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2017 has been a VERY eventful year. In the press there have been a whole host of uplifting and saddening stories. We’ve been reviewing the year’s biggest stories from a marketing and web design perspective.
The Marketing Team’s Take On Beyonce’s Instagram Dominance
Beyonce announces she is expecting twins – gets more Instagram likes than anyone else ever.
While this news meant she had to pull out of her headline Coachella Festival slot and break many attendees’ hearts (namely Cucumber Gemma’s), it is a very interesting topic to discuss.
We can learn from the success of this post to implement these tips ourselves (and no, we aren’t going to advise finding a pregnant Beyonce look-a-like to take a replica photo of).
High Quality Photos
We’re pretty sure this photo of Beyonce was planned, and was not taken on a mobile phone. As we’ve discussed in our previous social media marketing blogs, it is advisable to use high quality photos from a camera for Instagram. Plan what photos you want to take ahead of time. Once you’ve taken the photos, edit them with whatever editing software you have and then send them to your phone or scheduling software. You can take this a step further with your editing and create presets so that all of your photos have a consistent look and colour – which you’ve probably noticed on your favourite Instagram accounts.
Timing
This photo was posted at 1:40pm ET. For somebody with a global audience, this is a very good time. It was 10:40am on North America’s west coast, 6/7:40pm in western Europe, 10:40pm in Dubai, and early morning the next day for Australia and New Zealand.
Timing is so important on Instagram. If you have a business Instagram page, the insights tool can provide you with lots of useful information. It will tell you both at what time your followers are most active as well as where the majority of your followers are located. You can use these insights to plan all of your future Instagram posts.
Behind The Scenes
Beyonce is as A-list as it gets. She builds rapport with her followers by giving them an insight into her personal life. Your Instagram followers want exclusive content. Beyonce isn’t posting photos from her previous album covers that her fans have already seen, she’s providing something new. Show your followers something they wouldn’t see as a customer – something a bit behind the scenes. For instance, if you’re a restaurant, perhaps post a video of something being prepared in the kitchen, rather than just photos of the finished meal that the customer sees.
The Web Design Expert’s Take On The Rise of the Secure Site
It’s not so obvious at first, but perhaps the biggest change to the web over this past year was the newfound focus on security. While the average user used to be unaware, more and more visitors these days are looking up to the address bar for that little green lock.
Back in 2014 Google announced that they would give higher ranking to HTTPS websites. Since then the rise of the secure site was slow and steady, but Let’s Encrypt changed the game when they launched their free SSL certificate service around the middle of last year. Today, Let’s Encrypt holds 37% market share in the certificate issuing business. The free service has brought HTTPS to many sites that wouldn’t have sprung the cash for security in the past, and in doing so they brought usage up just enough to bring that little green lock into the public eye.
Back in January, HTTPS usage sat at 14.59% worldwide. Now at the end of the year, that number has nearly doubled, at 26.91%. There is no doubt moving forward that the secure site will continue to rise in importance, both for SEO and public perception. Keep this in mind as something to discuss next time you reach out to a web design company.
All of our Cucumber Marketing agency team would love to hear if you have a different perspective on either of the stories we’ve discussed. Or tell us which of 2017’s biggest stories you remember most on Facebook. It has been quite a year!