Social Media Marketing | Beginners Guide to Pinterest

So what is Pinterest? Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes and a whole lot of other interesting stuff. Now where exactly does this fit in with your social media marketing campaign? vikitech.com explains below.

Have you started pinning? If you haven’t, you are probably missing one of the hottest thing on the web at this time. In just two months, Pinterest has quickly grown from an ordinary start-up to the hottest upcoming social network.

Surprisingly, women are the dominant users of the social network. They create boards for recipes, family vacations, gift ideas, shoe galleries and share them with their friends and families.

If you haven’t set up your account, you can always browse the pins of other people. However, you need aPinterest account to join the train and start pinning. Already, we have covered How to Properly Set Up a Pinterest Account. Now, we shall quickly run through how the social network works and how people are using the network effectively.

How to Pin Your Interests

Essentially, Pinterest (P-’in’-terest) is a visual web-based bulletin board where users pin their interests and fantasies in pictures; and a pin is a photo or video with or without comments and a link to the originating website.

To have real fun pinning, you need to learn the basics of using Pinterest without hassle.

1. How to Pin Items on Pinterest

There are three obvious things you can immediately do with every item you see on Pinterest -  “Repin”,“Like” or “Comment”. By moving your mouse cursor around the top of a picture, you will find buttons for the three possibilities. If you find an item on Pinterest that you like and would love to keep, click on “repin”.

This will lead you to a page where you will select a board category for the item. Click on the arrow icon to get a dropdown list and select one of the boards you have created. Then enter a description and click ‘Pin It’.

Pinning items on Pinterest is as simple as that. To get other options like  tweet, like and email, do not click any of the three options at the top of the picture. Instead, click on the picture itself.

This will take you a page detailing other pins from the pinner of that item as well as options for liking, tweeting and emailing. Click on the corresponding button for whatever you intend to do.

2. How to Pin Items from Your Computer

To pin pictures and videos from your computer, locate the icon labeled “Add” at the top right hand corner of your Pinterest page and click on it.

It will take you to a page with three options – “Add a Pin”, “Upload a Pin”, and “Create a Board”. Select‘Upload a Pin’.

On the next page, click on browse and upload a picture from your computer. When the picture uploads, enter a befitting description and click on the red button labeled ‘Pin It’.

3. How to Pin Items from Webpages

The easiest way to achieve this is by using your Pinterest bookmarklet. You can learn how to get a Pinterest bookmarklet from the post on How to Properly Set Up a Pinterest Account.

Alternatively, you can follow the steps highlighted in ‘2’ above. Select the pin icon (in step 2) labeled ‘Add a Pin’ and enter the webpage URL to the column provided. Then click “Find Images’ to generate your image.

Stuffs You Can Do on Pinterest

1. Find Pins to Follow

One of the basic things you should be able to do on Pinterest is to locate boards that will interest you. To do this, go to your Pinterest homepage. At the middle of the top of the page, move your mouse cursor over the portion tagged ‘Everything’ to display a list of categories you can choose from.

Select the category that interest you to get a full page of recent pins under that category, and click on a picture.

The following page will display the name of the pinner of that picture amongst other information. Select the red button labeled ‘Follow’ to follow the pinner.

You can also follow these steps for other buttons at the middle of the top of your Pinterest page – ‘videos’, ‘popular’ and ‘gifts’.

2. Create Nice Pinboards

A pinboard is a collection of pins created by a person and identified under a topic. To create one, follow the steps under ‘How to Pin Items from Your Computer’; and select the icon labeled ‘Create a Board’. You will be taken to a page where you can enter your own topic, select a board category and create a board for pinning the items that interest you.

Check out the pinboards of other people or sites for ideas. You can follow step 1 under ‘How to Pin Items on Pinterest’ to get to their pages, or enter the link below after replacing ‘web URL’ with a real URL of a website.

http://pinterest.com/source/[Website URL]/
for example http://pinterest.com/source/cookrepublic.com/

Alternatively, you can search for pins and pinboards using relevant keywords to locate pinners to follow. You will find the search bar at the left hand corner of the top of your Pinterest page.

3. Get Pinterest Invite for Your Friends

If you want more fun on Pinterest, you need to invite your friends who haven’t tried the social network. The quickest way to invite your friends is by clicking on the red icon labeled ‘Invite Friends’ at the top right hand corner of your Pinterest page.

On the following page, you will find buttons for inviting friends from Facebook or through their email addresses. The instruction for inviting friends from Facebook is under How to Properly Set Up Your Account on Pinterest.

To invite friends via email addresses, input their addresses in the columns provided, add a personal note and send your invites.

So, How Are You Using Pinterest?

Pinterest is still hot and new; and different people are using the social network in different creative ways. Some people are using the network to drive traffic to their blogs and websites. Whereas, many others are using the network to plan birthday parties and weddings, explore new places, plan vacations, or stay in touch with influencers.

Tell the world the reason you are pinning and why you are on Pinterest.

Content marketing for small businesses

There are still many small businesses, internet marketingagencies, and online marketers that believe the best way to create valuable content is to do some keywords research and write a steady stream of articles in hopes that your organic search engine rankings will improve. Maybe they will at some point, but I usually don’t recommend this content strategy.

A far better way is to create the content that will be useful for the audience you would like to reach. It really doesn’t have to be hardcore keyword driven, or even focused on a specific niche, it just have to be relevant and useful. For example, let’s say you have a pharmacy. Instead of producing lame and boring content about your medical products, and how useful they are (if you are sick you need them anyway), why not produce valuable content that will be helpful for people?

Here are a some types of valuable content that a pharmacy could create that would be helpful:

• Common symptoms of various sickness symptoms
• Ways to stay healthy for the given month/season
• Why you should regularly visit your doctor

Be creative with your content

This list can really carry on forever. Your individual content items can be optimized around certain keywords that are associated with its content, but why not use “pharmacy” keywords and bore your network and audience to death? Think of something creative that your audience will find beneficial. After all, everyone needs a pharmacy from time to time so your audience is very broad.

By producing relevant and interesting content that goes way beyond keywords associated with pharmacies, you can increase your organic traffic based on the content that you publish.

A Solution for Correcting Erroneous Tweets

Twitter is a free micro blogging Web 2.0 service that enables its members to read and send messages known as Tweets. Tweets are short text posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s followers. You can send “Tweets” via the Twitter website, your mobile phone, instant messaging and a couple of other third-party applications. Twitter is one of the most used and top social media channels available to anyone but most members misunderstand the real power of this excellent Web 2.0 tool. Mashable explains further.

Twitter is celebrated for rapidly distributing breaking news, sometimes reaching vast audiences before that information is reported by the press. But sometimes that information is inaccurate, misspelled or taken offensively — and it can be difficult to correct once it’s saturated the Twittersphere.

So how do you stop a bad tweet from spreading? Simply deleting it often looks suspicious. Deleting it and issuing a correction is better, but even then, tweets can perpetuate in quoted retweets and in screenshots (or, if you’re a member of congress, remain forever on public display.)

In an entry on his agency’s blog, interface designer Oliver Recihenstein proposes an alternative. Give users the ability to mark their tweets with an “Error” status that would cross out the text, he suggests. That would clearly indicate that a tweet was sent in error and has since been corrected by the original sender. Users could then look through the sender’s timeline for a followup tweet.

  

I sent Recihenstein’s post around to my colleagues and a few journalists at other organizations, all of whom responded positively to the idea. Both Mashable reporter Alex Fitzpatrick and Anthony de Rosa, social media editor at Reuters, suggested it would be even better if redacted tweets could be automatically linked to a correction, although such a mechanism might be too complex.

Fitzpatrick was also quick to remind me that Twitter isn’t designed expressly for journalists — it’s been adapted by them. “I don’t think a lot of people realize how great for journalists Twitter almost is. If it was rebuilt with them in mind, it could be amazing,” he observed.

Twitter’s design team has thus far reacted less enthusiastically. Doug Bowman told Recihenstein he was worried about “the additional complexity that forking delete like this would bring.” He added, “It’s hard for Twitter to justify spending resources on features that would be used by a small relative base.”

  

What do you think? Would you like to see this feature, or a version of it, appear on Twitter? Or do you think, like Bowman, it would make Twitter’s featureset too complex?

Internal linking for search engine optimization

Internal linking is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization (SEO), but it is often overlooked. Internal linking is ainternet marketing strategy where you have to link internal website pages including your home page together. This helps to control the link flow and value of on your website. The primary website pages on your website should be easily accessible and only be one click away from any point.

When you are optimizing all of your website pages within your site and then linking them together, you are providing a focused linking structure to your website that can increase your organic search engine rankings. If you have a variety of topics/categories on your website with different subjects, by internal linking them together, you can provide search engines and visitors of your website a clear path to navigate. When you internal linking pages together, link the strongest topic at the top for example – your home page have to link to a primary (top) page for each category/topic and then more interlinking within each category. This can help with increasing the relevancy across your website.

How link value flows

Link value flows into website pages from internal and external pages. This forms a waterfall starting at the top from page to page within the structure of a website. Links leave the website in exactly the same way, and the link value can be directed or random. The link flow of your website can be sculpted and directed using the rel=”nofollow” method. This way the value of your links can be directed to the most valuable pages on your website using keyword link text, and redirected to pages with little importance.

What should you think about while you are busy with your internal linking structure? Your home page should always be structures to be text links and include your primary keywords. These links can be breadcrumb links, navigation links, individual page links or even category links. You can use these links to optimize keyword density strategically to improve your organic search engine rankings.

Internal linking helps your visitors navigate your website and Google’s search engine spiders from indexing your website.

Social Media Marketing’s new kid on the block | Pinterest

So what is Pinterest? Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes and a whole lot of other interesting stuff. Now where exactly does this fit in with your social media marketing campaign? Mashable explains below.

As the new kid in town, Pinterest is poised to make some major waves in the social media scene. Facebook, Twitterand Google+, watch your backs.

Launched in 2010, the site grew from 1.6 million visitors in September 2011 to a whopping 11.1 million visitors in February 2012.

A cursory examination of Pinterest site statistics reveals some interesting demographic information: Women are engaging on the social site with much more veracity than men. Currently, women make up about 82% of active users on Pinterest, according to Google Ad Planner.

As a general trend, women engage more on most social sites, including on Facebook and Twitter. Comscoresays women are the majority of social networking users, and spend 30% more time on sites than men. Plus, mobile social network usage is 55% female, according to Nielsen.

Is it the inherent nature of Pinterest that speaks to women? One might argue that Pinterest’s openness, its homepage feed an aggregate “board” of everyone’s pins, allows users to follow friends’ interests and plays to the female psyche. Many examinations have been made as to why this is the case. Some have proposed that women are simply more socially inclined than men, the posited difference being that men generally view social media as a tool — a means to gain information or access entertainment — while women more often use it to interact with others and build a community online.

Whatever the answer, the real question remains: What does all of this information mean for businesses using Pinterest as a marketing tool? After all, women account for 85% of all consumer purchases, everything from autos to health care.

Social consumption sites like Pinterest are particularly good marketing avenues for consumer products. Many businesses have established presences on Facebook and Twitter, using the unique properties of each platform to highlight their brands. Accordingly, individuals can Like or follow businesses they are interested in. However, it can be difficult to determine just how significant the draw of a product-centric environment for social media users on Facebook or Twitter. With sites like Pinterest, companies have a rich view into just such an environment.

Businesses use two primary marketing tactics to target women on Pinterest. The first, and perhaps most straightforward, is to use the platform to exhibit items or services that traditionally appeal to women.

In the case of Walkers Shortbread, Pinterest represents one of the company’s very first forays into social media. While the company does have Facebook and Twitter profiles, it found a better fit for its product on Pinterest. Tom Kupfer, account supervisor for PMG Public Relations, says, “It makes sense. Pinterest and Walkers are both popular among females. Nothing makes people want to buy shortbread like delicious shortbread photos. It’s a great way to reach others with an interest in food.”

Companies can also use Pinterest to selectively market their products. Core Performance, a proactive wellness company that specializes in training elite athletes, takes the female demographic into account when posting to Pinterest — by focusing on nutrition and the latest weight loss trends and recipes. In addition, Core Performance hired Tia Albright from wedding site The Knot to oversee its content strategy and to ensure its flavor appeals to women in particular.

Another tactic for successful marketing on Pinterest and other social consumption sites involves creating an environment that fosters positive associations with a company, rather than directly selling products and services. This has the added benefit of falling in line with “pinning etiquette,” which maintains that shameless self-promotion is frowned upon.

Rachael Cook, founder of The Yogipreneur, uses this tactic in her marketing strategy. “If I were only to have links back to my site, it wouldn’t work as well as if I also reveal my own likes and interests to the community,” she says. By creating a communal environment, Cook can grow her personal brand while making potential clients feel welcome and comfortable. To her, this new wave of social sites is all about creating an experience and building a community rather than performing direct marketing. And by sharing other user’s pins, she shows a willingness to reciprocate what she calls “mini-endorsements.”

Are these marketers the cause or the result of the primarily female demographic on Pinterest? The answer is both. Women, who tend to be much faster at adopting new social media, set the trend. Then, marketers review site user demographics and tailor their approaches accordingly. Thus, these sites, though not inherently female, become a haven for women on the Internet, with products, content and images tailored specifically for them.

Looking forward, it would not be surprising to see these trends continue on the majority of social sites. Social media, and particularly marketing via social media, seem to be very influenced by the old mantra: Ladies first.

Your online marketing campaign

Before your start with marketing your business online, you should develop your online marketing strategy first. What will you strategy consist of? The first step with any online marketing campaign is to assess what you are currently doing. What methods were you using and is it working for you?

Once you have assessed what you have done until now for your online marketing efforts, then you will be able to tell what has been working and what doesn’t. You can then move forward with your online marketing campaign with a solid plan on what has worked in the past for you while integrating new methods for the future.

What do you include in your online marketing strategy? Find below a couple of tips that can help you with this.

Online marketing tips

• Web design: Does your website have any errors or issues? If it does, are these errors the reason why you are not getting the rankings on the search engines that you are after? Are these errors the reason why you should use other online marketing methods to achieve the same goals?
• SEO: Most online websites and blogs still receive the majority of traffic directly from organic search engine rankings. Include a SEO (search engine optimization) strategy in your online marketing plan to get high rankings for the keywords you are targeting.
• Social media: Trying to market your business online without some kind of social media marketing method isn’t making the most of the opportunities available to you. Integrate social media marketing into your overall marketing campaign.
• PPC: Paid marketing such as PPC is an excellent way that you can also use to get instant rankings. The only problem with it is that if you stop paying, you lose your rankings and it can work out quite costly.
• Online branding: What online branding awareness methods will you be using to integrate with your overall marketing strategy?
• Measurement: You cannot change what you cannot measure. It is important that you measure the results of your online marketing campaign and what you will be doing with the information that you gather from your analytics.

It is never too late to create an internet marketing strategy. Do your research and integrate all the various elements described above into your plan.

Business blog marketing

Internet marketing is all about creating awareness and visibility for your website or blog online by placing content in front of the right people at the right time. Blog marketing is a method of using a blog as the medium to achieve this. If you want to reach and interact with potential prospects, blogging is definitively a powerful way your business can achieve this.

Online you will find businesses that are using their blogs to attract new customers and to build up their brand. Blog marketing is done with a purpose and is usually focused if you want to get results. Your blogging campaign and journey begins by choosing a topic and information that your target audience and readers will find interesting and that they will read. A business blog allows you to engage directly with the audience you are after.

Blog marketing = educational based marketing

Using educational based marketing is where the power of a blog can be useful for your business. With educational based marketing, you sharing your expertise, advice, and your opinions. Blogs should not be directly about selling your products and services, and should be used for interacting and branding. Blogs are also performing at their best when they are integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

The sole job of your business blog is to attract interested readers. Blog can also serve as a link magnet that attracts inbound links if you publish original, engaging, and interesting blog posts. Bloggers will then be able to carry on the conversation and content on their own blogs and usually reference your content. Adding this type of content to your website is a natural link building method that Google loves because these backlinks will not only help your blog, but can also help you with the organic rankings of your website.

Websites are passives and blogs are active. Blogs are broadcasting their content online via RSS every time a new item is published. Websites have to wait to be discovered and can take a long time for the search engines to pick it up. Blog marketing is definitively a smart way to start marketing your business online.

Making sure your SEO campaign doesn’t fail

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a very expensive process where many businesses are spending lots of money every month to get top organic results from the search engines. While some SEO tactics are ineffective in the long run (black hat SEO), some tactics can attract the wrong traffic to your website or blog. This is the traffic that is not converting into sales (conversions).

SEO is all about driving targeted traffic to your website or blog from the search engines, and it is one of the best investments any business can make online. The world wide web consist of millions of websites and so SEO is an absolute must to be found online, and to generate leads or sales for your business. If you are busy with an SEO campaign, what should you look out for?

Search Engine Optimization tips

Traffic: Are you attracting targeted visitors to your website? Your SEO campaign needs to be keyword optimized to attract the right visitors that can result in more sales and conversions. Local buyers are looking for local businesses. Research which keywords your ideal customer will use when searching for your business.

White hat SEO: There has been a number of updates in the last few month on Google’s algorithm to penalize websites and blogs with very low quality content, link schemes, and duplicate content. Using methods such as Black Hat SEO might work for a short while, but they always fail in the long run. Always focus on quality content that is keyword rich and that others will find interesting.

Conversions: The design of your website should be focused on one thing – to sell. Interested visitors to your website should be directed to a request quote, buy or a request to sign up form. Targeted visitors are looking for a specific solution to their problem. If your website cannot provide them with a solution or a clear call to action, you might get lots of traffic, but no conversions.

Targeted traffic from Google is important, but high conversion rates and sales is what it is all about.