An API (application programming interface) is code that makes data and functionality from one website available on another. APIs can help marketing operations run smoothly in the form of marketing automation, data collection, integration and more.

Examples of API’s in Marketing

YouTube video embedding: When you embed a YouTube video into your website code, you are essentially requesting to use YouTube’s API on your website.

Flick: Here at Flick we use Instagram’s API in order to allow scheduling.

Why are API’s Important?

Essentially, an API allows two different programs or pieces of software to communicate with each other. By creating an API, companies let third-party developers create applications (using the data from their API) that can even improve the usage of the main platform.

Brand awareness is how familiar an audience is with your brand, product and service. If your brand is recognizable, people will trust you and your brand enough to buy from you.

When it comes to building a brand, figuring out how people are going to experience your branding for the first time is incredibly important. How do you want them to feel about you when they experience your brand? Your biggest advocates for your brand are going to be fans of your brand, so making sure to build an effective brand strategy will help you cultivate a community that supports you and shares your brand every step of the way.

When it comes to building brand awareness, social media is going to be your biggest asset. But … how do you capture the attention of your followers instead of being that sad little post that gets scrolled right past? We’ve got a few ideas for you:

1. Brand voice

Brand voice is essential when it comes to building brand awareness. If you have a very distinct voice online, people will respond to that. The best way to stand out amongst the crowd? To not be like everyone else. Give yourself some personality. Add some spice. Be funny. Be sassy. Just give people something that screams PERSONALITY, and you’ll go far.

2. Consistent branding

If you want people to recognize your brand, making sure that your branding across all social media platforms and your online presence, in general, are consistent is essential. Make sure all of your profile pictures are similar and on brand. Make sure your voice is consistent and on brand. Don’t confuse your audience by not being completely recognizable.

3. Use hashtags

Hashtags are still alive and kicking and making sure that you use the most relevant hashtags possible for your content will help your posts go further. Even better, creating your own branded hashtags that people can use, track, and recognize as your brand will be a great way for you to build brand awareness.

4. Comment on posts

If you want to get engagement on your own posts, you need to start commenting on others. Plus, the more you comment on other people's social media pages, the more people will recognize your brand and get curious about who and what you are. It’s a great strategy to build brand awareness.

5. Partner with creators

Working with creators can be one of the easiest, best, and most effective ways to spread awareness about your brand. Find a creator that loves your product or service and makes sense to work with, and see if you can create a partnership where they promote you on their channels.

In digital marketing, a click-through rate or CTR is a metric that measures the number of clicks you receive on an ad or campaign.

The percentage of people who view your ad is referred to as impressions.

To calculate your CTR, take the number of times an ad is clicked on and divide It by the total number of impressions. Once you have that number, multiply it by 100 to get a percentage – your CTR.

Your CTR is important in measuring the relevancy and efficacy of your marketing campaign. If you have a high CTR, it is an indication that users are finding your content relevant. Whereas a low CTR means users are finding your ad less relevant or exciting.

The average CTR rate differs depending on your industry and the medium you are using (email marketing, Google Ads, social media ads, etc.)

Content marketing is when you plan, create, distribute, share, publish, and promote content through social media, blogs, podcasts, video content and more. With content creation, brands and businesses are trying to increase brand awareness, sales, and engagement.

Content marketing is when you plan, create, distribute, share, publish, and promote content through social media, blogs, podcasts, video content and more. With content creation, brands and businesses are trying to increase brand awareness, sales, and engagement.

Now that you know what content marketing is, why in the world is it so important? For quite a few reasons:

Online Content Marketing

Online content marketing is any type of content that you publish online, specifically on your website. If you have the right kind of online marketing strategy in place, you’ll rank higher on Google and other search engines for people to find your brand and content.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media content marketing is when your brand or business builds a content strategy to promote and capture the attention of its audience through a number of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and more.

Podcast Content Marketing

Podcast content marketing is when businesses and brands start their own podcasts around a specific topic or niche that they are experts in. Podcasts are a great way to help you reach a new audience you might not have reached before and showcase your expertise in your field.

Blog Content Marketing

We love blogs! Oh, yes we do. Blogs are a great way for you to go into detail about a certain topic. Blogs can help you highlight and promote your product and service while also linking to other blog posts, your social media pages, and more.

Conversion rate is a popular metric that is tracked on social media. It refers to the percentage of people who take a desired action. For example, if you run an Instagram ad which asks followers to sign up to your mailing list, the conversation rate would reflect the percentage of people who actually took action and signed up.

Conversion rate is a popular metric that is tracked on social media. It refers to the percentage of people who take the desired action. For example, if you run an Instagram ad that asks followers to sign up to your mailing list, the conversation rate would reflect the percentage of people who actually took action and signed up.

To calculate your conversion rate, you take the number of conversions and divide it by the total number of visitors.

For example, if 100 people clicked on your "sign up for the mailing list" link but only 33 actually signed up, the conversion rate would be 33%.

Tracking your conversion rate allows you to measure the performance of an ad or campaign you are running. It will help you to understand how different parts of your campaign are resonating with your audience. A high conversion rate is an indication that the content you are sharing through your ad or campaign is valued by your target audience.

Engagement rate is one of the most popular metrics when it comes to social media. It measures the level of interaction that your audience has with your content by comparing your number of likes, comments, shares and saves with the number of people who are following you, to determine the rate at which your followers are engaging with your content.

Most social media platforms offer analytics (particularly for business accounts) that will show you insights including engagement. To calculate your engagement rate, divide your total engagement number (a collation of likes, comments, saves, and shares) by your total number of followers and multiply that number by 100.

Why is Engagement Rate Important?

It measures the performance of your content and can show you which pieces of content are performing well and resonating with your audience the most. Having this insight will let you improve your content strategy and optimize each piece of content for growth. As a brand, it can also help push your content to larger audiences, because the more engagement you get, the more likely your posts will be shown to even more people.

How to Increase your Engagement Rate

A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the pound sign (#) used to categorize information and make it easily searchable for users. Hashtags help social media platforms know exactly what your content is about which then helps the platform suggest that content to people who are interested in it.

If you want to search for content within a particular theme or niche on social media, you can search via a hashtag such as #londonrestaurants. If you have a brand or business, using hashtags will help your content get seen and become more visible to those searching.

You can hashtag any word or phrase of your choice on social media just be sure to enter the pound key first and have no spaces in the word for example #hashtagtips.

Hashtag Examples:

Ranking on a hashtag means that you appear in the top section of the most popular posts in that hashtag, and so your content is seen by people who search it or is suggested by the social media platform to users who are interested in topics similar to that hashtag.

To rank on a hashtag, your content has to match up to other top-performing content within that hashtag. It should have a similar engagement rate to the top-performing posts (in terms of likes and comments) should have a similar momentum in terms of engagements when first posted, and your account should usually be of a similar size to the top performers that already exist in that hashtag.

​​On most social media platforms, the AI is configured to search hashtags to categorize what your content is about. So making good use of hashtags is an important part of putting together your marketing strategy. Because if you want to show up in search results for new and future followers, you need to use the right hashtags for your content.

Instagram analytics is a free tool within the Instagram app which gives you insights into your followers/ audience and key metrics/data around your performance.

Audience Insights:

Profile/ Performance Insights:

Instagram Analytics, or ‘insights’ as they are called within the app, are currently available to all business and creator accounts. Once you open the app and visit your profile, you will see the insights button right underneath your bio.

When you’re in the analytics section of the app you’ll see an overview and then be able to look more closely at insights about your audience, content, and track key metrics.

Using insights to inform your social media strategy can help you to grow your Instagram account. The data within Instagram analytics will tell you who your current audience is, what type of content they engage with and the times they are most engaged and so much more to help you improve your content strategy and potentially reach a wider audience.

Automation on Instagram refers to using third-party software and apps to manage your Instagram account – just like Flick!

Instagram automation tools can be broken down into two separate parts:

Front facing – these are services and apps that handle interactions with users that people can see, such as responding to comments, like a customer service bot.

Behind-the-scenes (BTS) – these are tools that automate things behind the scenes such as scheduling posts, reports, and analytics.

When it comes to automation, you must ensure that you are using a tool that plays by Instagram’s rules. The easiest way to tell that it is safe is all about how you log in. If you are redirected to Instagram or Facebook’s sign-in screen directly in their app or browser (rather than only having to log in to a third-party app), then it is likely the automation software you are using is safe as they have access to Instagram’s API.

Flick is an approved partner for Facebook and Instagram.

As a social media manager, it is likely that you have a lot on your plate. Using an Instagram automation tool will help save you time in the long run and can help you to avoid mistakes such as posting to the wrong client page (when it comes to scheduling posts, that is).

You can also uncover insights about your audience such as what hashtags your followers are interacting with, what time your followers are most active and so much more which will help you inform your social media strategy.

A keyword is a specific word or phrase that people type into search engines or social media search tools to find what they are looking for. Using keywords in digital marketing can improve a website’s search engine ranking. When relevant, keywords that relate to your business or service are placed strategically on parts of your website, the more likely search engines are to pull up your web pages when a user is looking for something specific.

Keyword research is the important first step to figuring out which search terms people are entering into search engines in relation to your business or sector. Research into keywords will give you valuable insight into the exact words, phrases, and questions that your target audience is searching for. Once you find the keywords that are best to target, you are able to create content that answers the questions or uses the keywords, in order to get in front of your audience as they search. Keyword tools such as Ahrefs can help you to find some of the most searched-for keywords.

It is important to include your keywords in the following places on your website:

When a user types a word or phrase into a search bar, whether on a search engine or social media, the algorithm uses this information to determine which website, piece of content, or social media profile to display and put in front of the user. Using relevant keywords correctly means that your website/ profile is more likely to appear closer to the top of the search results making it easy for your potential customer to see it and click through.

The Metaverse is considered the next evolution of the internet. It has also been described as a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social interactions where people live, work, shop and interact from the comfort of their couch (in the real/ physical world). It is essentially the idea of ‘cyberspace’ made real.

It is often thought that you need VR (virtual reality) goggles or headsets to enter the Metaverse, but it can actually be accessed through any internet browser.

The Metaverse is important because it brings people together. It includes interconnected spaces and ‘worlds’ which are not limited by location so anyone with an internet connection can have access to it no matter where they are geographically.

The Meta Business Suite is a centralized system that allows businesses and creators to manage their Facebook, Instagram and messenger accounts in one place. It includes a series of management tools allowing you to post across Facebook and Instagram, manage your inboxes, create ads, track insights, analytics and more.

Meta Business Suite is completely free, all you need is a business page on Facebook/ Instagram to use it. You can log into your Facebook account and find the Meta Business Suite option in the menu option on the left-hand side or type business.facebook.com into your browser.

Meta Business Suite is important and convenient as it lets you keep business accounts safe and separate from personal pages. The platform can be used by various staff members if they are given access and having one centralized location makes it easy to view notifications and respond quickly to messages.

On social media, a news feed is usually the screen on a platform that is constantly updating to show the latest posts by people, brands and news publishers that a user is following.

Most News Feeds are curated by the algorithm and show you content based on your previous interactions on the app. Other News Feeds, such as Twitter, are time-based and show you the most recent tweets from the people that you follow.

Your News Feed is usually the first page that you see when you open a social media app – it is the landing page showing content from users that you follow.

In social media, ROI (return on investment), is a metric used to show the return that a company can expect to make from the money, time and effort put into social media marketing.

Profit (or value achieved) divided by investment x 100 is how to work out your social media ROI %.

ROI can be measured both in terms of monetary value and non-monetary metrics within social media depending on the campaign goal. For example, if a company is running a paid ad campaign on social media with the aim to increase brand awareness, the ROI could be measured by growth in follower count or reach. Whereas, if the campaign goal was to achieve sales then the ROI would be measured based on a direct impact on revenue.

If your ROI is more than 0, it means that your investments are effective and making your business money. A negative ROI indicates that the investment was greater than the return.

Tracking ROI can demonstrate the value of social media marketing efforts to an organization and inform budget allocations for future campaigns. It can also help social media managers to identify what works successfully and refine strategy over time to improve returns.

When your account has been shadowbanned, it means your posts aren’t discoverable. They’re not being found via hashtags or showing up on explore pages of anyone who doesn’t already follow you. This mainly affects your discoverability via hashtags, as they are one of the key ways that you actually reach new audiences.

When your account has been shadowbanned, it means your posts aren’t discoverable. They’re not being found via hashtags or showing up on explore pages of anyone who doesn’t already follow you. This mainly affects your discoverability via hashtags, as they are one of the key ways that you actually reach new audiences.

When you use hashtags, you’re giving your posts a chance to be seen by a wider audience – an audience who is specifically interested in and searching for the type of content you’re posting.

Now, it’s true – there’s been some debate as to whether shadowbanning on Instagram is really a thing. But, just because Instagram themselves don’t use or promote the term, doesn’t mean the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

You only have to read Instagram’s help pages to know this:

“While some posts on Instagram may not go against our Community Guidelines, they might not be appropriate for our global community, and we’ll limit those types of posts from being recommended on Explore and hashtag pages. For example, a sexually suggestive post will still appear in Feed if you follow the account that posts it, but this type of content may not appear for the broader community in Explore and hashtag pages.”

You’ll need access to an account (or someone with an account) that is not following the account you want to check. Immediately after you post something to Instagram, use this other account to click on the hashtags you used and see if your post appears in the search results for those hashtags.

You’re not complying with the community guidelines. Instagram takes its community guidelines seriously, so if you’re in breach of them, there’s a good chance you’ll end up penalized by the platform. The community guidelines can be found here so brush up and be sure to stay within them.

You’re buying followers or faking engagement.

Say it with us: buying followers on Instagram isn’t worth it. If Instagram catches on that your followers are bots or spammers, they might not take too kindly to your account. Real, organic growth and genuinely engaged followers are what you want, full stop.

You’re using banned or flagged hashtags.

Certain hashtags have been banned or flagged by Instagram as going against their community guidelines. If you use these hashtags, you’re putting your account in danger by association. New hashtags are getting flagged all the time, so it’s difficult to know for sure which ones to avoid. That’s where Flick’s #1 hashtag tool can help, as it will never suggest banned or flagged hashtags, letting you effortlessly sidestep any that could potentially get you shadowbanned.

You’re using the same hashtags over and over.

If you’re constantly copying and pasting the same block of hashtags over and over (and over), it could be that Instagram thinks you’re being, well, a little bit spammy. Your hashtag strategy should include a way to use relevant hashtags every time. And since your content probably varies a bit, your hashtags should too.

You’re over-engaging.

Is there such a thing as being too gung-ho with the old like button? You bet – if you ramp up your liking and commenting to over-enthusiastic levels, Instagram might assess you as being less-than-genuine in your engagements. To avoid being shadowbanned, keep it real and don’t get too trigger-happy with that double-tapping.

Social listening is when you ‘listen’ or track conversations and trends on social media happening around your brand and your industry. It helps you to figure out why, where, and how the conversations are happening and narrow down what people think of your brand and the wider industry.

You can start by following hashtags, brand mentions, competitor mentions, products, and keywords related to your business and industry. Then go through all the mentions and analyze the information to figure out a plan of action for your content plan. It can be something as simple as responding to a customer or potential customer or something as big as changing your entire brand strategy.

Social listening provides insight that can help you with future social media campaigns, improve your overall messaging and content strategy, and build more brand and influencer partnerships.

Social media analytics is the data from your social media accounts that help you measure and figure out how well your accounts are performing. The metrics will help you determine how well your content is doing and will help you figure out what content your followers like more so you can start making more of what they like. Social media analytics is a combination of likes, comments, shares, saves, mentions, and more.

There are a few metrics you can keep track of when looking at your social media analytics. Some of the best ones to keep track of are:

A social media manager is the person (or multiple people) who run, monitor, schedule and measure the social media presence of a brand, business, or person. Social media managers are the ones who post items on multiple social media platforms and are responsible for driving engagement and creating a full content strategy.

They create and maintain brand promotions, copy info, and marketing campaigns, and generally keep online and social media presence up-to-date so people know your brand, business, or WHO you are online.

Social media managers work daily to create new and improved content, jump on trends to hopefully make content go viral, build marketing strategies for new launches or products, and analyze and measure how these things performed after the fact.

Social media monitoring is the process of gathering data related to a particular brand or business. This can be done by monitoring and tracking hashtags and keywords or identifying and responding to individual mentions.

Social monitoring is typically more passive than social listening and usually involves identifying and responding to individual mentions and tracking metrics, such as hashtags, industry trends, keywords, and competitor mentions. Social listening goes one step further than social monitoring and takes action on the data you have collected.

Social Media Monitoring is a great way to stay informed about the trends and developments within your industry and to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. It can also help you to measure the effectiveness of your communications and garner feedback from your audience.

TikTok Analytics is an in-app feature (within TikTok) that allows you to track key metrics such as your follower count, video views, likes, comments, shares, how long someone watched your video and more.

In order to get access to analytics within TikTok, head to your profile and click the three horizontal lines at the top right, select ‘Creator Tools’ and then ‘Analytics’ for a full view. You have the option to change the date range to view analytics over a set period if you want to.

These analytics allow you to measure growth over time and get insights into who is consuming and interacting with your content. This can help you build your TikTok strategy and grow your account.

Review your video insights monthly to figure out which pieces of content were most popular (the watch length and engagement level are key for this). You can then adapt your content strategy for the next month to include more videos in a similar style to those that have previously resonated with your audience.

User-generated content is any form of content that is related to your business, from images to videos, text and audio, that is created by a customer or fan of your brand. This can range from a photo showing your product/ service posted by a customer to a review/ testimonial video and so much more.

You can repost UGC across your social media account but always remember to ask the creator for permission first and give proper credit by tagging them in the post.

Technology company, GoPro, is known for using 100% UGC on its brand Instagram page. All of the content the brand shares was created by GoPro users.

UGC is a very effective marketing method because it is authentic. As the person posting this content (likely a customer) is not a member of your business actively trying to sell the product, this content comes across as more genuine and honest.

This guide was taken from Flick's glossary guide, to learn more about social media marketing and gain more tips, tricks and resources check out Flick's Blog.

Defined: Analytics Metrics

Defined: Hashtag Metrics

Defined: Smart Collection Metrics