Instagram features you may not be using

April 24, 2015Azure Collier Leave a comment

Instagram is a fantastic tool for taking, editing and sharing photographs, but are you taking full advantage of all the features it offers? Here’s a few options that you may not know about:

The Layout app

OK, technically Layout is a separate app from Instagram, but it was created by the folks at Instagram. Layout allows you to quickly combine multiple photos from your phone into a collage. Choose the images you want, and Layout will automatically give you photo collage suggestions.

Scroll through the options and click on any of the images to switch them, rotate, or choose a mirror image option.

When you have the collage you want, upload it to Instagram, Facebook or a few other options. If you’re sharing it through Instagram, follow the regular steps to edit and post to your feed.

Location tagging

Did you know that you can tag your Instagram images with a location? Instagram uses geotargeting – if your phone’s privacy settings are turned on – to offer location suggestions. When you’re filling out your photo caption on the “Share to” screen, turn the Add to Photo Map function on, and then click on Name This Location.

Choose a location or create a new one.

The location will appear on the “Share to” screen.

When you share your photo, it will be tagged with the location.

Want to see more photos that were taken at that location? Click on the tag. You’ll be able to scroll through images that share the same location tag. This is a great way to find out more about a location, and to show you’re a loyal fan!

Managing filters

Instagram recently added some options that will help you organize your filters so that you’re using the ones you like the best. To organize your filters, click and hold to highlight a filter. You can drag it anywhere on the row so that your favorites appear at the front of the list. If there are filters you hate and never use, drop them to the middle of the screen to hide them.

Have you used any of these Instagram features? Which one do you like best?

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6 tricks to get more clicks

July 31, 2014Azure Collier Leave a comment

Anyone who uses social media marketing to promote themselves or their business wants people to see and interact with all the content they’re sharing. Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. You have an off day, a post that gets less engagement than you had hoped, or nothing but crickets.

But there are a few things you can do with your social posts to increase the odds of engagement. Here are 6 tricks to get you more clicks.

1. Use hashtags

Hashtags help to highlight the topics you’re talking about in a social post and make your content more searchable. And they’re used on all the social networks. When you use a hashtag, the network will turn it into a link, and when you click on it, you’ll see all the posts on that network that also use that hashtag. When people click on those hashtags, your post will be shown as part of that conversation. Take a look at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram and see what topics are trending. Use relevant hashtags for those topics in your post, and your content will be more likely to be seen by a larger audience.

When Spike TV’s Frankenfood truck stopped by my office to give out free samples and publicize the show, I took an Instagram photo, and shared it on Twitter, using their #frankenfood hashtag in both places. Frankenfood saw the tweet and retweeted it, resulting in a 52 engagement actions, including 14 link clicks, 11 clicks on the tweet to expand it, 9 clicks on the photo, and 7 favorites.

2. Use the hashtag #mostpopular
Everyone is interested in the latest trends – we want to know what everyone is talking about, what’s popular. Why can’t it be your content?

If you’ve been using a link shortener like bit.ly or Hootsuite’s ow.ly when you’re sharing links to your content or curated content, check your stats at the end of the week. Which of your posts got the most engagement? Retweet yourself or repost on Facebook using the same link and tell your followers it was your best content of the week by adding the hashtag #mostpopular. Anyone who read it or missed it will see that it was trending and they’ll be curious – why was this so popular?

A few weeks ago, I tweeted a link to a blog post about the Seinfeld emoji app, and also shared the link to the blog post on Facebook.

It got the most clicks out of my tweets that week, so I retweeted it that Friday as my #mostpopular tweet, and got a few more clicks.

3. Use an interesting fact, stat or tip

People love trivia and learning little nuggets of information that help them connect the dots about what’s happening in the world around them. Think about the content you personally or your friends share on Facebook. I bet there’s at least one thing that shows up in your news feed that makes you think “Hey! I didn’t know that. Pretty cool.” Do the same thing for your followers. Share something that makes you say that, but make sure it’s relevant to your business and your social voice, and link to the news story or blog post that talks about the stat, fact or tip.

Make it stand out visually – create some graphics with free tools like PicMonkey or Canva to Illustrate your stat, fact or tip. Share the image in your social post and link back to the blog post or article.

Here’s a tweet I posted that includes a link to tips on finding the best time to post on social media. People are always looking for tips like this!

4. Share multimedia
By now, it’s no secret that photos, video and graphics get more engagement than a text post. It’s why all of the top networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, and Instagram have either improved the quality of the display of visual posts in their newsfeed, or added it or are all visual. If you haven’t started sharing multimedia, what are you waiting for?

Post photos to visualize your blog posts. Post photos on their own. Show off what you do, what you sell, or what happens behind the scenes (to show off your personality). You don’t need a professional camera for this. Use that gadget you keep in your pocket all day and on your bedside table at night – your smartphone. Smartphone cameras have improved a lot. That’s one of the reasons your iPhone is so expensive. It’s a fancy camera! Just make sure your photos are sized appropriately for the social network you’re posting to. Not sure what size you need? Check out this handy social media size guide for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram.

This is a simple photo collage I shared on Twitter when our office started offering manicures at work from Manicube. You can see it got some nice engagement when you view the stats via Twitter’s analytics tools – 13 clicks to view the photo, 10 clicks on the link (which linked to the original Instagram photo), a few favorites, retweets and clicks on my profile. Pretty sweet!

Please promise me that you won’t use your iPad or whatever tablet you own to take pictures. That’s embarrassing. It looks like you’re holding up a book and smashing your face in it. Just don’t. Cameras are tiny. Use your smartphone.

Your phone also records video, so share that too. Record a greeting to your fans – tell them what’s new. Or try a how to video that includes instructions on how to use one of your products. Just make sure the video is short. Attention spans have changed – more than half of viewers will stop watching a video within the first 90 seconds.

5. Tag people
If you want people to see your posts, sometimes you have to do something that personally asks them “Hey would you please click on this?”.Try tagging people in your posts. When you tag someone, they get a notification and they’ll be more likely to click on your post and share with their networks, which gets you more clicks.

But don’t be obnoxious about it, like this person. It’s like they’re on a public sidewalk shoving a flyer in my face: “HEY I DON’T KNOW YOU, BUT READ THIS THING!” First of all, I don’t know who you are and if you’re credible. Secondly, you clearly aren’t a social media expert because you didn’t shrink your link in your Twitter post and you maxed out your 140 characters with a long link. So no, I might not like your post. Also, I might just block you and report you for spam.

How do you do it the right way? Relevance. Tag them if you or someone else mentions them in the thing you’re linking to (like a blog post). Tag them if you have a relationship with a person and you know them well enough that they would be interested in the thing you’re linking to. I tag my alma mater, Purdue University, when I see a blog post or news article that mentions them or their community (which is also my hometown). Sometimes they are very generous and retweet me, which gives my tweet more exposure to their 44,000 followers. Here’s a recent tweet I shared about a Forbes article that listed my hometown as one of the top places for small businesses and careers. It’s relevant to Purdue so they retweeted it. According to Twitter’s analytics, the link got 66 clicks!

6. Post on multiple networks

Another great way to get clicks is to post the same content on multiple social networks so that more people will see it. You don’t have to be on every network – just the ones that are relevant to you and your audience.

It’s OK to post on multiple places because your followers aren’t exactly the same people following you every place. If you were to print out a list of your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Instagram followers, etc., you might have some overlap, but there could be some people who follow you on one or a few places, but not all. Don’t isolate your content to one network – people might not catch it there if they follow you on a different network. Or if they are following you on multiple places, well, clearly they like you. They won’t mind seeing the same thing a few times – in fact, they might scroll by and make a mental note to read your content later when they see it on Facebook, and make the move to click when they pass by it on Twitter.

Just make sure that you are not auto-posting and blasting out the same exact thing to multiple places. Keep in mind the nuances and etiquette of posting on each channel. If you’re auto-posting your Facebook posts to Twitter, those Facebook posts won’t work as tweets. If you exceed the 140 character limit in your Facebook post, it will get cut off on Twitter, which means a long link you post on Facebook might end prematurely in your tweet. Also, if you’re not changing up the content a little bit for each channel, you’re not really giving people a reason to follow you in multiple places.

Also, make sure you are shrinking your link so you can tell where the traffic came from. I shortened the link to an infographic I created and shared it on my personal Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Notice how each of the posts are a little bit different:

According to HootSuite, it got 22 clicks in the first 24 hours. On the day I posted it, it was the only one of the links from my tweets that I shared on multiple networks. You can see referrals came in from LinkedIn and Facebook.

How do you get clicks?

These are just 6 examples of how to get engagement with your content. How do you do it? Leave your tips in the comments or link to tips that you’ve seen on other blogs. I’d love to learn a few new tips!

3 steps to testing content for your Facebook page

October 28, 2013Azure Collier Leave a comment

A common question I hear from people using Facebook for marketing is “What kind of content gets the most engagement?” There’s no easy answer I can give you. But what you can do is test to find out what topics and types your audience is interested in. And you can also take advantage of marketing research that shows what kind of content gets a typical Facebook user’s attention.

That’s what I did recently in September when I started volunteering with the Leominster Office of Emergency Management (LOEM) and helping with their Facebook page. Before I became involved with the page, the organization had been posting text updates about severe weather warnings and links to news or information about public health, safety and emergencies. This was important information that the page’s fans needed to know, but it wasn’t getting them much engagement, spreading the word about what the organization and its volunteers does, or helping to grow their fan numbers.

What was missing from the page was original content, posts that show what happens behind the scenes at LOEM, and photos. If you want to increase your engagement, photos are a great start. Photos get 2 times the engagement of text posts. Photos are also the No. 1 content type shared by Facebook users.

So, for the month of September, I tried posting more of that type of content, and the results showed that this is what the fans want. Here’s how I tested the content:

1. Testing Post Types

We posted 4 text updates during the month and tried 5 photo posts. The text updates included the weather warnings and information about a community event. The photos showed LOEM volunteers in action at a fire and at a booth during an annual festival, as well as a post known as a word image that combined a stock photo of a first aid kit and 4 emergency preparedness tips and a link to more information online. It’s clear from the stats shown above in Facebook Insights that photo posts get the most reach and engagement.

2. Measuring Likes, Comments and Shares

Though photos received more clicks than likes, comments and shares, fans are showed through digital body language by just clicking that they’re interested. Of course I’d love more likes, comments and shares on the page, but the clicks are a good start and indicate strong interest. The activity shows Facebook that these fans want to see our page’s updates in the news feed. And the actions of likes, comments and shares can be seen by our fans’ friends in their news feeds, which gives us greater reach, more exposure and potential page likes. The behind-the-scenes and LOEM in action photos are starting to help spread the word about what the organization does. Since the September tests, there have been a few fan comments thanking volunteers for their work.

3. Posting When Fans are Online

In recent months, as Facebook has updated its Insights, page admins now have access to some great data about when fans are online. The stat – found when you click on the Posts tab in the new Insights – shows an average of how many of your fans are online during each day of the week, as well as during each hour of the day.

So I decided to post 3 out of the 5 photo posts specifically using the When Your Fans Are Online data. The majority of our fans who are online using Facebook are viewing the site from early afternoon to late evening on any given day of the week, from 4 pm to 9 pm. This is pure speculation on my part, but based on the time of day and the gender of our engaged fans (65% women, 40% of them are ages 25-44), many of them may hold day jobs and may be parents. They are using Facebook after work or after their kids are in bed, so they have time to browse Facebook. By posting during those hours, our content has a better chance of being seen in their news feed.

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t solely rely on the When Your Fans Are Online stats. Make sure you’re testing other days and times as well. But the stats are a great start to helping you find a frequency sweet spot.

Results and Moving Forward

There’s a lot more that you can test when posting Facebook content, but just looking at these 3 factors helped us determine that trying visual content that showed what the LOEM was about is a great start to improving the page. As more people interacted with and commented on our content, that engagement was seen by their fans, and that helped to influence fan growth. The LOEM page gained 10 fans in September. To some people, that may not be a lot, but to a small organization, those small gains are a fantastic step forward. We’re continuing to post photos and testing to see what other types or topics our fans will engage with.

Need more Facebook help?

Check out my other posts on Facebook marketing or ask your questions in this post’s comments.

3 tools that will help you measure and optimize your Instagram engagement

May 24, 2013Azure Collier 2 Comments

Instagram isn’t the largest social network in terms of users (13% of Internet users have accounts) or businesses using it for social media marketing, but you can make a big impact with the content you’re creating there.

There are 3 reasons for this:

You can easily share to Facebook, Twitter, and a few other sites through Instagram’s settings.
People love visual content. If you share your Instagram photos to Facebook, they will receive between 120-180% more engagement than just a text-based post.
You now have access to a lot of 3^rd party tools that can measure engagement with your Instagram content – and show you some other nifty stats about your activity.

I’ve done a little digging recently, and thought I’d share some tools I found to help you get the most out of your Instagramming.

Statigram

I’ve mentioned Statigram before – as a tool you can use to create a Facebook profile photo from your Instagram shots – but Statigram also has great statistics for your account.

When you click on the Statistics tab, it will give you:

An overview of your total photos, likes, comments, followers. The overview also shows scores for your love rate (how much your followers like your photos), talk rate (how many followers comment on your photos), and spread rate (engagement from non-follows). Judging by those scores, I have a lot of work to do on my Instagram account!
A rolling month analysis – and this is exactly a month from when you’re currently accessing your stats. You’ll see the amount of content you posted during that period, engagement in likes and comments, and follower growth.
Content analysis from your first Instagram post, including total photos per month, a month by month and week by week comparison, which day of the week and hour you post the most, filter usage, tags, and geolocation.
Engagement statistics, such as the percentage of likes from followers and nonfollowers, likes compared to growth history, most liked photos, percentage of comments, comments compared to growth history, and most commented photos.
Optimization of your frequency and filters, and how they impact engagement. I think this is the most useful set of statistics. There’s a great chart that shows your current posting habits for days of the week and times, compared to when your followers interact with your photos. The places those intersect are your optimal posting date and time. You’ll also see a chart that shows the lifespan of engagement with a photo – how quickly people comment after you post a photo. There’s a graph that shows the filters you used, compared to comments and likes. It looks at your tags as well – what tags you use compared to the most popular tags.
Community statistics on your followers – who you’re not following back, who’s not following you back, and who are you following that follows you back – and your follower growth.

SimplyMeasured

SimplyMeasured’s free reports give you a look at multiple social networks, including Instagram. The best part about the Instagram report is the engagement activity. If you’re sharing to Facebook and Twitter from Instagram, SimplyMeasured will show you which channel is getting the most engagement for your images.

In my case, Instagram ranked the highest, followed by Facebook and Twitter. Since I share photos mostly on Instagram, sometimes on Facebook, and rarely on Twitter, that makes sense. If I shared every photo on all networks, this report would give me a better idea of – all sharing being equal – what channel would give me the most engagement as far as Instagram photos.

SimplyMeasured also analyzes engagement among your Instagram activity – likes and comments per photo. And it shows engagement via Twitter and Facebook – tweets per photo, and Facebook likes, comments, and shares per photo. It shows your top photos for the last month, a keyword analysis – comments per keyword, and determines your best time and day for engagement. Not what I expected at all; it turns out my best time is 4-5 pm, and my best day is Friday.

Twtrland

A tool called Twtrland might throw you off – we’re talking about Instagram here. But in addition to Twitter analytics, Twtrland gives you stats for your Instagram profile:

Your follower count, and what percentage of your followers are novice, casual users, or power users.
Your average activity per week
Likes and comments per photo
Your most popular photos – my No. 1 is of one of my cats, which is a relief; I’m trying not to post too many cat photos. But I guess this just reaffirms that cats rule the Internet.

What I Learned

Based on these tools, my current Instagram habits, and common marketing knowledge, I know that I do need to post more (I have been slacking). My growth history from Statigram shows the more I post, the more engagement I receive and my follower count goes up.

I get good results if I’m posting photos during an event and tagging the pics with the event hashtag – more exposure because event attendees are looking for related content. The Simply Measures activity stats show that the weekend I posted during Blog Better Boston, my engagement went up. Hashtags count too – when I participate in the Photo a Day challenge, other participants are looking at the #fmsphotoaday hashtag, and are catching my content. And that explains why my most popular photos from the Twtrland stats are from the photo challenge.

Stats from Simply Measured and Statigram show that I should be posting at 4 pm on Fridays, but weekend mornings and weekday evenings after dinner will get me steady engagement.

How is Your Instagram Activity?

If you’ve used these tools, what did you learn? And if you have other tools to suggest, I would love to hear about them in the comments!

How can your business get noticed in the new Facebook news feed? More visual content

March 8, 2013Azure Collier 1 Comment

A look at the new Facebook news feed (image from Facebook)

The most important lesson from Facebook’s news feed upgrade announcement this week is this: multimedia is critical to your business’ success on Facebook.

Photos and videos will appear larger in the news feed – currently that content makes up 50% of the stream. And there’s a good reason for that. Facebook users are more engaged with multimedia than with text updates alone, or with text and a link. MBooth found that videos are shared 12 times more than link or text updates, and photos are liked 2 times more than text updates.

It makes sense. for Facebook users – your fans and followers – photos and videos are a huge part of their social media activity. A recent Pew Internet and American Life study shows that almost half (46%) of online adults post photos and video, while 56% have completed at least one photo-sharing activity.

For small businesses who are already using photos and video, the changes validate the time and effort they spend on creating that content. For those that aren’t, it’s time to take stock of your content creation for 2013, and change those New Year’s content resolutions. The top content types that small businesses in a BusinessBolts.com study planned to increase this year were written content; 53% wanted to focus on video, and 30% planned to increase photo creation. If your business placed multimedia towards the bottom of the list, your smartphone is going to be your new best friend.

The time is right for multimedia content, especially for small businesses on a small budget – no one has to purchase expensive equipment, or hire high-end professionals to show off their business. Everything you need is on your iPhone or Android. The tools are extremely easy to use, and you don’t have to spend hours on your photos or video. A couple of images in a small album or photo collage, or a short video (really short if you’re using 6 second clips from Vine) are all you need. If you haven’t already, download Instagram and Vine, and start capturing engaging, interesting visual content.

15 tips for using social media marketing for nonprofit events

January 30, 2013Azure Collier 2 Comments

Yes, I know it says Tweeter (I didn’t create it). But having the social info on table tents was progress!

I’ve volunteered for my local United Way the last two years, but I’m not building houses, helping with community gardens or raising money. I’m using my social media marketing skills to help the agency with social media for their events.

My role is to engage their audience of volunteers and supporters before, during and after events, including traditional save-the-date/registration, thanking volunteers when the work is done, and creating and sharing multimedia. Most of the work takes place during the event day – including live posting and working with a group of volunteer photographers who provide images and video content.

After helping with several events – including annual Martin Luther King Jr. service days and the Day of Caring – I’ve learned a lot of tips on how to use social media for nonprofit event marketing, and I’d like to share a few of them with you:

Working with the nonprofit staff, volunteers and supporters

1. Create a content calendar – Meet with event organizers at least two months prior to your event to plan out your social media communications. Include save-the-date messages, registration reminders, linking to monthly newsletters, and highlighting sponsors and participating organizations. Balance your event content with your everyday content so you’re not just talking about the event all the time.

2. Meet with everyone who has access to the organization’s social media profiles – It’s important to review basic social media marketing best practices to prevent oversharing, to know who is posting what content, and to review social media etiquette (such as not liking your own posts).

3. Look before you post – If you are a Facebook admin, you will get alerts when a fan interacts with your page or content. You don’t get alerts if another admin has posted to the page. Even if you have planned your content with the other admins, someone will forget. Check the time and the date of the previous post to avoid oversharing.

4. Integrate your marketing – Remind event organizers to include links to the nonprofit’s social media sites on every communication that goes out about the event, and make sure you have a sentence or two that lets volunteers know that they can find event updates there during the event day.

5. Follow your supporters – It’s important to thank your supporters – those who gave money to your cause, as well as those who sent teams to participate in your event. Get a list of supporters before the event day. Make sure your nonprofit’s page likes their pages, and your Twitter account follows their accounts. When you thank them on Facebook or Twitter, tag them. They’ll be notified that someone’s talking about them, and any interaction they have with that content will be seen by their fans, and so on.

6. Encourage volunteers to participate – If your volunteers don’t know that you’ll be providing live updates throughout the day, they won’t know to check your Facebook page or tweet about the event. Let them know in your event communications. Tell them at the event kickoff. We have lots of younger volunteers at these events, so – at one point during event kickoffs – one of the organizers holds up their smartphone and tells volunteers it’s OK to use it. We usually create an event hashtag for Twitter, and we’ve been getting better about sharing it and the social media info during the kickoff –we had table tents with the Facebook URL, Twitter handle and Twitter hashtag on display at the Martin Luther King Jr. service day this month. Volunteers had plenty of time to pull out their smartphones and follow us as they were having breakfast.

Working with volunteer photographers

All of the events I’ve worked on have involved projects that require physical labor. A few of them have involved multiple locations, so the following are tips for working with volunteer photographers under those conditions:

7. Use Dropbox to gather multimedia –You’ve got multiple people who are shooting at multiple locations and are producing dozens of large image files. Dropbox is the easiest and best way for you to receive those images. Create a folder for the event and share it with your volunteers ahead of time. New Dropbox users have trouble navigating the site, so setting this up ahead of time and providing instructions for uploading photos will make it easy on your volunteers and yourself.

8. Minimize your uploads – During an event day, I’ll edit as many images as I can and post them all at once in a Facebook photo album around lunchtime to show fans the progress that’s being made. I’ll wait for more photos to come in, and then add the rest of the images that night or the next day in one bulk upload. By adding a ton of photos at once, that action appears once in the newsfeed and will keep me from oversharing.

9. Provide some photography guidelines

No butts – Volunteers who are working at the Day of Caring or the Martin Luther King Jr. service day are typically doing a lot of bending over – working in gardens, painting rooms, or hammering nails. So you’re going to get a lot of photos of butts unless you point this out to your photographers. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want a photo of myself bending over to appear on Facebook. Ask your photographers to slow down, take their time and find a more flattering angle.
Smiling and candid shots are great – These events are about working hard, but they’re also about teamwork and having fun. Encourage your photographers to get group shots at project sites. These are great images for nonprofits to add to their website, blog or promotional pieces about their programs.
Ask for the top 10 – Save yourself and your photographers some time by asking them to send you the top 10 photos from each project site. It’s not realistic to use every image that was shot that day – no one wants to look through a Facebook album of 300 images to try to find themselves.

Working at project sites

On event day, your role is dependent on technology, so make sure you have everything you need:

10. Wifi – Does the event site have wifi? If so, get the account name and password ahead of time. If not, consider purchasing a mifi/wifi card to create your own wireless hotspot.

11. Social apps – Are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, HootSuite, or TweetDeck installed on your phone? Do it before the event day so you’re not trying to remember logins and passwords on the fly.

12. Electricity – Are there outlets on site, and are there enough? You might think about bringing an extension cord to support your laptop power source and any chargers you need.

13. Batteries – Are all batteries charged for digital cameras and video cameras?

14. Cell phone contacts – Add your event staff and volunteer photographers ahead of time so you’re not digging through notes or paper lists to find their contact info.

15. GPS – If you’re traveling to several project sites, consider using an app like Waze to get turn-by-turn directions.

This is a long list, but it’s essential if you want to get the most out of social media for your nonprofit’s service days and events. If you can think of any other tips, please share them in the comments!

3 tools that will turn your Instagram images into a Facebook cover photo

January 14, 2013Azure Collier 1 Comment

It’s been over a year since Facebook introduced cover photos for profile and business pages, and I’ve only changed mine 9 times. Why? That is a big space – 851 by 315 pixels. Whatever you put up there is huge, and you want it to be good, right?

That’s where Instagram comes in. Their filters and tools let you look like a photography rock star. Why not use all those great images you’ve been creating, and make them into your cover photo?

I’ve found 3 tools that will help you create a beautiful Facebook cover photo from your Instagram pics:

PicStitch

PicStitch (available for iPhone and Android) is a collage app with 70 different layouts. To create your cover photo, choose your layout, then click on Aspect in the tools on the bottom of the screen. After you choose Aspect, you have several sizing options; scroll until you see the one called FB Cover.

To add your photos, click on any of the boxes in your collage layout and click the Edit tool. Then choose your Instagram images you’ve saved in your phone’s photo album or on Facebook. Once your photos are in place, click Export, and choose Facebook.

Statigram

Statigram is an Instagram management dashboard that tracks your Instagram stats, but did you know it’s another tool that you can use to make Facebook cover photo collage?

To get started, click the Promote tab, and scroll down to Profile Cover. Click the Create your cover button, and Statigram will automatically pull and size your images.

It takes a few minutes, but you get an easy-peasy way to create a cover photo. When your image is all set, right click it and choose Save image as to save to your computer. Then use Facebook to upload to your page.

InstaCover

The InstaCover site makes a Facebook cover photo that’s a bit similar to Statigram, but you get editing options. Start by choosing which Instagram account you want to pull from – it doesn’t have to be yours – by entering the Instagram ID. You could also make collages out of categories, tags, or photos you’ve liked. Choose your layout and spacing, and then click the Preview button.

InstaCover pulls up a draft of your cover photo, which you can edit. Click the orange X in the top right of any photo to drag and drop to another spot, or delete it. When you delete it, InstaCover replaces it with another Instagram photo. Click the Final Preview button when you’re finished editing.

You’ll see the finished cover photo, and you can save it to your Facebook profile by clicking the Save to album on Facebook button.

Changing your cover photo

None of these tools instantly changes your cover photo. You need to be on your page to do that.

Go to your Facebook page, and hover over the bottom right corner of your current cover photo. A Change Cover option will appear. Click Choose from Photos.

Select the new cover photo you just added to your Facebook page.

Voila! You now have a collage cover photo made from beautiful images you created with Instagram.

Why I still use Instagram

December 27, 2012Azure Collier Leave a comment

I was late to the Instagram party – I joined just after they were purchased by Facebook in the spring. And after that, I just used it occasionally. My iPhone’s photo app was my main tool for smartphone photography.

I know there’s been a lot of grumblings and complaints about Instagram lately because of their terms of service changes, but I have really grown to love it for the following reasons:

1. Instagram helps you create beautiful images

I am not a professional photographer (disclosure: I am married to one!), but I do like to take nice, non-blurry photos that I can share. Instagram’s filters allow me to take my basic, stripped down images and make them more special. Take this image for example – here’s a photo I took of bangle bracelets at Adivasi, a funky Indian gift shop/small business in Brattleboro, VT.

Photo taken with iPhone

Here’s the Instagram version – it’s cropped and I added the Kelvin filter.

The Instagram-edited photo is a much more vibrant image and I gave it a fun border. Better, right?

2. Instagram’s profile pages

Instagram recently gave all users profile pages, which is great. You can’t do a lot there, but you can see more of a user’s photos, and follow them from the desktop version. And having a public profile page is good for SEO.

3. Apps to enhance your Instagram photos

A co-worker introduced me to Pic Stitch, which allows you to create collages of 2 to 4 photos in 32 different combinations. I’ve also found Statigram, which will show you Instagram stats, your most popular images, and which filters you use the most.

My Nov. 11 photo of the day: The theme is night so I took a photo of a candlelight in one of my lanterns.

4. Photo of the day projects

I started using Instagram on a regular basis when a friend introduced me to the November Photo a Day challenge from blogger Fat Mum Slim. I didn’t know it before, but apparently there are lots of photo challenge groups on the interwebs. Somehow I managed to complete all of the November photos. It’s a fun project, and having a theme every day makes you look at your surroundings a bit differently. As you go about your day, you start looking for possible objects or activities that complete the theme. It makes you think creatively. I tried not to repeat any of my subjects – I can’t use photos of my cats, wine, or my shoe collection for everything – and the themes are broad enough that you can put your own spin or interpretation on the challenge. If you’re interested, the January list is up – try it out!

Azure Collier

My take on social media marketing and its impact on how we work, live and consume

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