3 Things Your Brand Should Be Doing To Gain Pinterest Followers
Unlike many other social networks, businesses cannot yet advertise to a specific target market on Pinterest. With Pinterest exploding to nearly 11 million unique visits last month, I predict that eventually the site will follow the advertising strategies similar to Facebook and Twitter, but until then what can a business do to increase it’s followers?
When joining Pinterest as an individual, you are given the option to follow all of your current Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Unfortunately, businesses do not have the luxury to follow all of their fans, so it takes some more work to gain a large follower base on Pinterest.
Here are 3 things your brand should be doing right now to gain Pinterest followers:
1. Link to Other Platforms
The easiest way to quickly gain followers is to post links to Pinterest on your website, blog, and Facebook pages. Since Pinterest is still gaining in popularity, adding a Pinterest button will let your readers know that you are an early adopter of the new social media trend. Linking Pinterest to existing networks is a great way to gain followers, but it is important to remember not to flood your followers pages with a million pins.
Posting a pin to Facebook and Twitter once or twice a day (at most) is a great way to let them know you are on Pinterest. However, if your Facebook page and Twitter profile begins to look like an extension of your Pinterest page, it might be time to step away from Pinterest. When pinning an image to Pinterest, you are given an option to post on Facebook and Twitter, only choose this option for those amazing pins that everyone needs to see. Like these!
2. Utilize Searchable Captions
A great way to increase the strength of a pin is to add a searchable caption when re-pinning. This becomes a missed opportunity when an account does not change the caption to reflect their company’s relevant keywords to make it searchable to their target market. By using keywords often used by your target market, it is more likely that your Facebook fans and Twitter followers will come across your pins using the internal search feature. Not only can you add searchable keywords into captions on Pinterest, but you can also utilize the hashtag function in the same way that it is used on Twitter. Including hashtags into captions make your pins searchable for a wider audience, who may be unfamiliar with your brand.
3. Link to the Correct Page
One of the most frustrating things that I’ve encountered on Pinterest is when links do not follow back to the original source. There is absolutely nothing worse than looking for a recipe and not being able to find it because of a poorly placed pin or an inactive link. When pinning content (especially if it is from your own website) make sure that the pin links back to the page where someone can get more information. By pinning from your website, you are hoping to drive traffic to that specific page. Making sure that the pins go back to the correct page on your website will make it easier when others re-pin your content as well.
Looking for Pinterest tips? See my prior blog: How To Create A Unique Brand Image on Pinterest
Happy pinning!
Is your brand missing opportunities to capture followers on #pinterest? ow.ly/9c4qc#socialmedia
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) February 21, 2012
The Business of Social Media: Three Ways to Rethink Your Social Performance
Any business can throw up a Facebook page or create a Twitter handle and have a presence in the social media space, but the organizations that truly succeed are the ones that are actually present in the social media space. Being present means managing the community on a day-to-day basis and approaching the community with the understanding that their needs come first.
It used to be that businesses were asking, “What is a community manager and how do I find one?” Now, however, the question is more along the lines of, “What can make our good community great?” Here are three ways you can instantly elevate your social media presence:
1. Lose the 24/7 Marketing Messages
One of the easiest ways to turn-off community members is to abuse the marketing messages. We’ve all seen them – the brands that market more than they converse – and we’ve all chosen to hide them from our news feed or unfollow them. Remember that when you’re playing in the social media space, you are there by invitation only. This isn’t television, where a rabid fan of a show will sit through commercials to pass the time. This time around, companies are invited into personal space and it is important to be respectful of that, or they risk being shut out with a simple click of the mouse.
2. Take the Heat or Get Out of the Kitchen
I once worked for a large corporation that only allowed their community managers to respond to direct questions. Saying “thanks,” or even, “I am not sure, but I’ll get back to you,” was a no-no in their eyes. Fortunately for me, I had a boss who understood that this was the exact opposite of a best practice, and he let me use my best judgment. When I started responding within minutes of a post, or even just thanking a fan for a compliment, the engagement rates for that company shot up by double digits.
This same rule applies to negative comments. 95% of the time, a Negative Nancy just wants to be heard. Simply letting them know their feedback is valuable (and it is!), and was heard by a real person will stop the complaint from escalating, and in many cases can turn a potentially negative brand experience into a positive one. Ignoring negative feedback? That’s SO 2010. If you’re going to play in the social media sandbox, then you better be ready to interact, respond, listen, and learn. Social media is a space where you have to commit. You can’t just show up some of the time and expect results.
3. Be Fearless
If you think about all of the brands that make the news in social, you’ll soon realize that the one major thing they have in common is that they’re fearless. My favorite example is Domino’s Pizza. They’ve used social media to entirely reinvent themselves over the course of the last 18 months. Not many companies are willing to put their CEO in front of consumers to communicate a brand message. Domino’s did and it paid off both financially and from the perspective of credibility. They created an experience for their consumers that allowed for a two-way conversation, not just a one-way marketing push. By stepping outside the comfort zone of traditional media, businesses can make big things happen for them in social media.
The Business of Social Media: Three Ways to Rethink Your Social Performance by @annabelleblue bit.ly/IPSM3 #engage #social
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) February 2, 2012
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Managing Your Personal & Professional Social Profiles (Part 3)
Join our own @MaryLeeS as she discusses how Social Media Privacy is really now Search Privacy bit.ly/IPSocMed2 ^MLS #privacy
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) January 25, 2012
Part Three: Social Media Privacy has morphed into Search Privacy
This post is the third in a five part series addressing the management of one’s personal and professional social media profiles. (Did you miss Part 1 and/or Part 2?)
Most of us are quite familiar with Facebook and its ever changing Privacy Settings. We know that every time there is a Facebook update, we need to go in and deactivate whatever changes they made arbitrarily – we know the drill. But when is the last time you updated your Google Profile? Have you delved into your Google+ Privacy settings? What about your other Social Media profiles? Why does it matter?
Last week, Linda O’Neill discussed Intrapromote’s POV on Google Search Plus Your World with Erik Dafforn. In what Erik describes as “One of the most dramatic changes to search results in years”, Google has significantly increased the input of certain social signals for certain users. What does this have to do with Privacy? Depending upon how you have your privacy settings set up on your social media accounts, your profiles will be showing up more prominently in Google Search Results than ever.
Take this quick search for Intrapromote’s illustrious President, Erik Dafforn, as an example:
You will notice the following:
- Erik’s Google+ profile shows up in instant search results
- Erik’s LinkedIn & Twitter accounts are listed prominently
With Google having the largest market share (66.6% in December 2011) by far, it is important to take a closer look at your Google Profile Privacy settings.
First of all, if you want Personal Results to show up in your Search results on Google, you do have to opt in. You may do this in your Search Settings as seen below.
Now that you have Personal Results turned on for Search, what is the easiest way to manage all of your different profiles? Fortunately, Google has Google Dashboard to manage all of your profiles associated with Google products. From your Google Dashboard you may currently manage settings for your Google Profile, Google Analytics, Android Devices, Android Market, Blogger, Buzz (yes it’s still listed!), Calendar, Chrome, Contacts, Docs, Friend Connect, Gmail, Google Music, Google+, iGoogle, Latitude, Picasa Web Albums, Reader, Google Talk, Google Chat, Google Voice, YouTube and any other Google product that you may have signed up for!
Check out this video about the Google Dashboard below:
Google Privacy also has a YouTube channel, which is a great resource for further information on the topic.
Although Google related profiles are very important, that is not all you need to look at. As we found with our search of Erik above, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles regularly rank high in search results.
Especially in regards to business, LinkedIn is a profile that most of us would WANT to show up in search results. LinkedIn has a newly re-designed settings page with privacy options prominently displayed as shown below:
When it comes to Twitter, it really depends upon what you are using Twitter for (personal vs. professional). Twitter does not have a lot of privacy features aside from protecting your tweets from public view. As a good rule of thumb, never Tweet anything that you would not want seen by the world (including employers and journalists). You never know when a national publication may pick up and quote your tweet on a subject and always assume potential employers are searching for your Twitter account to review. In Part 1 of this series, there’s a good example of how this can backfire on you — especially if potential employers or customers are using tools like Rapportive.
And don’t leave out your new Social Media accounts as well! It is generally a good practice to search out privacy settings in each network when you first set up your account. You may have caught Intrapromote’s Katie Hehn and her recent blog post about Creating a Unique Brand on Pinterest. Interestingly, Pinterest has just one Privacy Setting and it is all about Search!
How you have your privacy settings set on your social media profiles is now more important than ever. After all, you will probably prefer that a potential employer find your polished LinkedIn profile over your Milli Vanilli Fan Pinboard….”Girl you know it’s true!”
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SOPA: Will There Be Censorship of the Internet in the United States?
#SOPA: Did you realize it’s the same Internet censorship the US State Depart fights in Iran, China & Syria?bit.ly/IPSOPA
— Intrapromote (@intrapromote) January 18, 2012
If you visit a handful of popular websites today, like research giant Wikipedia, you’re going to see that the entire English-speaking portion of the site has gone dark for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. Better known as SOPA (or as some say, the “internet censorship bill”), the introduced measures, if passed, would allow the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of playing any role in copyright infringement.
Online piracy is undoubtedly a problem for many copyright holders, but SOPA is far from a solution. Even the author of the bill, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) came under fire last week when Vice contributor Jamie Lee Curits Taete pointed out that Smith himself violated the provisions of the proposed legislation for failing to give proper attribute to artwork that was used on the Representative’s official website. Since, the artwork has been removed and the website has been updated.
Beyond the difficulty of policing intellectual property, critics of the legislation point out significant flaws, including one of the original provisions, which would allow blocking DNS requests for any sites that were deemed to be hosting content illegally. This is the same internet censorship that the U.S. State Department constantly fights against in Iran, China, and Syria. Lamar Smith’s office released a statement last week, however, saying that the DNS provision should be removed from the bill until further examination.
So what exactly would it mean for businesses and websites if SOPA were to come to fruition?
First of all, the implications to search engine results and social media sites are substantial. Vint Cerf, a Vice President at Google, put it this way in a letter to CNet, ”Requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented ‘censorship’ of the Web,” implying that the cure for online piracy may be much worse than the disease.
Major companies including Google, Facebook, and Twitter sent a joint letter to Congress, stating “We support the bills’ stated goals – providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ Web sites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting. However, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action and technology mandates that would require monitoring of Web sites.”
Further, the proposed SOPA legislation does more than just try to stop online piracy. Instead, it removes a core tennet of the American justice system, due process. Under SOPA, a court order can shut down any site and force any search engine to stop sending traffic to the site before a full investigation can take place. It could potentially allow the companies with the deepest pockets to control what content you are allowed to read and share on the web and on sites like Facebook. Taken a step further, it could even contend that an individual simply re-tweeting without appropriate attribution could be held legally liable for damages.
So what do you think about SOPA? How would it impact your business or the way you interact online? Would you continue to share photos on Facebook?
Learn More About SOPA:
- Infographic on SOPA
- List of companies that support SOPA from the House Judiciary Committee
- Complete Guide to Contacting Your Representative about SOPA
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