Candid's Instagram Marketing Blog

Instagram's New Hashtag Search API for Businesses is Live

Nariman Haghighi Friday, November 2, 2018

Instagram Hashtag Search Lifts Cloud Over UGC Marketing

In response to a lot of confusion and disinformation, we published a post in August outlining the Hashtag road map for Instagram. That didn't seem to help with the cloud of uncertainty as we continued to see emails from clients and partners that were concerned about the upcoming changes and their impacts...

Instagram Graph API Support for Hashtags is Coming

Nariman Haghighi Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Hashtags & Public Content: Key Insights @ F8

It seems many of our peers did not attend F8 this year. Having just read the post published today by Bazaarvoice on what marketers need to know about the new Instagram Graph API, we thought it was a good time to clear the air on the future of hashtags for visual marketers. Many of the visual commerce...

Unfair Advantage for Windows 10 Instagram Users?

Jeremy Guan Friday, April 20, 2018

Social apps for desktop and mobile leverage Windows features like Live Tiles

Chances are Instagram will never "officially" bring the full photo uploading and editing to the desktop experience since they are a mobile platform first and foremost. However, business users are another beast, and for them, the line between mobile and desktop continues to blur. Windows 10 Surface users...

Monitoring Comment, Caption Mentions on the New Instagram Graph API

Nariman Haghighi Friday, April 13, 2018

When you're live on the new Instagram API in a matter of days with room to spare

And we're live! You may not be familiar with the Instagram Graph API yet, but you'll soon realize it's happy dance worthy! It's been a busy April to say the least with lots of supripses in the social media listening space. Hundreds of posts have been written by Instagram partners and platform developers...

Shoppable Instagram posts are coming to Canada and 7 other countries

Jeremy Guan Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Shoppable Instagram Storefront Roll-out Expanded

After careful testing in the U.S, Instagram has expanded the native shopping feature to eight new countries covering: UK, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and finally Canada. For those unfamiliar with the experience, it allows all business accounts selling physical goods with a Facebook...

RFP for User Generated Content Aggregation & Publication

Daniel Whitefield Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Looking to run a RFP for UGC? We're often approached by large multi-nationals that have assembed an Innovation Team to find a tech partner to launch a UGC aggregation services that allow business users to use earned content for publication purposes. In this post, we're going to share some of these common...

Image & Video Recognition APIs To Automate Your Visual Marketing

Nariman Haghighi Monday, July 10, 2017

Visual search on Candid can now automate UGC publishing workflows

Bleeding edge "neural network" learning is no longer something that only the largest players like Facebook and Apple can access to improve their products and amaze their customers, it's also a thriving "pay as you go" offering with three of the big five (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) investing to drive...

The Super Obsessive and Paranoid Guide to Keeping Your Instagram Account Safe From Hacking

Nariman Haghighi Wednesday, July 5, 2017

The ironclad 5-bullet recipe social media managers can follow

We've seen a number of hacking attempts on high profile brand and celebrity Instagram accounts over the years, including regular attempts on our own @candid handle. Many of these episodes were pre-2017, before Instagram rolled out 2-factor authentication, and all were evenutally resolved but it's never...

5 Key Influencer Marketing Challenges, Opportunities in 2017

Jeremy Guan Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Hailed as the holy grail of content marketing, influencer marketing continues be the subject of pursuit for many marketers with only a few who can claim to have mastered the craft. Here at Candid, we have been helping our clients separate true influencers from the noise since 2012. Our approach and methodology...

UGC-Powered Dynamic Product Ads for Travel, E‑commerce

Daniel Whitefield Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Personalized Facebook ads without manual work

Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) are potent, often misunderstood and almost always underutilized. Fortunately the fix is actually pretty easy. What do DPAs have to do with Candid? Candid is all about helping brands get better content and do more with it, this has always been our core focus. Simply put, community...

Scott Galloway's Powerful Podcast on Amazon, Future of Retail, E-commerce & Tech Disruption

Nariman Haghighi Sunday, June 18, 2017

A lot of people are claiming victory for having succesfully predicted Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods but few were as clear about this scenario and the underlying drivers (in advance of the announcement) as the L2 founder and New York University professor Scott Galloway. His interview on how how...

Driving Sales Using Dynamic UGC for Email

Nariman Haghighi Monday, June 12, 2017

Marketers have been using rights-approved community content across a variety of channels for years. The field of visual marketing platforms have solved the problem of getting UGC in to emails, but how do you refresh content after you hit send? Email plugin provides you with a URL to embed, which means...

Candid + Slack: Better Together

Daniel Whitefield Friday, January 13, 2017

Connect Slack to Candid to Enable Push Notifications for New Media

Competition in the last few years has placed extreme pressure on brands to increase the frequency and quality of their visual storytelling across social channels... keeping this river flowing has become a significant challenge for most teams. Rights management of community content certainly helps with...

Conversion Marketing: The Business Case for Incremental Revenue

Nariman Haghighi Wednesday, October 5, 2016

How can you be sure you're correctly measuring the conversion impact of social proof at the point-of-sale?

Have you wondered why Visual Commerce has exploded in popularity over the last 4 years and why there are now hundreds of platforms vying to help marketers inject community and authenticity into static e-commerce experiences? The simple answer lies in conversion rates, a metric that marketers obsess over...

Should you build or buy a CMS for UGC?

Daniel Whitefield Wednesday, September 7, 2016

The Fine Art of Mastering UGC Content Workflows

When we first started in this space in 2012, there was hardly a Visual Commerce or Visual Marketing cateogry to speak of. There were certainly dozens of plugins and widgets for rendering social feeds within the e-comm experience, but very little in terms of true content management and merchandizing capabilities....

Instagram's Best Hidden Feature For Community Managers

Daniel Whitefield Sunday, August 14, 2016

'Photos You've Liked' is actually a powerful bookmarking tool for marketers

Many marketers have approached us in the last year with suggestions on how to improve discovery and support for finding content where a branded hashtag wasn't used. It's quite common for users to simply tag the brand's account or mention them in the caption and such posts have been traditionally difficult...

Monitoring Account Mentions Using the Instagram API

Nariman Haghighi Tuesday, April 26, 2016

[Update Jan 30, 2018: Please note the post below is almost 2 years old and Instagram has since released a new Instagram Graph API that has direct support for listening to mentions in both the post caption as well as post comments. Candid has access this new endpoint and is in the process of rolling out...

How Shangri-La Uses Candid to Manage 100+ Global Guest Galleries

Daniel Whitefield Sunday, April 24, 2016

We don't always pause to celebrate client successes with our community but the effort behind this one truly warrants the attention. In the spring of 2015, close to a year ago, we were approached by the Digital Marketing team of Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts to consult on the build out of a guest gallery...

The Business of Instagram

Nariman Haghighi Tuesday, January 5, 2016

As we prepare to usher in 2016, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on our journey and where we can have the biggest impact in the new year. Our story started in the trenches of Toronto’s tech community in 2012, close to a year after Kevin welcomed the first batch of developers looking to build...

Twitter Video support in REST and Streaming API

Nariman Haghighi Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Twitter is finally rolling out long-awaited features for its core apps designed to boost the time people spend on the service. As of yesterday morning, you can now post 30-second video clips to Twitter from the iOS and Android apps. In typical Twitter fashion, videos taken within the app or uploaded...

All Display Plugins Now Support HTTPS

Christine Davis Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Hot on the heels of Instagram's announcement of new Embed post capabilities, we are happy to announce that all Candid display plugins now support HTTPS and can be safely used on secure sites without triggering certificate warnings. Best of all, no code changes are required to enable this on active deployments....

Case Study: GLAMGLOW & Candid Team Up for Stunning Engagement

Christine Davis Monday, September 8, 2014

Last week we finally had a chance to sit down with Jennifer Karasik, eCommerce Manager at GLAMGLOW® to review the results of one of our most most successful campaigns to date. Campaign Objectives GLAMGLOW® wanted to celebrate their biggest fans and showcase their product in use on the homepage...

Candid Now an Instagram Preferred Platform Developer

Nariman Haghighi Saturday, June 14, 2014

The first team named outside of the US market

Today is a big day for a team of passionate Toronto Instagrammers who set out to build new generation of services on the most important social network of our time. We are absolutely ecstatic to be included on Instagram's preferred Platform Developers list which features pioneering teams that are pushing...

Are Online Customer Reviews Enough?

Stephen Da Cambra Monday, December 2, 2013

Word-of-mouth is a retailer’s most powerful selling tool. Depending on your sources, 70% to 90% of us trust word-of-mouth recommendations, even from people we don’t know. While only 10% to 20% of us trust a company’s advertising and sales messages. Word-of-mouth is the elusive payoff...

3 Reasons Why You Should Harness UGC Now

Stephen Da Cambra Saturday, November 30, 2013

Have you ever been to the food court in a mall, and, not knowing what you want, looked around at your options, only to find the one you want has the longest line-up? Why does that happen? Chances are you didn’t really pick the place with the longest line-up. The line-up chose you. No one shops...

Introducing Variations

Nariman Haghighi Wednesday, November 27, 2013

The Candid e-commerce plugin allows you to upload variations instantly from your phone to test different call-to-actions with your visitors to optimize conversion results.

We're excited to announce that a much requested feature by our customers (the ability to create variations for the promotions displayed alongside customer photos) was officially released yesterday. With this new feature, merchants can now try various catalog images and call-to-action texts to determine...

Chute’s user-generated photo tool adds permissions, because that’s what big brands want

Nariman Haghighi Thursday, October 17, 2013

Explicit Consent & Rights Management for Instagram

"User-generated photos is turning out to be a real business." Great article by Erin Griffith over at PandoDaily on how the our UGC marketing partners south of the border (OlaPic, Percolate, Chute, Curalate) are addressing the UGC problem. Respecting the candid photographer's rights is a fundamental cornerstone...

Is your Hashtag safe from hijackings?

Nariman Haghighi Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The hashtag (#) has become one of the most valuable assets in any modern marketing campaign. The brands that create the most effective ones and employ them well reap the benefits across social media. But not all hashtags are created equal and some can have disastrous consequences. Picking a great hashtag...