How To Effectively Use Instagram In Your Marketing Campaigns

According to statistics, since Instagram’s launch in October 6, 2010, this online mobile photo and video sharing app has now a community of a whopping 400 million active users. No one can deny this app’s continuously growing popularity especially now that the number of smartphone users is extraordinarily growing too.

Instagram began introducing advertising for selected brands in October 2013 but only opened up advertising for all in September 2015. At present, 90% of the top 100 brands in the world now have Instagram accounts. As compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, there is 10x more engagement on Instagram.

By 2017, Instagram’s global revenue from mobile ads is expected to reach $2.81 billion. Do you want to take advantage of Instagram’s promising contributions to increasing awareness and revenue for your brand? See below tips and guidelines on how to successfully leverage Instagram in your marketing campaigns:

1. Start With The Basic

Never neglect the importance of your Instagram profile’s bio. You must craft an outstanding bio that would best represent your business or brand. Your bio also has to be specific, engaging, and capturing. To help you create a good Instagram bio, try answering these questions:

• Who are you? What is your brand? What is it about?
• What’s the philosophy behind your business, brand, or products?
• Do you have an original motto or quote about your brand?
• Who is your target market or audience?
• What value can you offer your target market?

Besides writing about who you are on your bio, you must also include a link to your website, a call to action (CTA), branded hashtags, a few relevant keywords, and emojis to make an excellent first impression. See below IG bio examples to inspire you in creating yours:

Attract Instagram users to follow you with your brand’s killer bio, and rise above your competitors.

2. Have A Quality & Cohesive Feed

After attracting Instagram users to follow you with your captivating bio, you have to convert them into loyal followers. Because Instagram is known as a photo-sharing app, you have to use quality images for posting. Every image you’ll be posting should be worth their “follow”.

Besides being of high-quality, each photo to be posted on your Instagram profile must be related with the others. To make your photo feed cohesive, you can use themes, filters, or hues.

Once in a while, you can also repost a photo of your followers and mention them. Featuring relevant photos from your followers and tagging them can establish their loyalty.

To craft a cohesive Instagram feed, see below #feedgoals inspirations and ideas:


More than being visually pleasing, your images (or videos) and the theme has to represent your brand well. Practice consistency in the type of content you are posting. Establish a unique feed vibe.

3. Mind Your Post's Captions

Never upload a photo without a caption. Great photos should be partnered with great captions too. In crafting your photo captions, your main goal is to make your followers understand your brand or have a second look at your photos after reading your captions.

Be unlimited and creative. Don’t always focus on selling your brand, product, or service in your captions. People love captions that are witty, funny, informational, familiar, and relatable. But, your tone in creating each of your captions must align with your brand too.

Most often, people like Instagram posts because of the creative captions more than the photos. If your caption leads your followers to see your photo in a new light or increase your engagement with your followers, you’re doing the right thing. See below examples of winning IG captions:


To attract engagement, you must also insert relevant hashtags and CTAs in your captions as well.

4. Take Advantage Of The Hashtags

Hashtags are added to certain posts with the aim of being discovered. People use hashtags when searching for different photos on Instagram. Imagine hashtags as keywords used on search engines. You need to include hashtags in your captions to get discovered.

There are two types of hashtags you could use, popular hashtags and focused hashtags. Popular hashtags are those used by millions of people while focused hashtags are used by smaller groups. For your posts to be seen by millions of people, you must use the popular hashtags. Although it will be seen by many, it will only show in the top part of the feed in a short time.

If you’re a food brand, here are popular and focused hashtags you can use in your posts.


In using focused hashtags, you can stay on top of the feed for a longer time because fewer people are using them. You have a greater chance of dominating that feed and have your posts featured on the popular page. For best results, use both the popular and focused hashtags.

5. Connect With Your Followers

Sure, your posts, captions, and hashtags can drive people to your Instagram profile, but it is with engagement that you’ll get to keep them as your true-blue followers for the rest of their Instagram life. There are different strategies you can do to connect with your followers.

One way is through reposting or regramming your followers’ posts and tagging them. Doing this will establish a personal connection between you and them. More than that, they’ll feel special about being featured and will end up tagging their friends to that featured post.


See GoPro's example. They sure know how to make GoPro users feel special in a personal way.

Another way to build connections between you and your followers is through online photo/video contests. You can hold a photo/video sharing contest that would require them to post about how they use your product or service and offer a reward to the best post.

Repost the top entries on your profile and interact with every single entry by liking or commenting. Personal interactions like these can increase customer loyalty and retention. You must also create a unique hashtag for the said promo to easily track the contest participants.

Recently, Singapore Air launched a contest on Instagram which requires participants to share a photo or video of their experience with their airlines for a chance to win a free flight.

With just 19 hours after their #ultimatea350experience contest launch, there are already 780 submitted entries.



Last but not the least, the simplest way to connect and engage with your followers is to follow them back. By doing this, you’ll also be able to discover what they are up to.

Learn how to leverage Instagram in your marketing campaigns with the above tips, ideas, and guidelines. Who knows? Your brand might be the next Instagram superstar.

If you need help with your digital marketing campaigns, you can check out our marketing services.

About the Author:

Japs Buidon is a Social Media Specialist and SEO from Always Open Commerce. He loves hiking as well as electronics.

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Speeding Up A Video With Movavi Video Editor

At first glance it may seem as if speeding up a video using a ‘fast forward’ style effect is of limited use – but nothing could be further from the truth. It is actually an effect that is widely-used in videos and movies and depending on the circumstance can make your video look comedic, create a fast-paced action sequence, or even just speed-through part of the video so that it takes less time.

In short it would definitely pay to be able to speed up your video, and frankly it really isn’t that difficult to do using Movavi Video Editor. If you want to get started, just follow these steps:

1. Launch Movavi Video Editor and select ‘Create project in full feature mode’ in the menu.

2. Click on the ‘Add Media Files’ button and select the video that you want to speed up.

3. Click on ‘Clip Properties’ (i.e. the ‘cogwheel’ icon), and move the speed slider to the right to increase the speed of your clip.
4. By speeding up the clip the audio will also play at an increased speed – which you may want to fix. To do so you can click the ‘Mute track’ button (i.e. the ‘speaker’ icon) and then add the original audio track again or add a new audio track of your choosing.
5. Click ‘Export’ when you are satisfied to save your video.

As you can see using the fast forward video effect in Movavi Video Editor is really a piece of cake. The only ‘tricky’ part may be deciding how you want to deal with the audio – which is something that you’ll have to do on a case by case basis.

If you really want to make your video look impressive however, it would help to explore, experiment with, and learn how to use the other features in Movavi Video Editor. One place to start is by using its features to process and edit the video footage so that you can cut and merge video clips, rearrange the sequence in which they appear, improve the video quality, and fix common problems.

After you’re comfortable processing video footage, you can move on and start to explore the various other features present in Movavi Video Editor. As you go along you’ll discover how to apply special effects and filters, utilize audio effects, insert stylish animated transitions, add customizable text, and more.

Assuming you spend a few minutes trying out and playing around with the numerous features in Movavi Video Editor, you’ll soon find yourself able to make full use of them. From there on out it is just a question of deciding how you want to edit your video, and using the tools available to do so.

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8 Social Media Hacks For Productive Personal Branding

In the world where social media has become as essential as electricity itself, we hear a lot about business branding. More than that, the notion of personal branding keeps re-emerging as well. What is it exactly and who may need it? While the necessity of brand awareness for businesses is clear to everyone, the issue of personal branding remains fuzzy for many professionals.

To put it simply, personal branding offers a chance to boost your professional opportunities. As the awareness of your skills and credentials becomes more transparent, the flow of generous clients gets steadier and steadier. Think only freelancers can benefit from that? Think again! After all, it is no longer common to have the same job for decades, and it would be unwise to let great career opportunities slip through your fingers simply because you could not establish a recognizable personal brand.

Already interested? Read on to find out the best social media hacks for productive personal branding!

1. Define A Narrow-Area Of Expertise

Sure, we all have a job, but so do millions of people across the globe. In other words, it is not always enough to say ‘a blogger’ or 'a marketer' and hope that potential clients, employers, and peers will easily recognize you. Ideally, you should choose 3-5 areas of expertise and see where they may overlap. At this stage, the areas of expertise do not necessarily have to be current-job-related. Just try to figure out which of these areas you have the most experience in and about which of them you feel most passionate.

2. Work On Your Headline/Bio

Social media is all about presenting yourself, which goes along with the definition of personal branding perfectly. Once you have determined your areas of expertise, it is time to work on a catchy headline. For example, instead of writing a stiff ‘travel blogger’, you could go with something like this: ‘out-of-the-box thinker, travel enthusiast, and cultural writer'. Sounds pretentious? Maybe, but one thing is for sure — it works.

3. Keep Your Social Profiles Consistent

Consistency is the key to success in every sphere of life and building a personal brand is not an exception. Just like all major companies have a fixed association with a particular logo and color scheme, so should your personal brand remain consistent throughout all your social media accounts. If you feel that the approach is too boring, you can play a bit with your background photos, but make sure your color settings and filters remain unchanged. And, preferably, stick to the same profile picture on all of the social networks you use.

4. Approach Each Platform Individually

At the same time, you should not forget that each platform is unique and, thus, requires an individual approach. This statement concerns not only the length of your posts, which on Twitter is limited to 140 characters and is virtually unlimited on Facebook. It also has to do with the average user behind each platform. Twitter, for example, is perfect for informational or inspirational messages reflecting your personality. The main motto for the Twitter is ‘on the go', so keep it simple. On Facebook, people are looking for something straightforward and entertaining and most of them are ready to spare some of their time, so you can write lengthy posts but be sure to grab the reader’s attention, otherwise your posts won’t get noticed.

5. Do Not Confuse Facebook & LinkedIn

A separate point that requires extra attention. A lot of social media novices still confuse promotional tactics for Facebook and LinkedIn. Sure, it seems obvious that FB calls for something more entertaining and LinkedIn for something more useful and informative, but how do you actually promote the posts, even if you have made them right?

In a nutshell, the key to success on LinkedIn is to take things really slow. Instead of joining interest-related groups and spamming them with your content right from the start, hang out in each community a little bit more. Start with commenting of other people’s content, reply to their questions, offer your help/advice, etc. This way, you will become recognizable in each community, and only then you can start promoting your content more actively. Otherwise, group members will simply see you as a spammer.

6. Differentiate Between Personal & Work-Related

Sounds tough when promoting yourself, doesn’t it? Still, this is a good piece of advice you should sleep on. Ideally, you should keep all of your career-related accounts under one and the same name, but you can create a strictly personal page under a nickname. This approach can be especially useful for Facebook.

7. Post Regularly

Here goes, the holy cow of making yourself visible on the Internet. You DO have to post regularly. Just like a blog will never earn a following unless new engaging content appears on a regular basis, your personal brand will not become traceable unless you constantly remind your peers about yourself. Note that the post frequency is different for every platform. On Twitter, for example, five posts a day seem to be the optimal choice. Two times a day works best for Facebook. On LinkedIn, once a day is enough. For Instagram, you can post once in two days. Pinterest, which is growing pretty quickly, requires 5 pins a day, according to the latest social media research on the subject. The good news is that you do not have to use all of these networks; choose 2-3 and make the best of them.

8. Monitor & Respond Quickly

Finally, keep an eye on your social media and quickly respond to any mentions of your name. The easiest way would be to install official apps on your mobile and enable push notifications for every new mention you get. This will boost your online presence and give you a chance to connect with the new peers and clients.

All in all, raising your personal brand awareness is not a brain surgery. Still, you have to do it consistently. For example, if you make a commitment to regular posting, stick to it. Fortunately, there are plenty of social media tools that help you write posts in advance and submit them automatically. The rest, however, is on you. So, good luck with building your own personal brand!

About the Author:

Richard Nolan is a writer and a private tutor, sharing his experience in spheres of writing, blogging and psychology. Richard writes for numerous blogs and gives useful tips for bloggers and students.

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5 Common Mistakes In Product Marketing

Bringing a new product to the market requires taking multiple necessary steps in order to ensure that it gets the traffic that you desire. Even the most experienced online marketers tend to make mistakes and not get the wanted results, which are usually based on overlooking some of these steps. If your marketing campaign isn’t getting you the results that you are looking for, maybe you are making one of these 5 common mistakes.

The Content Isn’t Ideal For Your Target Audience

The most important aspect of marketing your product is understanding and properly targeting your audience. If you are basing all your efforts on the content before getting to know your audience, you are doing it wrong. You need to identify your customers, research them and get to know what they want. This probably means that you have to make super-focused content, which is exactly what you’re looking for, since this kind of content will entice the most engaged potential customers. Sometimes you will target a niche within a broader market, which comes with its own expectations about content. You have to keep in mind that in thegroup that you have selected there are individuals with a different level of education and economic background, as well as other factors that take part in how they will respond to your content. While the choice to use basic language may fit your younger audience with less experience, it may throw off someone who is highly educated and has a lot of experience with the product. This means that the best idea is to create multiple content pieces with the same general message, but tweaked appropriately.

You’re Selling Instead Of Expanding Knowledge

The focus of marketing your product has to be on educating your target audience first, before selling it to them. By putting most of their attention into promoting the unique capabilities of their products, companies often forget the importance of communicating how this product makes their lives easier and provides them the desired experience. You need to teach your audience how to solve a problem and where to seek for help if they need it. The best approach to this problem is to not mention your business until the call to action at the end. It is necessary for people to share your content so that you or your client look like experts in the field. Create a good story that communicates your product to the audience in a way that is easy for them connect with it, giving them a unique experience that will encourage them to buy it and share their experience with others.

You Didn’t Optimize For The Target Channel

Marketing your product via the social media is a great and necessary way to drive traffic to it. But you need to keep in mind that every social channel works in its own way. Twitter users like to be able to share links and have the information condensed into a basic overview. On the other hand, Facebook users are looking for content that they can “like”, leave detailed comments and share with friends with common interests. However, the audience on Facebook and Twitter is usually different from the one on LinkedIn and other professional networking websites. The content that you write there needs to keep a more professional tone, catered toward a more professional audience. You also need to have your marketing plan cover all the bases, not just your site and social media. Have every aspect in mind, including customer service and current ads.

You Neglected Your Website’s Design

A common mistake for many companies is neglecting the way a potential customer interacts with their website, in order for him to convert. It is essential that you design your website in a way that it provides the necessary information at the right time. A website must have clear paths for the visitor to be taken to where they need to be. Your website’s aesthetics are important, but you need to make sure that they don’t get in the way of what is important. An essential feature of your website is a prominent logo. Your logo needs to be designed with the customer’s viewpoint in mind. It mustn’t be too complicated, and rely on cliché trends and too many or inappropriate fonts. It is essential that it is unique and original. Another important feature are your CTA-s. They need to be obvious and brightly colored, with a proper action word that encourages the visitors to do something.

You Aren’t Using SEO

You need to make sure that you blend your content marketing with your SEO. Search engine optimization is the necessary path to driving traffic to your website and therefore to the product, as well as to minimizing the cost of your customer acquisition efforts. You need to keep in mind that SEO is more than using appropriate keywords and phrases in order to improve your ranking in SERPs. Next to knowing which the essential keywords to target are, you also have to use them consistently throughout your content, including them in title tags and paragraph headings.

Don’t forget that, as creating your product didn’t come overnight, the same goes for your marketing campaign. In the end, it boils down to trial and error, and will it will require you to revise and refine it. If you have these common mistakes in mind and do your best to avoid them, your product will be on its way to success.

About the Author:

Steven Clarke is business consultant at Logo Design Sydney and Seo Reseller. In his spare time, he likes to write about his ideas and share them with the world.

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6 Musts Before Launching Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

It’s okay to be excited about the potential of social media marketing. There is a lot of evidence out there that if it’s done correctly it can bring in a lot of customers. The key phrase in that statement, however, is ‘if it’s done correctly’. It is quite easy to screw up if you jump in without careful consideration.

For that reason, here we’ve got a list of some of the most important things for you to think about before you go ahead and launch that campaign. In that way, you’ll be prepared and you’ll actually get the most bang for your buck.

What Is Your Goal?

No, ‘success’ is not the right answer here. Of course, you want success, but if that’s all the goal setting you do you can be pretty sure that you won’t get it. Instead, you need to know what you’re aiming for. This is how you can make sure that you stay on message, that your team (if you’ve got one) knows what to do and that your strategy moves forward.

So define what you mean by ‘success’. Does it mean more traffic? Does it mean more conversions? Does it mean more likes or followers?

Also, what’s your plan for getting you there?

These are important questions that will help steer your efforts. So if you don’t have answers to them, then it’s time to start doing some research. Dig into the research as to what techniques and tactics will get you to your goals (and what goals you should set for yourself).

In that way, you’ll make sure that you don’t end up re-inventing the wheel and can avoid the many mistakes that have already been documented.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

Just as importantly, who is your audience and what are they interested in?

Again, ‘everybody’ is not the right answer. For if you say ‘everybody’ then chances are, you’ll end up interesting nobody. Why? A good strategy isn’t about stirring the mild interest of a lot of people. It’s about getting a small group of people highly interested.

If you can do that, then you’ll actually start building up a followership. What’s more, these people – as well as becoming customers – can become multipliers. They can start re-sharing your content and your ideas across their networks and thereby much increase your reach.

Remember, organic reach is getting harder. It will be almost impossible if you can’t get advocates.

So define your audience and find out what interest them. In this way, you’ll be able to significantly expand how many people end up seeing your material.

Who Is Doing What?

If you’re in the fortunate position of having a team, you’ve got to make sure that all the responsibilities and duties have been correctly identified and assigned. This is vitally important, as chances are for many people involved in the process this might be the first time they’re trying to use social media in this way.

That means that there is a good chance that things that might be obvious to the more experienced ones out there aren’t at all clear to them. And when that’s the case, things that are important might well not get done at all.

The worst part? You might not actually realize what isn’t getting done for a while. After all, there are a lot of things to keep track of. And that could set your campaign back a lot (to not even mention waste a lot of money).

So get together, assign duties and make sure everybody’s on the same page. Also, meet often in the first few weeks to make sure that everything is getting done correctly and nobody is getting overwhelmed by their responsibilities.

Is Your Site Set Up For Conversions?

Ultimately, the point of having a social media strategy is to get you, new customers. That means boosting your traffic is only the first step. You’ve got to make sure that once they arrive on your site, they end up being steered in the right direction, through your sales funnel.

You do have a sales funnel, right?

In case you’re not completely familiar with the concept, a sales funnel is a structure where people move from your landing pages (e.g. your blog posts or other pages that are meant to attract traffic) towards your products and ultimately towards hitting that ‘buy’ button and sending you their money.

For that to happen, there have to be clear links from your content towards your product pages. There are many great examples out there, but a great example is that of writing services companies. They really have this practice down to a fine art. So check them out to get a better idea of how to do this process correctly.

Is Your Blog Ready?

If you want to have a successful social media marketing campaign, then you’re going to need a constant stream of new content to keep your audience interested. The best way to do that is to build a blog that you going to update on a regular enough basis (don’t go overboard. Once or twice a week is enough).

Blogs are great marketing tools as they allow you to establish trust, create a flow of new content and bring back people in your niche to view your site again and again (thereby significantly raising the chance that they’ll buy your product). So build one!

Then, as your blog builds up to build up your marketing campaign as well. In that way, your visitors can stick around a little longer on your site by going back to older content. What’s more, this will allow you to get a sense for what the people actually want to read and that makes it easier to actually market the content.

Are Your Profiles Ready?

So now you’re ready to start that campaign? Not quite. You see, once people read you content and decide they like it, chances are they’ll check out your social media profiles to see what you stand for and what you do.

If those profiles are missing information, then that can mean that you end up missing out on some new followers. After all, they don’t want to follow something that they can’t put their finger on. They’ve got enough things to choose from that they can identify almost immediately!

So make sure that you’ve correctly filled out your profiles and that they all point towards places where your potential followers and customers can get a better idea of what you do and why you’re doing it.

Last Words

Social media marketing can be incredibly effective. You just have to figure out how to do it correctly. With these steps, you’ll be well on your way. Note, there will probably still be things that you’ll only figure out after a while. That’s the way with life.

Still, at least you won’t be making the same mistakes as everybody else has already made. That’s something, right?

About the Author:

Malia Keirsey is a talented blogger and web designer. She has finished the University of Chicago with master’s degree in sociology. Now, you can find her articles written about marketing, writing, and self-development. Follow @MaliaKeirsey on Twitter.

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5 Best Camera Apps For Android

Since the advent of common sense, people have been of the view of looking things from different angles. In 1814, Joseph N Niepce became the first man to take the first click from the camera hence materializing the above metaphor. Since then, the camera has been an integral part of preserving the precious and memorable moments that once were never been able to be stored but in mind with a vague sense.

21st Century has been a golden era for technology. Cameras that were once used to be carried by professionals are now in everybody’s hands mostly integrated into mobile phones. Recent development in cameras in cell phones has made developers come out with such applications that could enhance the camera quality and make the pictures catchier. Nowadays we find that there are two cameras integrated on a mobile phone; Primary or back camera and Secondary or front camera which is also known as Selfie camera. Following are the five best camera apps that took photography to another level:

Camera FV-5 Pro

Camera FV-5 Pro is the best camera app on Android’s Google Play Store. It comes in two versions; Lite and Pro. Lite version is free to download but to access full features, and pro variant costs some bucks. The best thing it provides is manual focus, focus lock but these features depend on the hardware configuration of the mobile phone. It also comes up with adjustable exposure, shutter speed, and colors. In short, developers have tried to provide DSLR Camera features in the app and this is what makes it the top app.

CAMERA Ultimate 360 app

It is one of the leading apps in Play Store with more than 500 million downloads and 4.5 rating. This app uses lens filtering system that enables to enhance pictures in intensity, exposure, and color. There are numerous filters made available that can be applied before or after taking a picture. This feature gives users a choice to use any desired filter they want even before they click. Its selfie camera mode is excellent, enabling to adjust skin tones and give interesting effects.

Retrica

Retrica is one of the pioneers in camera app development. It is completely free to download. It provides its users more than 100 filters of differing intensities and contrasts. It is very simple to use. Its prominent features are collage formation, blurring effects, and vignette borders. Due to its simplicity and versatility of features and more than 100 million downloads; Retrica finds the third spot on the list.

Manual Camera

As the name depicts, this app offers manual focusing that envelops manual and infinity focus. Just like other apps user can adjust exposure, effects, color. It has quite a user-friendly interface and is relatively simple to use. What makes it outstanding is its size. It occupies just around 2MB’s of storage space. Its con is that this app isn’t free on Google and App Store meaning you got to pay to use.

Prisma

Last but not least is the Prisma app. It was firstly launched on App Store, but after proving a hit, it was also made available for Android users. It has a 4.2-star rating with 7 million downloads. The best thing about Prisma is that it offers filters and effects like no other app does. They are modern yet contain orthodox touch. The effects used are taken from famous artists and world famous patterns and styles. The app is free to download, but the biggest demerit of this app is that it doesn’t work till the user has internet connectivity making it an online app.

About the Author:

Arooshy Malik is a PR Professional & Editor at TechShur. She loves to write on Technology and specially android related stuffs.

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Compress PDF App - Tighten Up Those Huge PDFs

How many times have you read that notorious phrase “You can send up to 25 MB in attachments” when you urgently needed to send a PDF while on the go? That can be really frustrating especially if you have to take care of something immediately. Then, you would usually upload a document on a cloud storage, but it would take ages. In the worst case scenario, you would wait until you get your hands on the desktop computer and use compression tools. Either way, the result is the same: you won’t do you work on time.

With Compress PDF app that won’t be the case anymore because it will help you reduce the size of your large PDF files on both platforms, iOS, and Android and forward them again. This is a free way to make your hefty documents smaller right on the go and to send them successfully. So, you won’t squander your time anymore and delay your tasks. Aside from this principal benefit, there are some other positive and negative sides.

Features:

It’s possible to shrink PDF documents from Gmail attachments directly from the app
It’s possible to make smaller files from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive
The quality of the original document is conserved during compression

Pros

Very intuitive and simple to use design
Compressions aren’t performed on your phone, so your battery will be untouched

Cons

Compression ratio depends on the document itself - it can be compressed pretty much or just a little bit

In conclusion, this is an efficient way to handle sizeable documents on the fly and send them right away. Therefore, download Compress PDF from the Google Play or App Store and save the day!

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