Category Archives: Pinterest

Social Is the New Measure of Business Success

Pinterest, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology

business success is socialFor the longest time, the goal of most companies has been to make more money than everyone else at the end of the day. Some of America’s most successful corporations are changing this way of thinking about business by choosing to focus not just on profits, but also on the number of people following their company.

Facebook provides a very simple and easy-to-read metric for analyzing just how well people follow these companies in the form of page “Likes.” Granted that it’s taken a very long time for these companies to amass as many followers as they have, their seems to be a clear payout from all their effort. The corporations with the most followers like Coca-Cola, Disney and McDonald’s have continued to be leaders in earnings reports each fiscal quarter.

Corporations that have chosen to ignore the impact of social media have instead found themselves behind where they should be in earnings. Some are even struggling. The benefits of creating a good customer relationship using social media is an undeniable fact in 2012, and it should continue to be just as important in the coming years.

Source: Top Business Degrees

9 Ways to Effectively Use Pinterest for Marketing

Pinterest, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design, , ,

Pinterest MarketingSo you’ve decided to enter into the fastest growing social network, Pinterest, and you want to know how to use it effectively to better market your business, product or service? Good choice! Lucky for you I compiled a list of what I believe to be the 9 most important tactics for Pinterest marketing…so far.

1. Keep Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Mind

Google, Bing and Yahoo! all stand at attention when new and original content is made and shared socially. Therefore, as with any other web marketing undertaking you should optimize your pins with links, categories, keywords and hashtags. It is very important to pin images and content from your website and not just uploading it because a link from Pinterest to your site is a page rank 7 (PR7) back link (very important in SEO terms).

2. Share Other Businesses Content on Pinterest
Why should you share, like and pin other peoples content? Because if you share they’re more likely to share. This is especially important for newcomers to Pinterest. As Mom always said, you won’t make friends unless you share.

3. Pin Your Videos
Create a pinboard for videos and pin all of your current videos there. Video trumps text in terms of social sharing on the web so if you got them, flaunt them!

4. Share Images from your Blog on a Blog Posts Board
Nothing engages more than images so make sure you have great images to go along with your blog posts and post them to an appropriate Pinterest board.

5. Make and Share Infographics
We live in a world of instant gratification and infographics fulfill that need with straight to the point visual information. You can show how why people need your product or service passively by presenting beautiful visually enticing data. People share and read infographics much more than articles so if your not using and sharing infographics to get your point across your missing a huge social sharing opportunity.

6. Pin Your Product and Service Images with a Pinterest Board
Almost everyone has an image to showcase a particular product or service on their website (if you don’t you should!). Pin that image with a full description of the service onto a “Product” or “Services” Pinterest board for your company. If you have a Book make the cover of the book the cover picture of the board. If you’re a fitness trainer put your best ‘before and after’ shot on the cover of your weight loss program board. Be creative and get attention, after all Pinterest is all about image!

7. Make an ‘Events’ Board
If you hold live or web based events often then you should have a pinboard for events. This will allow people to get to know you personally while also promoting your event to a larger audience.

8. Create a Slideshare Boards
Slideshare, if you’re not familiar with it, is basically a social sharing site specifically for PowerPoint presentations. You upload your Slideshare presentation and share it with fellow SlideShare friends and hopefully they’ll share it with their friends, and so on. This is a great way to show your authority and expertise in your field and potentially gain business from it in the long term. You should share your work across all of your social networks including Pinterest.

9. Analyze your campaign using Reachli

Reachli analytics for Pinterest

Use Reachli for Pinterest Analytics

If you haven’t heard of Reachli you will. Formerly called Pinerly, they track all of the analytics on your Pinterest account so you know what’s being shared, liked and seen. Analytics is always the most important tactic for tracking ROI and it’s no different on Pinterest.

By Peter Marino on Google+

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HyperSmash

Using Pinterest for Personal Brand Recognition & SEO

Blogging, Pinterest, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Pinterest marketingThe online marketplace has become excessively competitive amongst website owners. There are tons of sites in existence that offer nearly the same services and they are all competing for top spots on search engine results. Over ninety percent of people who use search engines do not go past the first page of returned results, so it is imperative that a website owner uses search engine optimization (SEO) to get their websites ranked as high as possible. Many people do not know it, but Pinterest is quickly becoming a fantastic tool in increasing someone’s search engine ranking. Knowing how Pinterest works and how to use it for search engine optimization will no doubt produce positive results for website owners.

How Pinterest Can Help

When search engine “spiders” crawl the web to find the most relevant websites to return for certain keyword phrases, they look at several different things to decide which sites are appropriate. One of the things they look for are backlinks. These are links from websites that lead to another website. The more backlinks a website has from other sites, the better. This is especially true of reputable websites. A blog that has a backlink from Wikipedia is better off than a blog that only has backlinks from a small local shoe store website. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media sites in existence. It currently ranks seven on the first page results of search engines. This makes Pinterest an extremely reputable website, and back links from Pinterest are going to drive up any website’s search engine ranking.

Using Pinterest for SEO

Knowing that Pinterest can increase a website’s ranking is not enough to drive up that ranking; website owners have to know how to use the website to its full abilities. Pinterest allows people to “pin” pictures and videos from outside sources. This means a website owner can pin pictures from their website directly to Pinterest. This in essence creates an automatic backlink to the original website, thus increasing a website’s search engine visibility.
It is important to utilize keywords when working on Pinterest as well. Any website owner should use keywords in the name of their saved pictures and files on their website. Google spiders go through Pinterest boards, so the owner can even use specific keywords on their boards as a method of Pinterest marketing. A person should use keywords related to their website that they believe people using search engines would use when looking for their specific type of business. Keywords are another thing that search engine spiders look at, so they are another important tool in search engine optimization.

Other Ways Pinterest Can Help

Backlinks and an increase in keywords are not the only way Pinterest can help a website’s search engine ranking. Brand recognition is always important for any business or website owner. Anything posted on Pinterest has the possibility of going viral, which would insanely increase a website’s ranking. Even if it doesn’t go viral, however, people who use Pinterest boards will become acquainted with the website the pictures and videos are linked to. They in turn can “Re-pin” these links which will open several whole new sets of eyes to a person’s website.
Other websites should also be integrated into a person’s Pinterest marketing plan. Pinterest allows people to add a “Pin It” button to their web pages. All pages, articles, blogs or videos on a website should have the “Pin It” button somewhere on the page. This will allow people who visit a particular website to share these pages on their Pinterest, which basically makes them unknowing marketers. Pinterest should also be linked to other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This will allow followers on larger social media sites to link directly to a Pinterest site.
Brand recognition also increases when a website becomes a trusted authority on certain topics. Pinning informative infographics or videos will let people know that a website can be trusted. Once a brand is recognized as a trusted authority on certain topics, it is sure to be shared via several social media outlets. Becoming a trusted authority is as useful as search engine optimization in general.
Pinterest is yet another useful tool in the search engine optimization spectrum. Search engine ranking is a competitive field, so it is important for website owners to use every weapon in their arsenal to increase their ranking. Pinterest automatically creates backlinks to a person’s website and in time will be shared via other users of social media networks. Keywords, another great optimization tool, can also be used in conjunction with Pinterest to increase a websites ranking on search engines and thus the website’s overall traffic. Although SEOmoz, Alexa and other crawler and ranking sites aren’t using Pinterest yet in their ranking algorithms, I would imagine they will shortly because of the exponential growth Pinterest has had. Once someone knows how to properly use Pinterest as an SEO tool, they will have a competitive advantage over those who do not.
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