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What's the Deal with Pinterest? What Do I Need to Know?

 

If you haven't already heard, you're bound to hear soon: there's ANOTHER social network that's becoming a player in content marketing strategies.  It's called Pinterest and it's gaining traction quickly; in fact, I was just informed that "it is sending more referral traffic to websites then LinkedIn, YouTube and Google Plus COMBINED."  So, what is Pinterest and what do small business owners need to know?

Pinterest Overview

Pinterest is unique because it is much more of a visual network. Each "pin" (a post to the network) is tied to a photo or video - although right now, it's primarily being used for photos. So, instead of scrolling through the text of blog posts and comments, like you would on Facebook or Twitter, users scroll through photos. And, we all know that a picture speaks a thousand words!!!

Marketing for Small Business Owners on Pinterest
In all honesty, I don't know the numbers off hand, but my guess on demographic info is that the network is currently serving women, ages 28-50. The posts thusfar emphasize fashion, travel, motivation, diy projects, wedding planning, recipies, gardening and decorating. Brands that want to get on there and have some impact are going to get very creative visually.

That said, there are some who have been using it speldidly. I'm sure you read of the success that Okios greek yogurt is having as people are passing along recipes that they've tried using the product, including pictures of lush cheesecakes and breakfast ideas!  Here's a second example that I spied this morning; it's a branded message designed to be shared visually: http://pinterest.com/pin/68719887308/

The reason why it is doing so well at driving referral traffic is that all you get when you see a "pin" is the visual and a link to the place from which it originated, so if you want any info at all, you have to click-through. Then, of course, layered on top of that is social aspect of the site.  And, since the site ranks well on Google, having a backlink from Pinterest to your site is helpful in terms of SEO.

I hope that gives you a sense of the tool and what it's about.  Let me know if you have any other questions about it! (Insert throat clearing) I"m an "avid user."

New Shareable, Old Content

First, yes.  I did just make up that word.  Well, it's a real word, but Websters only uses it as an adjective. Here, it's a noun. A shareable is any type of content that is meant to be passed along from one person to another.  You know what viral is, right?  Same thing.  Only viral is an adjective and sharable is a noun.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's talk about repurposing content.  Repurosing content means that you take old creations (ideas, images, videos, etc.) and you use them to generate new content.  For instance, perhaps you've written a white paper called "100 Ways to Organize Your Office."  Instead of coming up with 100 additional ideas for blog posts, you take each idea from the white paper and expand on them one at a time as blog posts.  It's a lot less effort, right?

What made me think of this topic was the following graphic from Ape Con Myth:

 

Whatever your thoughts on SOPA & PIPA, you have to admit that this organization has done a wonderful job taking old, online content and turning it into a timely shareable.  Keep in mind as you look at this that the links are active, so the actual content remains on the originators' websites: the organization doesn't have to worry about crediting its sources.   

As a business owner, think about how long it would have taken for you to generate all of the articles to which this one graphic links!  Compare that to the time it took to pull the links together and repackage it as a graphic.  A pretty big difference, right?  Now, how much money could you have earned in those saved hours?  That said, keep the idea in mind for yourselves!

Now, tell me.  Who has done something similar for their own business?  Can you share the link in the comments section to give other ideas?  

 

Twelve Ideas of Christmas on Facebook

One business related thing that I enjoy at this time of year is watching how creative people are. Everywhere you look, they are coming up with unique and interesting ways to tie-in to Christmas and the holiday season.  On Facebook, I've seen the following and wanted to pass them along to inspire you to do some creative planning in 2012:

1. CTMLS: They have created a blog series called Twelve Days of Tips and Tricks.  What content could you pull together for twelve days to create something similar?
2. Pottery Barn Kids: Using the ever popular give away ploy, their custom page is quite festive.
3. The Little Beach Gallery:  As a gift shop, it seems an easy fit for the holiday season, but I like how they created a special photo album for their "Holiday Gift Guide 2011."
4. The Song Lists: Want attention when everyone else is posting about the holidays?  Try an non-holiday headline.  
5. Organized for Life: Created a holiday themed downloadable.  They probably won't make a ton of money off of the one item, but it's the type of thing people may pass around and it gets traffic to their site.
6. All Things for Sale: Showing cute and clever ideas for using your products during the holiday season.
7. Better Homes & Garden: Host a holiday themed contest.  You can't beat cookies, but it could also beat decorating, organizing tips, travel locations.  You get the idea!  Just plan early for this.  You'll need to talk it up to get entrants and then follow up by highlighting your winner!
8. Two Peas in a Bucket: Plenty of holiday How Tos available on their website.  They simply linked to their great blog posts on Facebook.  Even businesses with a serious side can tackle this: "How to Continue Saving as the Holidays Burst your Budget" or "How to Avoid Travel Headaches During the Holidays." 
9. Evernote:  Sure, the holidays are joyous, but there is also a lot to do and a lot of stress that leads up to the festivities.  Recognize your customers' holiday related pain and demonstrate how your product can alleviate that!
10. Kiva:  Be blunt.  Remind your customers that gift cards make a wonderful gift.  But, let me remind you that you can only do that if you balance it out with lots of other compelling content.
11. Modern Mom:  Help your customers by creating a list of gift suggestions.  If you are tragetting your business to small business owners, think of the "Top 10 Gifts for Small Business Owners."  Perhaps selling garden supplies, try "Top 25 Gift Ideas for Those Who Love Playing in the Dirt!"
12. Mind Over Matter Coaching:  Take it a little deeper.  Think about the values and ideas that the holidays represent and share heartfelt ideas, quotes or questions.  

There you have it, folks.  Twelve ideas to get you thinking about how you can tie-in to the holiday season with your own business.  And, don't just leave this for next year's holiday season.  The ideas work just as well come spring season, pool season, or wedding season!  What creative ideas have you seen - either on Facebook specifically or the web in general?

A Practical Social Media Example for Small Business Owners

Ten years ago, I had just moved to the Triangle area andworked for Binary Press, a start-up consulting firm, doing anything and everything related to marketing and PR.  This was back at the time when intranets, the notion of sharing content on websites, and email marketing were just starting up.  It was "long" before social media.  So, I headed off to area networking events and met Kristy Stevenson.

Ten years ago, Kristy was a new Mom too and had started her own online, parenting magazine called Bundles of Joy which she was promoting.

Turns out Binary Press only lasted a couple of years.  My networking for that company ended and I didn't see Kristy for years - literally.  I worked on other things before finally starting up Purple Phone in 2008.  Not honestly sure how Kristy spent those days: given her portfolio, I imagine she was writing away.

Then came social media.  For whatever Kristy was working on, she continued to network out in the North Raleigh area.  I got back into it more locally in Holly Springs as I lauched Purple Phone: I was about 30 minutes away.  (Now, dig in your mind for how that Kevin Bacon game works.)  She was connected to someone.  I to someone else.  And, there was a connection in the middle.  In time, thanks to aid of our online tools, we found one another again and reconnected.  We chatted here and there sharing resources and tools and comments about our local area.  

A couple months ago, Kristy was assigned an article by Carolina Parent that was to focus on how social media plays into ones personal branding.  Like all good reporters, Kristy needed expert opinions.  In looking through the many contacts that she'd gathered over the years, she knew several local marketing and social media professionals, myself included.  Kristy, as a small business owner herself, benefitted from social media simply by having the right network to go to when she needed to produce her product.

As for me, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for her article, Maximize Your Own Brand with Social Media.  Does it mean the world is knocking down my door this AM for me to work with them?  No - it's not quite that tangible.  But, it does mean that my name and business name have spread to all of the readers of Carolina Parent.  It means that my search engine rankings will get a bit of a boost by being tied to that article.  And, it offers one more step in presenting me as an expert in my field.

The point: if you are still dangling your feet on the edge of social media and are afraid to dive on in, don't be.  Think of it most simply as a way connect (or as is the case here re-connect) with people.  Share experiences and questions.  It's the biggest networking event ever, so don't be shy!

 (Photo credit: mikecogh)

How to Post on your Facebook Business Page as Yourself

The other day, I was talking with a business owner who worked on a business page with other team members.  At one point, she wanted to post a congratulations message to one of their members from her own account, but couldn’t figure out how to do it.  Here’s how:

1. Pull up your page and click the “Edit Page” button in the upper right hand corner of the page.
2. Choose “Your Settings” at the top of the menu list on the left.
3. Next to “Posting Preferences,” deselect the line that says “Always post as page.”
4. Save changes.

Aside from wishing someone well, why might this be important to know?  A couple of the things that I can think of are:

• You want to tag someone who is your friend, but who does not like the page.
• You want to comment on something that the page has posted.

How else are you using this Facebook feature?  Why do you post on your business page as “you?”

What's a Wordle?

I know you've seen these images before - some inspirational, others advertisements, etc.  They are called "word clouds."  What you may not have known is that you can generate your own word clouds using an online program called Wordle.  

I found this out yesterday when reading "4 Great (free) Tools to Measure Social Sentiment and 4 Important Stats" by Nick Bennett.  In the article, he demonstrated the tool by showing the words that he's posted to the Social Media Today site.

How might you use tool to aid and measure your social media efforts?  I bet there are hundreds of ideas, but here are a couple that the article sparked for me:

• Visit a competitor's blog and understand the language that is driving traffic to their site.
• Enter your own site's blog to make sure that you are using your keywords frequently enough.
• Grab the RSS feed from the news paper, an industry journal, or even YouTube's home page.  It'd be the quickest way I know to scan what's happening today.
• Interested in someone on Twitter?  Take a quick look at their blog to get a general idea about the topics that their blog addresses.

What about you.  What other ways could you see yourself using this creative, colorful, and captivating tool?

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(Oh- and my Wordle above?  To try out the tool, I copied the 2010 text from the journal that I keep on my daughter.  The journal contains notes about the clever and funny things she says.  This is ages 6-7.)

What a Broom, Coat Hanger and Tube of Spackle Reminded Me about Marketing

The quick setup.  We’re selling our house.  There was a long settlement crack running down from the ceiling to the bottom of the wall.  It had to be fixed.  Problems arose when the tallest ladder I could get was 10’ tall – and the ceiling was maybe 15’ or so.

As I teetered on the edge, not knowing exactly what to do about this, I realize that other things in the house could probably help.  I got the coat hanger, dribbled a hefty amount of spackle on it and ran it down the crack.  Good results, but still not quite high enough.  A rounded broom handle, I thought:  that did the trick!  Spackle all the way from ceiling to wall’s edge!

Climbed on down and was rinsing the broom.  Of course, this was all mid-work day, so my mind was on marketing and I was reminded that . . . 

As a digital marketing consultant, I can tell you anything and everything you want to know about social media, but the catch is that they are simply tools - they are the coat hanger and broom.  It’s the WAY we use them and the IDEAS that we have for applying them that will have the greatest impact, offering you solutions to problems, exciting customers, and resulting in more leads than you can handle. 

What are you doing with Facebook, Twitter, etc. that’s fresh and different?  How are you being creative in your marketing? Show me your out-of-the-box ideas!  (If you’re not doing, you can show what are you seeing – maybe you’ll spark an idea for someone else.)

Linking the Employer on your Facebook Profile Page to your Actual Business Page

What a pain.  You’ve gone to all this trouble to create a business page on Facebook and have it represent your business.  Suddenly, Facebook updates it’s profile pages so that your key info, such as your employer, are prominent on your page.  The problem is for many business owners who try to choose their current business page as their employer, it’s not an option and a blank, meaningless page is created instead.

The good news is that with a little monkeying around, this can be fixed.

The essence of fixing this is that every single page on Facebook, whether its a personal profile page or business page or photo, has a number that represents it – a unique identifier.  You don’t see this number too often on the site, because words are easier for people to understand, so the site shows those instead.  But, if you can dig up that number for your business page and then add that to your profile page, you can change where Facebook sends someone when they click the employer link on your profile.

Still with me?  Here are the steps that I was able to use to do this:

1. Make sure that you have either the Google Chrome or Firefox browser and the developers add-on for the one you choose. (Add-on for Google and for Firefox.  These are all free to download.)
2. Open your business page in the browser you are using.  I’ll be using Firefox here.
3. Move your cursor to hover over the “Edit Page” button.  Leave it there.  On the bottom, left corner of the page, you’ll see a URL pop up.  At the end of the URL it says “id=” followed by a number.  This is the number of your business page.  Write it down.
4. Open your profile page.  Click “Edit Profile.”  Choose “Education and Work” from the left menu bar.  It’s time to add that number to your profile.
5. Start entering the name of your business page on Facebook. Some pages will come up and if yours does, great.  You’re all done.  Many won’t though.  For those people, just choose any page.  (Don’t finish typing and Add what you’ve typed – actually choose from the dropdown list.)  Literally any page will do because we’re going to replace the page that you add with the number you wrote down above and this random page will no longer show.
6. Now you need to use the Forms option in your web browser.  If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a menu bar up top.  One option says “Forms”.  Click that and choose “Display Form Details.”  If you are using Google Chrome, you’ll find a little gear-like icon in the upper right.  Click that.  Choose “Forms” and “Display Form Details.”
7. When you click this, your page is going to look really messy with lots of weird words all over.  Don’t panic.  All you have to do is find one little piece of information: look for the line that says “employer_id=”.  Next to it, there could be a blank or a number.  This is the spot where you’ll enter the number that you wrote down in Step 3. 
8. And, the most important step of all – SAVE.  Well, click “Add Job.” Don’t forget this or you’ll have to start over again!

Of course, I make no promises that this will actually work next time Facebook makes changes to the profile page, but at least for now, it worked for me!  (Thanks to Tracey Gritz for pushing me to finally figure this out because it’s been driving me crazy for months!)  If you get super stuck or have an easier idea, please let me know! 

Cool Tool: NutshellMail for Twitter Productivity

I loved Twitter from the moment I discovered it.  Loved it to the point where I'd find myself "wasting" time with it instead of using it for any sort of productive business reason.  Sound familiar?  

The good news is that I've come up with a way to use the tool more productively through the aid of NutshellMail, a Constant Contact product, and want to share that with you.  NutshellMail actually allows you to link several of your social media accounts to it and have updates from those accounts delivered to your email.  You can use it with Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, and LinkedIn.  So, it's pretty robust, but I've choosen to use it to simplify my own use of Twitter and that's my focus here.

Here's the method:

1. Use Twitter to network  (Or another social aggregator: I use HootSuite.) whenever you can for specified amounts of time.  Get out there, meet as many people as you can.  Just see who is around.  Think of it as akin to attending a seminar, company picnic, or tradeshow.  You may never again see most of these people, but there will be a few with whom you develop a relationship of some sort.  
2. Establish Twitter lists.  Instead of thinking of lists as a way to group people of like interests together, use these to group together those people with whom you've established some sort of relationship.  Maybe you find that their posts are super interesting each time.  Maybe you've had some direct communications with them.  Maybe you've met them in person.  For whatever reason, you've begun to form some sort of relationship with the people on your lists.  (Learn to create Twitter lists.)
3. Get a NutshellMail account.  Here's their link: http://nutshellmail.com/default.aspx and link this to your Twitter account.    
4. Customize your NutshellMail account.  Customize your Twitter account to add the lists that you established in Step 2.  And, from the Account Settings tab, set your delivery times.  I receive it 5 times a day, during Twitter's busiest times. (Like I said, you can opt to do more with the tool, but I'm a KISS person and these settings allow to to just make sure that I'm meeting my goals and not getting sidetracked by other social media chatter.)
5. Check your email and RESPOND.  Now, you'll be receiving emails at your scheduled times from Nutshell and it will contain only the tweets of those people with whom you want to deepen your relationships.  These you will read and respond to everytime, but the commitment will be much less than if you tried to logon to Twitter five times per day and read/respond to everything that everyone tweets!

It's definitely been working for me.  I will say that you need to make sure you maintain the lists though.  I made the mistake of getting lax in that and then came to realize that there were people with whom I'd connected and enjoyed who I wasn't actually staying in touch with.

Now, tell me . . . have you tried NutshellMail yet?  Are you using something different to accomplish what I've described above?  

I Sold My Network for a Dollar. How Cheaply Can Your Network Be Bought?

Here’s the thing.  If one person likes my Facebook page, I have access to their 150 friends.  If ten people like my page, I now have access to approximately 1500 people.  At 10,000 fans, you’re looking at a reach of a million and a half people!

As much as we hate to admit it, numbers are important.  Certainly, what you do with those numbers is key to actually leveraging social media and building a business using it, but at the start, getting yourself out there is about numbers and marketers know this.

Because of this, I sold my network for a dollar this morning to Crossroads Ford Wake Forest.  Given that I drive a Toyota, I think it’s reasonable to say that I’m not a brand advocate, joining their page because I feel strongly that my friends should know about their products and services.  Rather, they were offering to donate a dollar to juvenile diabetes research for every person who liked their page.  Now, juvenile diabetes does resonate with me, so not only did I like their page, I shared their page.  For one dollar, they bought access to me and to my 376 friends.  Pretty good investment, wouldn’t you say?

It makes me wonder, what does it take for you to sell your network?  As from being an actual brand fan, what has motivated you to like a page?  What other tactics have you seen employed on Facebook?