Instagram Brand Engagement, Content Marketing Keywords, The Dish’s Paywall

The Strategist picks the day’s most relevant and interesting stories about the world of content from around the web. Here’s what you should be reading today:

Instagram’s Brand Engagement

Instagram is seeing more brand engagement on the site. Analytics firm Simply Measured found that engagement is up 35 percent amongst the top 100 brands on the site, which include Coca-Cola, Apple, Google, and IBM, Lisa Lacy of ClickZ reports.

The survey also found that brand adoption for both Instagram and Pinterest “grew at the fastest rates compared to other networks — at 9% and 10% respectively. Since August 2012, 19 Interbrand Top 100 brands have created Instagram accounts; 18 have created Pinterest accounts.”

Keywords for Content Marketing

Beth Hayden of CopyBlogger writes about finding keywords and using them in content marketing campaigns.

Marketers can use tools like Google Trends to find them or CopyBlogger’s Scribe, which has a keyword research tool. They can look at social networks and see what keywords people are using in their conversations, and conduct searches in the Yahoo and Bing search engines. To get started, marketers should look at a few possible keywords, determine their popularity, check the trending data on them as well as the social conversations they pop up in, and figure out which ones to use for the content.

The Dish and its Metered Paywall

Funds for Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish have slowed down, according to Paid Content.

So far, he’s raised $611,000 in under two months, with a goal of $900,000. Currently, 20,000 people have clicked on over four ‘read-ons’ in three weeks and haven’t paid for the content. Laura Hazard Owen suggests that Sullivan nag his readers more, ends his free RSS access, and sets the meter lower so that people pay up.

Pitching to Freelance Websites

The Freelancer’s Union covers how writers can get their foot in the door at different websites.

They should blog and figure out what sites are a good fit for their writing style. They need to follow the contact instructions and keep the inquiry email short.

Writers should “Give a quick description of the article you’ve attached (or the article you want to write). Tell them, briefly, who you are and give them your blog URL and any relevant sites you’ve written for.” Submissions should be attached and writers need to follow up afterwards.