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It’s National 🐦 Nestbox Week, Reader! It's a perfect time to place a new home for your favorite 🪶 feathered friends.

In today’s edition:

• Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for Tiktok

• ✅ Instagram content every business needs

• Instagram ✂️ Cutout stickers for video

• 🎯 Creator targeting on X/Twitter

• 📣 Additional industry news from Threads and TikTok

Have you seen that TikTok is prompting users to add the Search page to their Home screen? Want to be sure your content shows up in more searches?

Review Others Searched For Results

This section of TikTok's search results page will help you reveal the other terms, keywords, and phrases consumers are using to find the product or service you’re marketing.

Today's tip is inspired by Melissa Laurie, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.

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3 Types of Instagram Content Your Business Must Have

Instagram offers businesses the chance to connect with potential customers. However, simply having an account is not enough.

By taking an intentional, strategic approach to Instagram content centered around sharing genuinely value-added content optimized specifically for converting followers into leads and customers, you can significantly grow your business impact on Instagram.

Instagram Content and the Customer Journey

Carefully balancing three types of content throughout the customer lifecycle helps smoothly guide Instagram followers down the path to becoming paying customers.

Content to Attract: This content should focus on drawing in and engaging new audience members who may just be discovering your brand for the first time. Effective forms of this content leverage popular trends and interest areas loosely related to or adjacent to your core niche. The emphasis here is more on establishing an initial emotional connection or capturing attention rather than teaching complex skills or delivering advanced education.

Content to Nurture: Once you have attracted followers through your engaging or entertaining content, the next step is to nurture content. Here the focus shifts to building deeper relationships with your followers by sharing your specialized knowledge, expertise, and insights around common problems your target audience faces. Addressing real needs and delivering true value establishes greater trust and credibility for your brand.

Content to Convert: After you have built awareness, familiarity, and credibility with attract and nurture content, you can then transition select followers into actual customers or clients using sell content. This type of content directly promotes your core products, services, special offers, opt-ins, or other calls to action. The selling happens once leads are already warmed up and receptive to your brand after interacting with your attract and nurture content.

Boost Conversions With Automation

A powerful technique to boost conversions from your Instagram content is to leverage direct message (DM) automation tools. This involves setting up automated triggers to deliver targeted DMs when followers engage with your content in specific ways, such as commenting with certain keywords. 

For example, if someone comments "Offer" on one of your Instagram posts, you can set up a trigger to automatically send them a DM with a special discount code or link to claim a promotional offer. Other common uses are sending followers links to opt-in landing pages, free content upgrades, shopping links, or booking forms.

Automating these types of messages and offers in response to triggers boosts engagement, which the Instagram algorithm favors in terms of future reach and visibility. It also helps streamline your lead generation process directly within the Instagram messaging experience.

Optimize Continually

As with most marketing channels and campaigns, the key is to continually optimize your Instagram content approach over time. Consistently analyze key performance indicators and available data from the different types of Instagram posts you publish to identify what specific content formats, topics, and themes seem to resonate best with your audience. 

Then double down on what works by finding ways to incorporate those elements more prominently across both new content as well as updates or revisions to older evergreen content. It is also extremely valuable to routinely engage followers by asking for their direct feedback regarding what key problems they face or what types of solutions they find most valuable. This helps ensure you provide maximum relevance.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Michelle Gifford.

A Gift for Yourself on Valentine's Day? 

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I’m ready for the gift of education.

🗞 Cutouts for Instagram Videos: Instagram has expanded the functionality of its Cutout sticker to videos, enabling the creation of animated stickers from video clips. Source: Jonah Manzano via Threads

🗞 Today’s Topics Testing on Threads: The new feature launched in the United States this week will showcase trending conversation topics within the messaging app. The topics shown to users will be determined by artificial intelligence (AI), based on analyzing current popular engagement and discussions. While algorithmically generated, Meta states that a team of human content specialists will still filter the topics to ensure they adhere to community guidelines, avoid duplication or nonsense, and are not misleading. Source: Mark Zuckerberg via Threads

🗞 TikTok Creative Assistant Access Expands: TikTok and Adobe Express have announced a first-of-its-kind partnership that integrates TikTok's Creative Assistant into Adobe's digital content creation platform, Adobe Express. This AI-powered virtual assistant, previously only available in TikTok's Creative Center, helps brands create, brainstorm ideas, and optimize video content specifically for TikTok. Source: TikTok

🗞 Creator Targeting on X/Twitter: X is introducing a new advertising feature called Creator Targeting that will allow advertisers to specifically target ads to appear alongside content from handpicked premium creators on the platform. This self-serve capability gives advertisers more control and the ability to align their brand messaging with content creators that appeal to their target audience. Creator Targeting builds on X's existing brand safety controls by enabling advertisers to eliminate unwanted ad placements and forge positive associations through creator partnerships. In the near future, X will enable serving ads exclusively on individual creator profiles for maximum brand-creator alignment while guaranteeing brand safety. Source: X/Twitter

Did You Know?

In 2009, the @ symbol became the first Morse code character to be added since WWII.