Tools for Entrepreneurs, Twitter Marketing, Instagram and More News

This week in social media and marketing technology news we learned that what the top tools every entrepreneur must use, after a review of 16 million blog posts Buffer discovered 3 unusual lessons, how to maximizing Twitter as a marketing and engagement tool and 48 stats that will improve your Instagram strategy.

To read the full story, click the headline of each article.

7 Tools Every Digital Entrepreneur Must Use

by Ahfaz Ahmed
Jeff Bullas

Being an entrepreneur isn’t all about sitting on a secluded beach somewhere in paradise. If you think that entrepreneurship is about working 2-3 hours a day, then you’re a wrong.

An entrepreneur has a lot of responsibilities including marketing, managing teams and hiring employees. This can become stressful; with productivity, efficiency and the growth of the company suffering.

But you can overcome these barriers by using some simple tools. These tools are helpful in making you a productive and efficient entrepreneur.

If you want to stop wasting your valuable time, and instead focus on the important things in your business – these tools will help.

So here are 7 tools every entrepreneur must use.

3 Unusual Lessons We Learned by Studying Over 16 million Posts (And 100,000 Brands) on Social Media

By Ash Read
Buffer

At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels.

To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media.

We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of over 14 million tweets and two million Facebook updates to figure out how brands have been sharing to social media over the past 12 months.

Here’s how it broke down…

7 tips for maximizing Twitter as a marketing and engagement tool

By Larry Alton
CIO

Facebook may have the largest number of active users, but no platform is better at connecting brands and their followers in real time than Twitter. Unfortunately, very few marketers understand how to properly leverage Twitter. Sound familiar? Well, you need to revamp your approach and focus on engagement.

Why Twitter matters

The value of Twitter lies not only in its reach, but also in the strength of individual interactions on the platform. Consider the following statistics as curated by analytical marketer Craig Smith:

There are an estimated 1.3 billion registered Twitter users;
Of the 1.3 billion accounts, roughly 100 million are active on a daily basis;
34 percent of users that log on to the platform do so more than once per day.
While all of these statistics show the volume and reach of Twitter, let’s look at a piece of data that should excite the marketer inside of you. According to a comprehensive survey released by Edison Research, 49 percent of monthly Twitter users follow brands and companies. How significant is this? Well, consider that just 16 percent of social network users across all platforms follow brands.

This means Twitter users are three-times more likely to follow brands than Facebook users. But they aren’t just following — they’re actually using Twitter to research and engage. Around 42 percent say they use Twitter to learn more about products and services, 41 percent provide opinions on products and services, and 19 percent seek direct customer support.

When you combine all of these numbers with the fact that 51 percent of Twitter users make more than $50,000 per year, you can begin to understand the immense value lying beneath the surface of this seemingly innocuous platform.

48 Instagram Stats That’ll Help You Improve Your Posting Strategy

By Lindsay Kolowich
HubSpot

With over 400 million active users, brands are quickly recognizing the need to have a presence on Instagram.

But, as with any social network, the brands that are getting the most out of Instagram are the ones who are smart about what they post, when they post, how often they post, and whom they’re targeting.
But how do they know what’s “smart”?

That’s where the data comes in. There’s a whole lot of research out there about Instagram — everything from the demographics of its users and how often brands are posting, to how caption length affects engagement and what the most popular emoji is on Instagram. (See #32.)

For example, did you know that a brand would need about 2,325 Instagram followers to get 100 Likes & comments on a post? Or that brands posted an average of 4.9 times per week on Instagram in 2015? Read on to uncover more Instagram stats that’ll help you get ideas and improve your own Instagram posting strategy.