Instagram Engagement: Crowdsourcing Inspiration for Growth

People love pictures of flowers. Large, classic bouquets of gardenias or tight bundles of tulips—those crisp shots of bright colors are made for Instagram, and at Rayce PR, pictures like these are our lifeblood.

Based in L.A., Rayce PR is a boutique social media marketing PR consultancy focused on the special event industry, with an emphasis on luxury weddings. In addition to content marketing, web development, and consulting, we manage our clients’ social media accounts, and recently, we’ve discovered a way to harness our Instagram engagement to drive art direction and growth for our clients and our own business.

Want Growth? It’s Time to Go Beyond the Basics 

Messaging is vital when it comes to PR and marketing, but so often we work on a piece of content, put it on social media, and then have to rely on our instincts and lightweight analytics tools that don’t provide the necessary insights. For Instagram, that used to mean staring at our tiny phone screen counting likes, tracking comments, and then manually entering that data into a Google spreadsheet. Not exactly efficient.

Plus, when data is presented in that format, it can be difficult for clients to grasp the top-level success buried in the report. On our end, this sort of tracking also makes it difficult for us to hone in on what posts are performing well. That understanding is incredibly important because without it you can’t gauge engagement. You’re basically starting from scratch with every new post.

We intuitively knew that if we were interacting on the platforms, there would be increased engagement. So, we would just interact; we’d go into our clients’ Instagram or Facebook accounts and answer comments with an attitude of graciousness and gratitude for the loyal following. But we were unable to track that engagement successfully outside of the very basic in-app Instagram analytics.

In order for us to attract more business, clearly illustrate our value to our current clients, and use engagement to elevate the art direction of our posts, I knew we needed smarter analytics. Rather than having one new bride call for a piece of business, I wanted to see three or four new brides call for business. I wanted growth.

Curating Content with Crowdbabble

After evaluating all of the social media analytics platforms on the market, I landed on Crowdbabble. It was exactly what I had been looking for. As a desktop platform, it gives us a seamless workflow to measure, benchmark, and optimize for growth and engagement on Instagram, and in just a few short months using Crowdbabble, our growth percentages have increased dramatically.

By using Crowdbabble to identify which parts of our clients’ portfolios are garnering the most engagement, we can then take those pieces and repost to the Rayce PR accounts. This curation of top performing content has boosted our corporate engagement—and growth—substantially. Without Crowdbabble, we were never able to be so selective when it came to the second presentation of the content.

Before, trying to identify a top-performing post was terribly cumbersome. On my phone, I’d have to find the post, then swap to my desktop, scroll through the images again, re-find that image, open it, screenshot it, download it, take the copy, go over to our scheduling tool (we use Schedugram), upload it, and then paste the copy in and rewrite the captions. Just typing out the process is exhausting. Now imagine doing that for every top post.

With Crowdbabble, we have a little shortcut that saves us about six steps, which is really lovely. When you click on any image in Crowdbabble, it automatically takes you to that post, and I can then grab the URL and use that to reschedule content via Schedugram. That’s it; it’s that simple. Considering we do this process for all Rayce PR accounts, the time savings from this feature alone makes the investment worth it.

Being able to easily identify and share top posts from Instagram benefits our engagement on every other social platform as well. After using Crowdbabble to identify the correct post, we'll shoot it over to Facebook. Since we’ve already vetted the content with our analytics, our likelihood of developing engagement on Facebook is much, much higher. Then, if it does really well on Facebook, we'll take it over to LinkedIn.

Another aspect of Crowdbabble that I’ve been impressed with is how they’re constantly innovating. For example, they recently asked Rayce PR to participate in a beta test of a new product called Ninjababble. Ninjababble allows me to drill down to see who is engaging with each post; that way I can identify potential influencers and gain insight into the types of posts these influencers respond to. From the preliminary results we’ve seen, I can already tell this new offering is going to be an amazing growth opportunity for our clients—and our firm.

All of these features help us continually improve our marketing and social media efforts for our clients. Our team spends a great deal of time, energy, and effort analyzing best practices to understand what's really going to do well for the client. So, as our client base of designers, planners, and business owners facilitate beautiful functions in the real world, we become their digital interface. We take their three-dimensional events and then present that to the world, and by empowering our white glove service with powerful analytics, our businesses are thriving. The clients we work with are doing very well. Those that have been with us for several years are leading the industry, and Crowdbabble is quickly becoming a key component for our shared success.