Tips for Creating Pinnable Content

inShare2

Most marketers are aware that Pinterest can take a website from unknown to super successful with a single pin. However, up until now, finding the secret formula for content that will take off and go viral has been largely based on experiment. Marketers have been scrambling to find a way to reach the largest market possible using Pinterest as the medium.

While there’s no surefire method for finding Pinterest success, using the right combination of content, images and infographics seems to key. Follow the tips below to create pinnable content that meets or exceeds your expectations for the network while reaching the largest audience possible.

Content

Content marketing is important. It’s a way to increase search rankings and to be shared across multiple networks and social media platforms. It’s no different on Pinterest. But, just like old content cannot be relied upon to drive new traffic to a website, it can’t be relied upon to gain attention on Pinterest. If a site is not regularly updated, there’s nothing new to share on the network. This puts any company looking to maximize reach on Pinterest at a disadvantage.

Whether your brand creates and sells a single product or an entire line of retail goods or services, new content is a necessity. If a pin is not a success the first time, it can’t be relied upon over and over again. Instead, new content should be produced on an ongoing basis and regularly pinned to your brand’s account. Using searchable keywords and images that speak to the content that has been created are a must. Think of information that matters to your target market; what are they searching for? What questions do they ask? What news stories pertain to their interests? Use these as inspiration for content creation.

Think about lists and actionable ideas that Pinterest users may be interested in, like this list by CopyBlogger. In most cases, those who use Pinterest on a regular basis are looking for projects and recipes—you can provide these easily.

Images

Many Pinterest users have entire boards of images: images that speak to them, images that are dynamic, images that are humorous and so on. Visually appealing pieces of information attract users on all social networks, Pinterest operates in the same way, maybe even more so. This is also a great way to supplement content creation. Snapping a photo takes a few seconds and can have a huge impact in driving website traffic.

An image can come from a cell phone or digital camera, a novice or a professional. Just make sure it’s clear and in jpeg form for optimal Pinterest viewing.

Think of images that speak to your target audience. 12 Keys, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, did this with their Pinterest image campaign that used controversial images of children with drinks and drugs and the caption “They Are More Like You Than You Think.” These images sparked just enough controversy to encourage pinning while speaking to viewers in a way that content alone could not. For marketers, Pinterest images are a necessity.

Infographics

Long live the infographic! This is just as true on Pinterest as any other social network. Infographics provide an easy way to break down complex pieces of information or statistics in a way that speaks to the visual side of the viewer’s brain. Because of this, these dynamic pieces of information are more easily shared than traditional content, especially on a site that operates on simplicity and visual appeal.

To create an infographic that is likely to be shared on Pinterest, think of something that your target audience could be instructed on, or a recent study that shares data and statistics that that audience would find interesting. Think of how you could break it down in a single image or “videographic” format. Use various font sizes and colors to make certain details stand out more than others depending on interest level.

An infographic entitled “The Cost of Providing Drugs to the World,” by Clarity Way does this in a memorable way. By comparing the cost of creating and consuming prescription drugs with their effectiveness and popularity based upon a recent FDA news item, the center broke down an otherwise forgettable piece of information into something that speaks to their target market while leaving a long term impression. This is exactly what an infographic should do; pieces like this are most likely to go viral on Pinterest.

In some ways, finding success on Pinterest is still somewhat hit or miss for marketers. But, because of the potential for posts to go viral, it should be a part of any strategic marketing campaign. Marketers looking to create pinnable content should focus on blog posts, images and infographics. It only takes one sharable piece of information to make an impact; don’t neglect this possibility.

5 Reasons to Use Pinterest in Your Internet Marketing Strategy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Most of the people today are dependent on internet. Surfing through their computer or smartphones. We are consuming an ocean of data in our everyday lives. Admit it or not, we are becoming less interested in reading long articles. We are now more on browsing images that is good in our eyes. And business see this as an opportunity to use Pinterest in their marketing strategy.

WHAT IS PINTEREST?

Pinterest is an image-based social network allowing their users to explore, manage and share images and videos from their theme-based image collections. Each user have their virtual bulletin boards where they can create their electronic pinboards for their images. It is a place for people to discover new things, browse interesting images and share the things that they love.

It has 70 millions users which is a good factor for a business to promote their products/services. Pinterest is a good way to establish a greater brand awareness and also to increase traffic to your website.

WHY USE PINTEREST?

There are a lot of reasons on why business should use Pinterest with their marketing. And here are few essential reasons to check out:

Create Brand Awareness

It is obvious that business can really use Pinterest to promote their products or services with other users. Capture your current audience interests by creating beautiful and unique images to promote your brand. Let them remember your business by browsing photos and videos in your board. You can also gain new customers by doing this thing on Pinterest. Keep in mind that when you are creating images, always put them in appropriate categories and share with the right people. You can also share your customer's photo using your brand to show your followers that they trusted your business.

Increase Website Traffic

Another positive point in using Pinterest for business is it's ability to increase traffic for your website. It is very useful in building traffic and a lot of exposure for your business because every pin that you will share has an embedded link back to its original source. When you and your followers use a photo that links to your products, then you can get a high-quality backlinks for that. Not only that, you can also improve your search engine ranking by writing a concise descriptions and using the right keywords for your brand.

Engage with Users

Pinterest is all about interesting and great images. But we can also say that it is a social network at the core. Why? Because we can also engage with users, follow, comment, like and 'repin' their great stuff. It is a good platform to establish a good relationship and interact with your customers. If your followers like or comment on your photo, don't forget to thank them. You can ask them to repin your images and return the favor by sharing interesting stuff on their board.

Connect with other Social Networks

You are not just using Pinterest alone when you are promoting your brand through this website. You also have the opportunity to integrate your Pinterest to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Pushing your pins to your other social media accounts will help you redirect your customers in your Pinterest. Letting them explore more of your product/service images and videos. They can share those photos in their own FB/Twitter accounts if they want. That is the best way to gain more followers or more potential customers.

Conduct Market Research

You can improve your business marketing strategy with the use of Pinterest. It is not only about promotion and getting traffics for your website. It is also about improving the way you market your brand. You can conduct a market research by the use of this platform. How? By observing the result of your pins. You have to know if you are pinning the right images that people are looking. Are these images interest other people? Do they like it by repinning or commenting on your photos? Are you able to maintain your current customers and gain new followers? Are you targeting the right market for your products/services? Doing a good report about the result of using this platform for your business will help you a lot in achieving success for your business.

START USING PINTEREST FOR FREE!

It is very simple to get started. All you have to do is go to Pinterest business page, and join as a business. Set-up your account for free! After verifying your website, you can now add the 'Pin It' or Follow' buttons to your site. Doing this will let your current and potential customers know that you are already using this social network. After signing up, you can now start creating your boards, browsing images and videos, and participate with other users on Pinterest.

Pinterest’s New Look Is Rolling Out To All Users

Pinterest’s redesigned look, which went through a short testing period in January, is being rolled out to all users over the next few weeks.

At the beginning of 2013, Pinterest asked a few users to test an updated version of the social pinboard site. Pinterest took the testers’ feedback into account and made a few more tweaks to the site. Earlier today, Pinterest announced that the update was being released to everyone, informing users on the Pinterest blog that they would see an invite to the new look soon.

Enlarged pins have been improved, with more information surrounding a pin after it has been clicked. Surrounding a chosen pin are pins from the same board, pins from the same website and pins from other people who also pinned the enlarged pin. Pins from the latter group are laid out exactly as the would be on the home page, as well as on individual boards. Pins from the same board are also laid out in a similar fashion, but only as images – without repins, likes or comments.


Mobile users won’t be able to see the pins from people who also pinned the enlarged pin just yet, but Pinterest say that the feature will be introduced to Android and iOS users soon.

Pinterest has made significant changes to the foundation that the website is built upon, making it easier to update and simpler to use. Pinterest didn’t want users to have “to learn anything new”, so they’ve made “some subtle but useful changes”. For example, pins are bigger so that there is more to see.

Also, Pinterest “responded to some feedback from pinners who told [Pinterest that] they hated losing their place while browsing. Now, when you scroll through pins and click on something that interests you, the back button lands you right back where you were no matter how far you’ve gone.”

What do you think of Pinterest’s new look?

Photo Sharing Networks

Facebook and Twitter may gain you exposure and help grow your list with email marketing but there are new networks worth checking out. One of the advantages of these networks is they have targeted audiences, and because they are new-comers to the scene they are gaining popularity.

Some of the big names are already engaging with these niche social media sites and communicating directly with their target audience. Pinterest - Lets you build boards and pin pictures to them. A very simple idea but one that is growing fast. These can then be liked, re-pinned and commented upon.

You can follow and be followed in a similar way to other social media networks. If your business has products, photographs can be pinned to your boards which in turn will be liked and re-pinned. Connect with your customers by responding and re-pinning content. All items pinned link back to the originating source, your website. Your personality can be expressed with a board of the things you like on the web:

• your style;
• what or who motivates you;
• your likes and ambitions.

I find it a very positive network, very refreshing! The site has 10.4 million registered users and 12 million unique visits monthly. 97% of the site's Facebook 'likes' are female as are most of the sites users. ( http://www.business2community.com for Stats )

Instagram - With around 10 million active users (Sept 2011), Instagram was launched in 2010 in Apple's app store. By August 2011 users had uploaded 150 million photos.By April 2012 they have reached 30 million users.

As the mobile market develops the ability to share, follow and comment on photographs with your iPhone, has seen Instagram become a fast growing share network.
Several of the large brands are using the site to communicate with their customers, sharing photos that represent their brand and inform followers of other aspects of their business. For example, Burberry's stream has shots from behind-the-scenes at a fashion shoot, showing customers and followers interesting aspects of their brand.

Since the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook the new version of the App took advantage of the benefits of Facebook's Open Graph. You can now post your Instagram Likes directly to your Facebook account, all in one place. And if you manage a Facebook Page - you can post to your Page without leaving the App.
Personalise your stream with photos that you like, that express your personality and branding. Communicating in this way makes your business more approachable, more human.
Other photo sharing sites Flickr and Fotolog can be used in the same way to communicate with your customers. The internet is rapidly becoming a visually colourful shared world.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7537932

Tumblr Passes Pinterest in Unique Visitors

Having recently surpassed MySpace in terms of traffic, Tumblr is moving up the list of the most popular social networks in the world.
Between July 2011 and July 2012 Tumblr’s monthly unique visitor count increased by 100% to 26.9 million, as Marketing Land reports.
This puts Tumblr, the five-year-old microblog founded in New York, neck and neck with Pinterest which collects more than 23 million uniques a month, according to statistics from Site Analytics which tracks how many visitors sites collect in the U.S.
In July, Tumblr collected 6.7 million mobile visitors and 24 million search visits.
In May, Tumblr broke into comScore’s list of the top 50 U.S. web properties, edging out Target and Discovery Digital Media for spot 47. The top social network on the list was Facebook at number 4 with 159 million unique visitors for April 2012.
Tumblr currently hosts 74 million blogs and 31 billion posts. It collects about 100,000 new blogs every day.
The top social networking sites in the world in terms of visits are Facebook (7 billion), Twitter (182 million), Pinterest (104 million) and LinkedIn (86 million), according to Experian Hitwise.

Quick 5 tips: How To Create Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign

If you are planning a new marketing strategy for your business and you have no idea how to start or what path to follow that will be successful and cost effective, you should go for the social media marketing. Most of the major brands as well as small companies are using this medium to promote their products & brands on social media. Social Media is considered to be the best and most effective way of communicating and addressing your target audience in an efficient manner.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to setup any social media campaign, it’s a simple process if followed correctly.

Here are the five steps that will help you to create and implement a successful Social Media Campaign.

1- Select your Platform:

First of all you need to decide which social platform works best for your campaign.You need to know which social platform is more preferable and most suitable according to your nature of business and where the desired audience is availablei.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest etc.

Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are widely used and preferred for marketing for B2C services. On the other hand, if you are in B2b services then LinkedIn is more suitable according to your needs.

2- Target Audience

You should have the idea of what kind of audience you are targeting. It includes all the demographics (e.g. gender, age, education) and in order to get a true understanding, you must need to examine more socio-graphic information on how consumer interact with the social media. This could include the information such as (which websites do they visit regularly, which is more interesting for them). In addition to this information, an effective campaign needs to center around what value the company will be bringing to the consumer.

3- Implementation

Once you are done with the identification of an appropriate platform, you should start working on the idea and start decorating your business page, put some beautiful images which will attract users to company’s profile. Your presentation and content are the two things that gives a strong impression on the users. Put some notes about company’s back ground and setup a profile that will describe the nature of your brand and its services.

4- Engage Your Audience

In social media, it is easy to attract a consumer to join a campaign (e.g. ‘like’ a Facebook group or follow a Twitter stream). However, it is much harder to get a consumer to actually engage with the campaign and remain connected. The consumer needs to see that there is value with theengagement in order for them to continue to follow the execution and becoming more invested in the campaign. Choose your post wisely so it does not backfire on your brand, always try to post something that will trigger the user to get engage itself in the discussion and generate their interest

5- Evaluation

After specific time of period, evaluate your performance in order to determine how successful your campaign is and what impact it creates among the users and your consumers. The most important metric is to know how it works out for your business and how it helps you to create an image among the consumers and other users.

Above are just some basic tips for a successful social media campaign, although it seems very simple and easy and they are, but in order to get the right result you must understand the true power of social media before step in into it.

Pinerly: Hands on With the Newest Pinterest Analytics Tool

According to various reports and studies, Pinterest is driving a serious amount of traffic. It’s an exciting tool, not just for connected consumers, but for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Analyzing how well your content is doing on social media sites is a crucial part of any social strategy. New startup Pinerly wants to help people — be it brands, blogs or individuals — do just that for Pinterest.

Pinerly aims to fill a gap in the current market and become a comprehensive Pinterest analytics dashboard. The service opened up to beta users less than a week ago, but has already signed 35,000 users, including major brands.

The service currently offers basic data, for example, how well “campaigns” (Pinerly-tracked pins) are doing. But the company has ambitious plans to really drill down into analytics, offering detailed information about pin performance, in addition to other useful tools, such as the ability to schedule pins.

We have had a play with Pinerly. If you like what you see and you haven’t yet signed up to the waiting list, head over to the Pinerly homepage to do so. You can also follow the founding Pinerly team — Rick, Vlad and Slava — on Pinterest.

Shout out in the comments below what features you’d like to see the service offer. As Pinerly is a company that prides itself on listening to user feedback, we wouldn’t be surprised if some of your suggestions make it into the alpha service.

Need More YouTube Views? Try Pinterest

Independent film and entertainment studio Lionsgate holds the majority (30%) of the market share of fitness DVDs. Naturally, the company decided to create a YouTube channel comprised of athletic content. What it didn’t anticipate is how effectively Pinterest could promote its YouTube presence.

Launched Jan. 3, 2012 as part of YouTube’s Original Content initiative, Lionsgate BeFit features dozens of workout videos from celebrity trainers like Jillian Michaels and Jane Fonda. The channel posts to YouTube once a day, with the goal to generate as many viewers as possible to each video within 48 hours.

And what has been BeFit’s most successful traffic generator? Pinterest.

Digital brand and content manager of Lionsgate, Tahndi Campbell, says that within five days of Feb. 1, when Lionsgate introduced video content to its Pinterest profile, Lionsgate BeFit’s YouTube activity doubled, from 200,000 to 400,000 views. “I think we are reaching our audience in such a way that makes them highly, highly engaged with our product,” says Campbell.

Brands, media organizations and retailers alike are celebrating astounding referral traffic, thanks to Pinterest. Lionsgate is turning that traffic into views, and those views into advertising opportunities. The majority of Lionsgate BeFit’s pins are YouTube videos, which Pinterest users can watch right on Pinterest.com. The views not only count toward the channel’s YouTube traffic, but users are also exposed to the video’s original ads as well, which helps for future monetizing opportunities.

“We look at Pinterest as a way to cultivate an audience that is actually going to click the links and get that initial burst of traffic to our YouTube channel,” says Campbell. She explains that the more viewers they attract to YouTube, the higher the chance for continued engagement and commenting. “That’s going to send our video up in the search results, up in featured and suggested video. Then, it’s in front of a whole new audience on YouTube, even if we only drive 20 [Pinterest] people there who are highly engaged users.”

Anyone concerned that Pinterest users don’t actually click the links that host original content need only look at the numbers. Pinterest is now among the top five websites to drive referrals, and is neck and neck with Twitter at 3.6% of referral traffic. For some women’s lifestyle magazines and retailers, Pinterest referrals have already surpassed Facebook’s.

Social media manager of Lionsgate home entertainment, Megan Peterson, has observed that Pinterest users are very apt to search for pins’ original websites. “Pinterest users are very source hungry,” she says. “They want to know where that picture’s from, they want to know where they can get that workout, or where they can get that recipe.”

Since brands are still determining which content works best on Pinterest, Lionsgate decided to use other social media platforms to inform its Pinterest activity. “If we post a video on Facebook and it gets a certain amount of shares, then chances are if we post it on Pinterest, its going to get the same amount of pins. We’ve seen that to be true,” says Campbell.

Similarly, they don’t want to bombard their Twitter audience by tweeting every single pin. “Not everything needs to be pinned because that’s annoying on the Twitter feed,” says Peterson. “You don’t want to just be pinning and tweeting, at the same time, everything you’re doing.”

Finally, Lionsgate celebrates the inherently personal nature of Pinterest. “If you look at our Pinterest page, it really looks like a girl is speaking to what it is that she’s trying to work on on her body,” says Campbell. Where other social networks lack a human quality, Pinterest allows brands to create personas based on taste that speak to very specific demographics.

Using Pinterest, Lionsgate has managed to achieve twofold success: The brand has not only cashed in on the hottest new social network, but it has used its Pinterest presence to strengthen YouTube views. Will Pinterest continue to surprise us?