refer-a-friend campaigns to reward users with bonus entries for referring their friends and increase sharing and participation. Additionally, you can set your evergreen content to repost regularly with the advanced social media scheduler options. It also has expiration features that limit the number of reposts to the desired amount. With an all-in-one package, SocialBee is ready to help you organize, schedule, and post your social media content. It also comes in handy when scheduling, pausing, or rescheduling content based on topics. And the FREE account is actually good enough for you to create high-quality social media videos – though you’ll eventually run into limitations.

On other platforms, like Instagram, content is updated as a live feed and posts expire unless users search for your content directly. If you don’t have a big presence on the platform yet, that kind of shelf life unlikely to happen. Instagram doesn’t have the option to insert links into comments, posts or stories–unless it’s a paid ad, which isn’t always necessary or financially possible for your business. You can have a link in your text which you can direct users and your followers to, but this assumes a lot about the engagement your content is receiving.

Audience Insights provides an opportunity to explore your target audience options and personalize your audience segments. Segmentation can be specific and surpass the usual location, age, and gender options, and identify segments based on interests. Bitly is used in Google’s Campaign URL Builder to compress links and monitor campaign performance.

Check out our free trial of Agorapulseto help you schedule, track, and measure all your social media efforts. Meet Bitly, a free social media marketing tool that shortens URLs and stores them in your own personal database. You can track influencer marketing performance based on individual hashtag promotions, engagement rates and link sharing frequency. Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media posting and scheduling platforms that are preferred by world-class marketers.