The Business of Pinterest

If you’ve been using Pinterest for business you’ve no doubt checked your home page to see who’s repinned or liked your pins. You may have checked Google Analytics to see how much referral traffic Pinterest drives to your website, or done an image search to see who’s pinning your photos. But until recently, there wasn’t an easy way to see all your Pinterest activity in one place. That all changed in mid-March when Pinterest introduced web analytics.

Pinterest Web Analytics are only available to verified business accounts. If you’ve been using Pinterest as an individual on behalf of your brand, you’ll first need to convert your existing account to a business account, then verify that account before you can use the new analytics. Fortunately, this is a quick and easy process. You’ll retain all the board, pins, likes and followers in your current account when you make the conversion. (For step-by-step instructions, check out this post from Social Media Today.)

Once you’ve converted and verified your account, Pinterest will automatically begin tracking activity. Just continue pinning as you normally would, giving Pinterest a few days to collect initial data. Pinterest Web Analytics are available any time from the dropdown menu that appears next to your account name on the top right corner of you Pinterest page. By default, analytics opens in the “Site Metrics” tab and displays four individual line charts that tell you, by day:

How many images were pinned from your website, and by how many individual pinners
How many pins from your website were repinned, and by how many individual pinners
How many times your pins appeared in the main feed, in search results or on boards (impressions)
How many people saw your pins (reach)
How many clicks and how many visitors Pinterest drove to your website

Beyond the charts, you can use the “Most Recent” tab to see what images users Pinned in the last 24 hours, and the “Most Repinned” and “Most Clicked” tabs to see activity on selected days. There’s also an option to export your data for further analysis.

If you’re managing a Pinterest account on behalf of a brand, it’s definitely worth the few minutes it takes to convert to a verified business account. Pinterest has rolled out several new tools and features just for businesses in the past few months, and their analytics offering appears to be just the most recent effort to ensure businesses get the most from their presence on Pinterest.

A Beginner’s Guide to Repurposing Content for Social Media

We get a lot of questions about populating social media channels. Regularly posting fresh material across several channels can seem like a daunting task. Even with a good social media strategy in place, content creation takes time that a lot of markets don’t have.

That’s why we need to make sure we get the most out of everything we produce for social media. Enter the Beginner’s Guide to Repurposing Cotent. Repurposing content should be a part of any good social media strategy. Using minimal resources, you can turn one good piece of content into a handful of tangibles posted over a long period of time. Click the infographic to see larger.

Author: Tyler Norris [Google+]

Facebook is Changing – Why isn’t your Social Strategy Changing too?

Some marketers will tell you, “You’re only as good as your content.” While this is true in many cases, it seems Mark Zuckerberg overlooked the memo. I don’t know; maybe it posted on his Super Wall.

A Social Sea Change

With Facebook focusing on profit, it’s becoming more difficult for brands to connect with current fans. The focus on brand reinforcement is shifting toward brand awareness. Statistics form EdgeRanker show that engaged users of Facebook pages dropped from August to September. An in-depth look at the pages we manage confirmed their belief. Fewer people are seeing posts from brand pages.

Over time, social media managers can see patterns in a post’s engagement versus its reach. The higher a post’s engagement, the more people see. This is because Facebook displays posts in newsfeeds based on the level of interest in the post. For example, let’s say you and three of your friends like the same page. If those three friends like a status from the page, it’s more likely to display in your newsfeed. At least that’s how it used to be. Now, regardless of engagement, posts are displaying to roughly the same percentage of users who like a page (roughly 15 percent).

A Necessary Evil

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that reach dropped shortly after the advent of the promoted post. With the promoted post, you can pay $5 to $15 to have posts displayed to a much larger audience of fans and friends of fans – much larger than any organic post could possibly deliver. The fee won’t guarantee engagement – just create the opportunity.

So your choices are simple. Show your post to a small group of people for free or show your post to the world for $15.

A company that has always put experience first is being forced to focus on profit, and marketers are an easy target. We all want access to the Facebook population and $15 isn’t an unreasonable price tag.

Marketers understand Facebook as a tool for brand reinforcement; you find people who like your brand and you interact with them – easy. But with pressure from shareholders, the stakes are raised for the social giant.

And make no mistake- the stakes are raised for marketers as well. What if you went to a CMO 10 years ago and said, “I want to allocate a significant portion of our resources to a free service that we have little to no control over?” But that’s what we do with Facebook everyday. We are at its mercy because it has six billion things we want.

A Plausible Solution

Great content and interaction are no longer the key drivers of success. Content still plays an important role, but the entirely organic nature of Facebook is gone. A really great post will no longer maximize your reach. Now, it takes a really great post and $15.

Some brands are trying creative ways to outsmart the system. One page posted an update that propositioned users to favorite their page so they wouldn’t have to “advertise.”

Instead of jamming a square peg in a round hole, our social media strategies have to evolve with the service. You must develop strategies that target the new audience available through promoted posts or find ways to mobilize the people who are still interacting with your page. There’s no simple solution. The technology will continue to change. The best advice: Stay agile. Watch your Insights and be ready to adapt your strategy accordingly.

The super-secret, guaranteed effective guide to building engagement in social media

It’s unfortunate, really. I didn’t even want to write this post. But after endless conversations about the secret to building engagement, I realized it needed to be said. So here it is. Are you ready? Read carefully, the super-secret, guaranteed effective guide to building engagement in social media:

The super-secret, guaranteed effective guide to building engagement in social media.

Provide value to your audience

Oh, I’m sorry. Were you waiting for more? That’s it. That’s all you have to do. A lot of marketers will talk to you about social media engagement strategy like it’s a secret recipe for Sunday sauce handed down from their great grandmother. They’ll say you need one part education, two parts consumer spotlight, a dash of sales-oriented content and with a little love you suddenly have three-million comments, Likes and retweets.

Sure, there may be a certain mix of content that works for your brand, but only because you’re selling a particular product to a particular audience with a particular interest. That’s what they like.

You might think this is a bland recipe, but let it simmer. Think about it. There are two operative words: value and audience.

Audience

The folks in your online community are already customers, right? So you should know who they are and what they want (If you don’t know them, you have bigger problems than social media). Now, all you have to do is talk to them. Post things they want to see. If you were talking face-to-face with a customer, how would they respond to your latest update? Would they say “Wow, neat!” or would it be more like “Oh, I see.” Users were gracious enough to click that Like or follow button. Now give them something in return.

All too often, management wants to highlight moments that make management proud and make the organization look good. That’s fine – if you can honestly say your audience would find it valuable. Photos from your company picnic probably won’t do the trick.

The people in your online community are there because you share some common value. Don’t ruin that relationship by telling them to think, feel or believe something different.

Value

Value isn’t just education. It can come in a lot of forms and it’s completely dependent on your audience. For example, there is a little newspaper is my hometown (I’m convinced their number of Facebook Likes is higher than their circulation). Every day, they post a poll question. Polls vary from local to state to national issues. You can always count on huge numbers of people posting paragraph-long responses. So how is this tiny daily providing value? It gives local politiphiles a place to voice their opinions. If you’ve gone to the trouble of Liking your local newspaper on Facebook, it’s safe to say you like to discuss current events. And hey, why not do it with a bunch of strangers on Facebook where you’re less likely to offend any friends or coworkers.

Skittles is another great example of providing value to your audience. With all current events aside, Skittles knows its audience on social media. I chuckle every time I read an update from skittles. See the below image if you need an example. You might say humor isn’t valuable from a marketing standpoint. But at the end of the day, what is Skittles as a brand? Sure it’s food. But it’s not healthy. It’s not innovative. It’s fun – just plain old fun. Skittles are bright, colorful and easy to share with friends, just like their musings on Facebook.

So, next time you write a Tweet or click the “post” button, just ask yourself: Am I providing value to my audience? If the answer is yes, engagement shouldn’t be a problem.

3 Reasons why Pinning is #Winning

“Pin it” seems to be the catchphrase of the social media world as a result from the latest online craze, aka Pinterest. And, guess what? The picture/video-sharing site is sticking with users just as well as Ellen’s singing sensations Sophia Grace and Rosie (you have to check out their latest performance).

Pinterest logo, courtesy of Google Images.

There are tons of articles floating around the cyber world that break down all you ever wanted to know about Pinterest, but we’ve boiled it down to the top three reasons why “Pinning is Winning.”

Sight: There is a reason why people say “A picture is worth a thousand words.” And when it comes to Pinterest, that is a lot of words. The pictures on Pinterest are appealing and serve as a form of expression that can be interpreted in different ways and can represent various things we see on a day-to-day basis. Look at it this way: are you more willing to try a new recipe if you read about it or if you see a picture of it?
Categories: It does not take long to notice the countless types of boards and categories Pinterest covers. I mean, the name Pinterest speaks for itself—the root word being interest if you have not caught on by now. From recipes to technology, Pinterest allows users to focus on their own interests, explore and share with others. It has become the go-to hub for sharing ideas, and it serves as a brands’ Mecca for monitoring and keying in on audiences’ interests. Who would have thought, right?
Links: Pinterest gives credit where credit is due. Instead of seeing a picture or video and scrambling through webpage after webpage to find it, Pinterest serves as your personal tour guide and takes you to the exact page it came from. This is where the whole “what’s in it for me” comes into play. It is a great way for companies to direct new visitors or loyal consumers directly to its website or blog because they are clearly looking for something. Linking individuals back to a brand’s website is also an excellent way to create engagement and give users a reason to return.

Bottom line: Do not doubt the power of Pinterest. It has taken the world by storm and is raising the bar every day of how we share and explore online. I will just let this infographic speak for itself. http://mashable.com/2012/02/25/pinterest-user-demographics/