'Net Features : pinterest

Pinterest Introduces Rich Pins

Allison Howen — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Pinterest has partnered up with some top brands in order to make pins more useful.

The pin-boarding social network is working with companies like Anthropologie, Home Depot, Target, Urban Outfitters, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping and Netflix to offer rich pins, which are pins that contain additional information and allow members to discover more about content without having to leave Pinterest.

Partners, for example, can include information like pricing, availability and where to purchase items onto product pins, as well as include information like cook time, ingredients and servings to recipe pins. Moreover, Netflix, Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes will be able to include content ratings and cast member information onto movie pins.

In order to see the new rich pins, however, users must first enable Pinterest’s new look, which can be done be clicking the “Get it now” button at the top of the homefeed. Additionally, businesses interested in using rich pins must first prep their site with meta tags, test out rich pins and then apply to get them on Pinterest.

It is also important to note that Pinterest has taken steps to make its social network more mobile, by making the Pin It button available on a variety of mobile apps, including Behance, Etsy, Jetsetter, The North Face and Zulily.

Instagram More Effective than Pinterest?

Allison Howen — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:15:00 GMT

Being acquired by Facebook does a brand good, according to a new study by Simply Measured.

In fact, just a year after being acquired by Facebook, Simply Measured reports that 67 percent of the top brands are now using Instagram – which has seen a 500 percent increase in users since its acquisition, with more than 100 million active monthly users.

According to Simply Measured’s study, which evaluates brands and verticals within the Interbrand 100, Instagram is actually growing faster and proving more valuable to brands than Pinterest. This is because the data reveals that as of May 1, the collective audience of the 76 top companies on Pinterest was less than 500,000, while the 67 top companies on Instagram reach more than 7 million audience members.

It is also important to note that Simply Measured’s quarterly study found that since Instagram's acquisition, engagement rates with images from the social network have dropped on Twitter. This is probably due to Instagram dropping support for embedded images on the micro-blogging social network. Conversely, engagement with Instagram images on Facebook is up by 23 percent quarter over quarter, which is likely the result of moves such as integrating “like” sharing and introducing Instagram Web profiles. For example, the study reports that more than 2 million likes, comments and shares of Instagram photos have occurred on Facebook since its acquisition of the image-based social networking app.

That said, the study also found that top brands are using Instagram more frequently, with 23 percent of the top companies on Instagram posting more than 50 times a month – which is up 20 percent from the previous quarter. Plus, those brands are receiving more than 5,600 engagements per photo, which is up 16 percent from last quarter. The study also rates Nike, MTV and Starbucks as the top brands on Instagram, with Nike becoming the third brand (joining MTV and Starbucks) to reach 1 million followers.

“A year ago, many people were skeptical about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and whether it would hinder the network’s growth,” said Adam Schoenfeld, CEO of Simply Measured. “However today it’s very clear that the synergies are not only bringing new users on board, but also creating incredible opportunities for brands to connect with consumers.”

Passing on Pinterest, Marketing to Men

Administrator — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:45:00 GMT

By Dana Rasmussen

If Pinterest was a woman, her friends would have the awkward task of telling her that men just aren't that into her.

Pinterest is the third most popular social networking site on the Internet behind Facebook and Twitter. It's a place where users go to share images of things that they love. A quick look at the Pinterest homepage shows an inordinate amount of jewelry, cute animals, recipes, female clothing, hairstyles and virtually anything else relating to femininity. Not surprisingly, roughly 80 percent of its users are women. That's good news for businesses targeting women, but doesn't leave much room to market to guys.

So where do marketers go to find men? Where do men go to find men sharing images of things they like?

Build It And They Will Come

Other sites like Pinterest are out there. They don't pull in as many unique hits as Pinterest does, but they do get up to a solid 1 million hits each month. Some of the most popular Pinterest alternatives include Gentlemint, MANteresting and Tapiture.

Photo Sharing For the Refined Male

While one might think that a male-dominated photo sharing site would be plastered with images of the female anatomy, hot wings and beer, that is not the case with all of these sites. Take Gentlemint, for instance.

This site, as the name suggests, is for gentlemen with a penchant for highbrow tastes. It's accessible by invitation only and is for a classier set of men. In essence, the site looks like it is tailor-made for men wearing tailored suits.

Imported ales, expensive suits, and handcrafted tobacco pipes are just a few of the images shared by the gentlemen of Gentlemint. A site like this lends itself naturally to an upperclass sect interested in the finer things.

The Internet's Mancave

Then there's MANteresting. This is the meat-and-potatoes' man's site. Users don't pin what they like onto their board on MANteresting, they nail it to their workbench. Some of the top posts include scantily clad women, cars, more women, some jokes, a few sobering pictures of fallen war heroes and some recipes. Users can join without an invitation and find all kinds of things that appeal to those with the Y chromosome.

The Money Maker

When the world started to take notice of Pinterest they realized that men weren't necessarily uninterested in photo-sharing sites so much as they were just totally bored by what was being pinned on female-dominated Pinterest. Naturally some decided to cash in on a niche market and find the guys out there wanting a page just for dudes. Tapiture was among one of the first male-centric photo sharing sites to get out there and one of the first to be backed by more than $800,000 in seed money.

One thing unique about Tapiture is that it is not exclusively for males. None of the sites are, really, seeing as there is no real monitoring that requires users to prove gender, but Tapiture's creator said it is up to the users to make it their own. Whether that means the site lends itself more to men and their wants and needs is entirely up to the users.

That idea is also the rationale behind Pinterest. It's not just for women by any means. It's just women flock to the site in greater numbers and spend more time on the site. Because of this, many photos shared are items that men find unappealing. It’s no surprise they spend about a nanosecond on the site before continuing on to something more interesting.

Cashing In On the Trend

The bottom line on image sharing sites is that men will probably never be a target market, so marketing to these men will continue to be challenging. Businesses interested in increasing their number of male followers on these sites need to make their content appealing to the male mind.

All of these sites allow users to see which posts have been reposted by followers or, as Facebook users would say, "liked" by another user. It gives users an idea of what kind of content is interesting to followers and what kind of content falls flat.

Pinterest, for the time being, is still the most well-known of all of these social media platforms and most major corporations and brands would be wise to create a Pinterest page. However, male-centric Pinterest alternatives should be watched as more and more men decide if they want to hit it and quit it or stick around awhile.

Dana Rasmussen writes about social marketing trends, social media and Internet reputation management.

Sharing Comes to Pinterest Ads

Amberly Dressler — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:22:00 GMT

A robust social ad strategy means reaching customers on their favorite platforms, and for many curators and online shoppers, that platform is Pinterest.

This is why social technology company 140 Proof recently announced the addition of Pinterest sharing to its native social ad offering. This integration allows brands to increase social sharing and re-pins of their branded visual messages on Pinterest. According to 140 Proof, advertisers can use the new feature to augment existing social ad campaigns that also target sharing on Facebook, Twitter and the Web, or they can run campaigns designed to drive Pinterest sharing at scale.

“Smart brands are focused on growing their social communities, but that process takes time. 140 Proof’s Pinterest solution can dramatically accelerate the rate at which a brand’s content is shared on Pinterest and immediately boost their exposure on this fast-growing social network,” said John Manoogian III, co-founder and CTO of 140 Proof.

The way 140 Proof’s newest ad feature does this, is by enabling brands to offer highly targeted native social ads, because using 140 Proof’s Blended Interest Graph targeting provides them with the opportunity to pinpoint target audiences for their campaigns and direct them to customized Pinterest sharing screens, where they can pin and spread the brand’s message.

"Pinterest is an ideal platform for consumer brands to express their essence visually while attracting a primarily female audience that is already in the purchasing mindset,” said Karen Renner, Associate Director, Social Media at digital marketing agency VML.

Pinfluencer Gets a New Name and Social E-Commerce Product

Michael Garrity — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:15:00 GMT

Pinfluencer literally made a name for itself by providing marketing and return-on-investment (ROI) analytics to brand’s using the Pinterest social network. However, as the company begins to move away from only using information from Pinterest and Facebook to incorporating image-based sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Polyvore into its platform, it felt like maybe a name-change was in order.

From now on, Pinfluencer will be known as Piqora, a marketing suite that will include analytics, promotions, content management and even social e-commerce.

“We have changed our name to Piqora, because it is an elegant blend of piquing one’s curiosity and inquiry about products,” explained the company’s CEO, Sharad Verma. “The new name also implies pictures and the IQ lends itself to deep analysis. This encompasses the essence of what we do.”

As mentioned, the new moniker isn’t the only big news to come from Piqora; the company is also launching a new social e-commerce product for brands on Pinterest and Facebook known as Gallery, a tablet-optimized and automated visual feed of a company’s current stock and top trending products on social media. Not only will this establish a social commerce experience for consumers, but (more importantly), it helps marketers turn their social traffic into conversions.

Since Pinterest is such a visual discovery experience that promotes browsing, pinning and purchases, it seemed like a natural choice to the folks at Piqora that they should find a way to turn these users into customers. Naturally, the best way to do that is by offering visually compelling product options on channels like Pinterest and Facebook. The Gallery landing pages for Pinterest-driven traffic promote on-site product browsing, pinning and purchases.

“Our new Gallery product gives brands a way to nurture their discovery traffic from social networks and tablet users,” said Verma, adding that it can also “showcase what is most popular and offer customers a rich, boutique-type browsing experience.”

In addition, Piqora will also monitor the social “pinning” activity on Facebook and Pinterst and examine search queries, traffic and purchase data from Google Analytics, Omniture and Coremetrics.

Pinterest Redesign Tackles the Big Pictures

Michael Garrity — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 01:00:00 GMT

Bigger is better – at least, that seems to be the philosophy that Pinterest is following when it comes to the social pinboarding site’s freshly launched new redesign.

The updated look is mostly notable for including bigger pictures, more linkage and enhanced discovery features, which were initially tested on select users starting back in January. Pinterest’s goal seems to be getting users to pin more and increase engagement with the images on the site.

In order to accomplish this task, the website has now added things like the ability to explore the pins on a user’s board without leaving the page that you’re currently visiting, along with links to related pins to those things that you’ve already pinned on the site. All of this will appear in new discovery tabs that will be alongside main images, meaning it will mirror sites like YouTube, which provide content discovery options from the page that a user is already on.

Plus, you’ll now be given pinning recommendations about what other users are pinning based on the content that you’ve flagged on your own board(s). This feature is also about to be released on the Pinterest mobile applications for iOS and Android.

Additionally, Pinterest also now has bigger pins and offers a better way to navigate back through your recent browsing history to find recently viewed content with a new back button.

And don’t forget, Pinterest also just released a new analytics service to help brand’s identify their most popular and best-performing content on the site. This, coupled with the new redesign, makes one think that Pinterest may just be getting ready to think about monetizing its service.

Design Inspiration from the Web 100

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:55:00 GMT

From innovative navigational elements to design based on customer feedback, Web 100 companies design for the user experience. These top digital destinations are also setting the bar and changing consumer expectations.

Here are six companies, one from each Web 100 category, that are improving their bottom line with design.

Chase.com

Category: Finance
Design Takeaway: Listen to your users!

A clearer, simpler Chase.com arrived in late 2012. The redesign centered on cleaner, more user-friendly aesthetics, including clearer language and navigation that is more purposeful. For example, all of Chase’s products and services can be viewed in just one click.

The redesign was the multiyear product of incorporating feedback from customers on what they want to see from the number one most visited banking website. Even though customers wanted a new Chase.com, not everyone likes change, however, especially such a drastic one. The financial company took a ‘rip off the Band-Aid’ approach, but explained the new home page to users visiting the site for the first time since the re-launch and even made the login area take up nearly 50 percent of the page’s real estate.

Visitor cookies eventually take over and indicate to Chase to swap out the re-design content (for things like credit card offers) and a smaller login space. The image below is with cookies.

Coca-ColaCompany.com

Category: Lifestyle
Design Takeaway: Break the mold.

Visit nearly any corporate website, and dull design is sure to follow. Visit Coca-Cola’s, and you’ll get a website that uses content marketing and visual elements to spark your interest and bring you into the Coca-Cola “journey”. The iconic brand completely reimagined the way a corporate website can look, feel and function. The site doesn’t fit into one category, but is a destination for investors, businesses and consumers. Its home page caters to all of these groups seamlessly.

Coca-Cola uses its above-the-fold assets to promote articles and videos, while the below-the-fold area features visually appealing company statistics, conversations and social elements. Again, it’s difficult to pinpoint the direction that Coca-Cola wants to take you to when arriving on the homepage, but that might be the goal – to get lost in the Coca-Cola Journey.

Pinterest.com

Category: News & Media
Design Takeaway: Images are everything.

When Pinterest pinned itself as a contender in the social scene, it did so in a way we had not yet seen. Its main content comes in the form of images, which users can pin, repin, like and comment on. Pinterest’s use of image tiles was the real groundbreaker, as many other companies – including eBay and Interscope – have imitated the design and have seen increased engagement levels. Pinterest also offers a streamlined navigational bar and search function that helps users sorts through the countless pins of Pinterest.

Moreover, while the social network still brings out all of our crafty sides, Pinterest has major e-commerce benefits, as merchants are increasing website traffic, conversions and finding creative ways to make the site grow their business.

Zappos.com

Category: Retail/Consumer Goods
Design Takeaway: Leave a trail.

Between millions of dollars of ad spend on Facebook and its partnership with Commission Junction, Zappos knows a thing or two about acquisition. The customer-first brand also knows it’s their job to provide an effortless user experience. One of the ways Zappos achieves this is through its use of breadcrumbs, which can work by either showing users other available product options or by providing a list of refinements that users have made to filter their searches (this helps users trace their searching steps).

Besides easier navigation, breadcrumbs also make the structure of your site more transparent to readers.

att.com

Category: Service Providers
Design Takeaway: Never stop innovating.

AT&T is a ubiquitous think tank that drives and delivers innovation in seemingly impossible ways. Its website, att.com, keeps up with this momentum. In 2012, the brand made several enhancements as part of its continual improvement of the online experience for its customers. Upgrades to the site design and technology have made it easier and faster for customers to get what they need, whether they are shopping, managing their accounts or need help.

For example, AT&T redesigned its account management page to make the most common tasks and most requested information easier to find.

Apple.com

Category: Tech
Design Takeaway: More is less.

There’s a reason why Apple’s product packaging is often kept as long as the products themselves. Not only is nothing about the wrapping wasteful (everything has a function), but the product inside is so high quality you are sure you’ll be able to repackage it and repurpose it.

Apple.com works in much the same way. The design takes a minimalist approach that makes the site easy to navigate and visually appealing – almost like a tablet or mobile-like experience.

Curalate for Instagram: Analytics for Visual Social Platforms

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Social media analytics are the hot sector right now among the digerati and big brands are jumping on the bandwagon in digital droves.

Zappos’ recent selection of Pinfluencer, for example, to help manage and analyze its promotional efforts on the network is sufficient proof for many that brands are finally starting to figure this whole "visual social media" thing out - at least in part. As many brands are quickly discovering, Pinterest is far from the only horse in the visual/social race. Facebook-owned Instagram is making moves and the savviest social media analytics providers are well aware of its potential to influence prospective and existing customers and users.

Case in point, visual analytics and marketing platform Curalate recently announced the availability of analytics and promotion solutions for Instagram, making it the first (if not only) vendor to bring analytics from Pinterest and Instagram analytics into one consolidated dashboard.

The updated platform enables brands to understand image popularity (and recency), consolidate conversations on both Pinterst and Instagram into one feed, create promotions on the two visual networks (and Facebook), share photos directly from within the platform's dashboard, and analyze performance of their Instagram campaigns as well. One of the more appealing features is the ability for brand users to differentiate between engagement on fan-posted and brand-posted images.

“Images drive emotions with an immediacy that no other medium offers. Brands are rapidly tapping into the power of imagery to connect with consumers and drive real business results,” said Apu Gupta, CEO and co-founder, Curalate. “By adding Instagram to our successful Pinterest solution we’re helping brands see the bigger picture. Curalate enables brands to engage audiences across networks based on what’s most relevant rather than what’s most recent.”

Screenshot of the Hashtag feature within Curalate which is used for tracking social promotions on Pinterest and now Instagram

Zappos Tracks Pinterest Conversions with Pinfluencer

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:15:00 GMT

As Pinterest continues its slow but steady ascent to social media greatness, brands are turning to the platform in droves to raise awareness with their target consumers and, in some cases, even turning a profit. As more and more enterprises start leveraging the platform, there will be a greater need to understand, on a high level, just how well they are performing.

Case in point, Pinfluencer (a marketing and analytics solution for Pinterest) has announced that online apparel and footwear retailer Zappos has selected its solution to provide performance analytics about its campaigns focusing on the social media site’s audience.

“Pinfluencer creates a web-based platform for us at Zappos to easily track online performance of our boards on Pinterest,” said Graham Kahr, social scientist at Zappos. “Through Pinfluencer, we have been able to boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality which results in increased earned media conversations and sales for our company. We now have a way to actually measure the ROI of our Pinterest initiatives. This is huge for us as a company and for the industry.”

Zappos will have quite a bit of actionable information available to it which will further fuel its already impressive social media and content marketing initiatives. Using Pinfluencer, Zappos will be able to track the pins that are driving engagement, clicks and revenue, and most importantly to track user eligibility of contests that are run through the platform.

Pinfluencer to date has been one of the only solutions on the market for brands to get direct value out of the Pinterest platform. Brands who ran their contests and sweepstakes on Pinfluencer increased their follower acquisition rate by 156 percent while their pins/day jumped by 125 percent. Since the October 2012 beta launch of its promotions and contests platform, Pinfluencer has hosted and tracked more than 100 promotions for brands such as Gilt, Jetsetter, WayFair, Martha Stewart and Shape Magazine.

Profile Optimization for 2nd-Tier Social Networks

Allison Howen — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:45:00 GMT

For brands, maintaining a social presence on the Web is hard work. Not only do social media managers need to focus on engaging audience members, but they must also stay current with new features, redesigns and updates from social networks.

While most brands tend to focus on maintaining a profile on the Web’s top social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, they should not forget to stay connected with popular second-tier social networks as well, like Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. In order to do this, brands must first create a profile on these social sites before they can start interacting with their audience.

Earlier this month, Website Magazine published an infographic to help brands optimize their profile design on the Web’s big three social networks. Today, however, we would like to help brands do the same for some of the Web’s most popular second-tier social networks – Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. Read below to discover some optimization tips for these social networks, in addition to some design examples of brands that do it right.

Instagram

Instagram finally made its platform available on the Web this week, allowing users to browse and interact with photos from their desktop (although it is still not possible to upload images outside of the mobile app). This is certainly the genesis of this mobile application’s migration to the Web, which means that changes are imminent. However, there are a few ways that social media managers can still optimize their profiles for the Web.

While every photo uploaded to Instagram is cropped to fit the social network’s square proportions, users should make sure that their images will look good when enlarged to 410x410 px, as this is the size of the largest (middle) image on Instagram Web profiles. Moreover, brands should make sure that their profile image (110x110 px) is a good representation of their company and that their bio and website information is correct. It is also important to note that the images displayed on the header of the Web profile pages are currently not customizable, and instead are images from the user's photo stream that are featured at random. This means that brand managers might want to consider uploading images that not only compliment one another, but also consider using filters that look good together so that the profile header is as visually appealing as possible (like Taco Bell's seen below).

YouTube

Once a brand has successfully had its account converted into a brand channel on YouTube, it is time to customize the profile design. Branded channels feature a 970-pixel wide and 150-pixel high channel banner, which support an image map so that areas on the banner are clickable. This aspect of the brand channel is very important because brands can add website links or other pertinent digital properties here. Branded channels also feature a channel navigation bar, which displays the channel title, a subscription button, the number of current subscribers, the number of video views and tabs for navigating to different content pages. Furthermore, there is a custom tab promo unit and sidebar on the right side of branded profile pages, where brands can add information about its channel and links to other social networks.

That being said, brands have a lot of customizable options on YouTube, and nearly every brand channel has a different look. However, the most important part about optimizing a brand channel is to connect it with other digital properties, just as BuzzFeed has done in the example below.

Pinterest

This popular image-based social network launched business pages toward the end of 2012. While these pages have a similar look to regular profile pages, they also come with a verified checkmark and allow brands to leverage new buttons and widgets that can be integrated into websites and content to increase engagement and drive traffic back to a business’s website.

The stand-out element on Pinterest business pages is the profile image, which is 160x165 px. Next to this image, brands need to enter a business description (200 characters or less) and a link to their website. After optimizing this part of the profile, the only thing left to do is create boards and start pinning. While the images within Pinterest vary in size, social media managers should know that the big thumbnail of each board is 222x150 px, with the smaller thumbnail images (featured directly below the bigger image) being 55x55 px. That being said, Pinterest is also a fairly new social network, and social managers should keep an eye out for new profile design features in the future. In the meantime, check out Etsy's profile for some "pinspiration."

Pinfluencer Launches Image Recognition Engine

Allison Howen — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Merchants that actively maintain a Pinterest profile have the potential to gain a lot of traffic from the visually driven social network.

However, just like any other social network, merchants must monitor the analytics of the content they post in order to optimize their production strategies to drive the best results. Luckily, tools like Pinfluencer, which is an enterprise marketing and analytics platform for Pinterest, can help brands do just that.

In fact, Pinfluencer just launched a new image recognition engine that helps brands identify which image on a particular page is driving the most traffic from Pinterest. The technology also breaks down data based on URL patterns and SEO tags, which can help marketers discover which images and products from a website are generating engagement on Pinterest and driving traffic back to the website. Moreover, Pinfluencer’s image recognition technology combined with URL and SEO parsing allows marketers to conduct analytics at an image, product and website level.

Pinfluencer also allows merchants and marketers to measure metrics such as overall followers, pins per day, repins per day and clicks per pin. Additionally, the platform’s Top Products report displays a brand’s most popular products on Pinterest, while the Top Images report shows which images are most popular and drive the most traffic.

“A website is composed of product pages and product pages are comprised of individual images. These images distribute the products on Pinterest via pins and repins serving as the digital mannequins that help drive traffic back to a retailer’s website,” said Sharad Verma, CEO, Pinfluencer. “We see every pin on Pinterest as a distribution opportunity for our customer brands and we have spent the last year helping these brands see how to identify their top and most influential pinners and learn which pins actually drive the most sales. We are unveiling our new image technology to allow brands to understand which images on a webpage drives the most traffic relative to other images. These insights are extremely powerful.”

Social Media for Home-Based Businesses

Administrator — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:15:00 GMT

When running a home-based business, the pressure of completing vital daily actions, in addition to time constraints, means social media strategy may not be your highest priority. But to outreach to an extensive customer base, build your online authority and gain a valuable platform for real-time customer service, it should be.

All social networks are not created equal, however. Brand social media is not a tool exclusive to large organizations, and for home businesses especially, can be crucially beneficial and should play an active role in daily business. Choosing a social channel for business depends on a number of variables, so before selecting one (or jumping straight into all networks) consider:

• What the home business is

• Who the target market is and which channel they are most likely to be active and responsive on

• The nature of the products and services sold

Considering what you want your social strategy to achieve can also help with your decision. For example, if you want to build yourself up as an industry leader, network, or promote your company and yourself through industry based discussion, then LinkedIn may be the most suitable network. But if you're likely to post numerous, frequent news, product and offer updates, and want to target and interact with potential clients more directly, using Facebook or Twitter may be a better route to take.

Of course there's nothing to stop you from using both! If you can meet the time requirements to maintain a dedicated and active presence across numerous social media channels, you'll be presenting a more varied, accessible and authoritative business profile. Just note that you don't have to join all networks at once, and be wary of the dangers and damaging effects which incomplete and sloppy social profiling can have.

Key social networks you may consider choosing include:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn acts as a virtual CV, networking and job-hunting tool, and for that reason works well as a B2B social network. Giving you the social status to network as a business figurehead, creating a LinkedIn company page can inform LinkedIn users of your home business, as well as your personal attributes and will showcase your services and company updates. Networking to contact key industry individuals and participation in regular discussion groups can establish your authority as a thought leader within your industry or area of business. It can also allow you as a business owner to advance, network, and raise your professional profile.

Depending upon your business or service offering (this may work well for freelance services for example), LinkedIn can also be an excellent way to source clients.

Twitter

For most organizations, Twitter is the go-to network. With users expectant and tolerant of much more frequent posting (some more brand active profiles post upward of 10 tweets a day), news, links relevant to your industry, retweets and other shared content can boost your profile. Plus, by taking advantage of Twitter features, such as hashtags, your tweets can be easily found in searches and your presence raised. Allowing you to present an accessible front, promote new product and converse with your client base, Twitter lets you directly access a much wider potential customer base, and can be a great way to gather feedback. Have an active follow and interaction strategy to boost and interact with followers and spread the name of your business.

Regarding the time restraints of being commercially active on Twitter, tweets can be scheduled, searched for and ordered using management applications, such as HootSuite or TweetDeck - meaning all daily social activity can be done at once.

Pinterest & Instagram

For businesses that offer a visually appealing product, having a Pinterest or Instagram account can be incredibly beneficial. Whilst Instagram works well in conjunction with Twitter (owing to its use of hashtags allowing users to locate images) and can be a way to encourage customers to create social content/ their own images related to your brand product, Pinterest works more as a virtual pinboard. Allowing users to 'repin' images of your product (once you have a developed profile), if your product can be aesthetically endorsed, both networks could work very well to an advantage.

Facebook

This is an excellent tool for home businesses with small audiences who wish to get to know their audience and fans. You can use your page insights to see what sort of content garners the best responses. Facebook is ideal for sharing and is more directly personal than Twitter, so knowing what content (images, links, competitions, etc.) your Facebook followers respond best to, can work to a business advantage in that you can encourage those followers to share your brand content to their own friends and followers as well. As a great place to share news, offers and promotions, Facebook works well for businesses with a wider consumer base, such as fashion or food, and offers a simple approach to customer service (comments and interaction).

Google +

Though less popular than the other networks, a Google + presence can be just as important. More relaxed when it comes to self-promotion, Google + allows for status and content sharing as with Facebook and LinkedIn, but importantly, as a Google owned service, means it is linked with all of Google's other products. An active account can provide additional SEO benefit: especially useful for smaller, location-dependent businesses.

Once you've decided which network to use:

Any social network can encourage customers to move from your social profile to your business site, and once you've decided which network(s) to be active on, you should consider some form of basic strategy to build a following - this can be as basic as deciding to use HootSuite to schedule in a certain number of tweets a day and replying to any customer feedback (good or bad), to forming a more comprehensive approach such as following targeted users and ensuring you mix your content between status updates, links, images etc.

The approach you take toward social media will vary depending on the time you have to invest in it, but making this investment can really help launch the profile of a whole business, especially if targeting a local market. You should make it easy for people to access your social networks, connect, share and promote you.

About the Author: Alastair Kane is a freelance writer working for 2touch, a leading provider of fulfillment services helping businesses keep their customers happy.

Life in the Fast Lane – Social Predictions for 2013

Administrator — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:30:00 GMT

By Richard Pasewark, CEO, Visible Technologies

This past year the social media and marketing world saw many evolutionary changes including the IPO of Facebook, market consolidation and increased adoption of social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram. As we move forward into 2013, companies of all sizes will realize the necessity of utilizing social media data and analytics to better serve, engage and help their customers. Simply participating in social media is no longer enough. Companies need a well thought-out social media strategy to stay ahead of the competition. Below is a snapshot of what the industry can expect to see this year and which areas companies should focus on when developing their marketing plans.

“If you build it, they will come”

As more and more of the large enterprise technology companies acquire social marketing tools and stitch together social media “suites”, clients are increasingly assessing if these toolkits meet their needs. 2013 will be the year that marketing leaders determine what type of software and solutions they can count on – whether it’s delivered from an independent vendor or the result of acquisitions. Many marketers need clear and clean solutions that meet immediate needs – as social media analytics and engagement continuously play a prominent role in their actions and effectiveness, they will need agile vendors to address their dynamic needs.

English isn’t the only language spoken in the world

The growth of social media in English speaking channels is enormous; yet we need to acknowledge the same rapid ascension of the social global movement, driven by mobile in many parts of the world. In 2013 it will be imperative for global brands to establish a multi-region, multi-language footprint in social channels to reach customers in all markets. Even though Facebook has been banned in countries like China, there is still a major adoption of social media use on homegrown sites such as Sino Wiebo. According to eMarketer, 54 percent of Internet users in China would make a purchase because a friend “liked” or follows the brand on a social network. That’s too big of a figure for companies to ignore. In order to be successful it will be important for companies to monitor their activity on international social channels as well as in non-English speaking channels in order to penetrate new markets. In turn, software companies will need to focus their efforts on developing solutions that can accurately understand and measure the sentiment expressed in languages beyond English. With nearly 20 percent of the world’s population speaking Mandarin or Arabic, both character-based languages, companies will also need to focus on identifying and reading these characters as well.

The rise of Pinterest will foster new technology that tracks the sharing of images (vs. text only)

The rise of visual social media like Pinterest will create a need for businesses to track the sharing of images versus just text. With the proliferation of images, videos and infographics going viral over the last few years, enterprises will begin to demand software to track these mainstream marketing and advertising methods. A fun example is the smiley face ;-), which is one of the most tweeted terms, making it imperative for companies to shift their technologies in this direction. With this will come new abilities added to search engines allowing users to copy and paste images to find a match versus relying on text-only options. This will open the gates of opportunity for other search engines to flourish if Google and Bing don’t evolve with these changes. It will also open new avenues for analytics as data sharing and influence will have new dimensions of insight.

Social media analytics will become the de facto source of customer input

Social media has already begun to pave the way of transformation in the customer service sector. As more and more customers voice their opinions online, companies have been forced to engage with consumers on their medium of choice. In 2013 we can expect this to continue and establish itself as the primary means of gaining customer feedback to improve customer experience. Data analyzed from social media sources will become a de facto way for companies to measure customer sentiment and satisfaction and be an essential channel to identify problem areas. Companies will no longer rely on surveys to gauge the success of their products and service, and will increasingly use social media analysis and community engagement to solicit and respond to customer input.

Product development will begin to lean on social channels

Much as customer service teams began addressing customer issues via social channels this year, product development teams will begin to look to social media to determine their next move. In order to meet consumer needs in a constantly changing marketplace, product development teams will begin sourcing ideas and preferences from social chatter when determining which capabilities or enhancements to focus on. This in turn will give the customer more power, allowing them to have a say in what innovations they see next.

About Richard Pasewark

As Chief Executive Officer of Visible Technologies, Rich provides strategic leadership to bring value to clients and partners. Prior to this role, Rich was President of Cymfony, where he scaled the organization to meet the growing demand for insights delivered from Cymfony’s technology and analyst services. Rich brings more than two decades of experience as a business leader, strategist, and software visionary for industry leaders such as Quark, Adobe and EDS. Rich values the opportunity to create new solutions in the emerging and continually evolving social media analytics market.

Pinterest Contests Come to Wishpond

Allison Howen — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:06:00 GMT

Interacting with fans through social media helps merchants foster relationships with their customers, and a new application from Wishpond makes this task easier than ever.

This is because the social marketing solutions provider has launched the Pinterest Contest App, which allows merchants to create Pinterest contests that can be deployed on multiple channels, including Facebook, websites and mobile. For example, merchants can encourage their audience to create boards on Pinterest with the items that the merchant sells. The boards can be submitted to the contest and then the merchant’s community votes on each of the boards to determine the winner. Moreover, merchants collect each entrant’s email address and social data, which can be valuable for segmenting future marketing initiatives.

It is also important to note that these contests can help boost a company’s reach and engagement metrics. This is because the social voting encourages entrants to share the contest with their Facebook network, and the app also requires voters to be a Facebook fan of the brand in order to vote.

“Our clients have been asking for an effective way to get users engaged on Pinterest,” said Ali Tajsekandar, CEO of Wishpond. “Our Pinterest Contest App is a simple way to get users sharing a brand’s products on Pinterest, leading to more engagement and referral traffic to their online store.”

The Pinterest Contest App is just the latest offering in Wishpond’s All-In-One Marketing Suite, which includes apps for launching photo contests, voting contests, photo caption contests, sweepstakes and social stores.

Pinterest Promotion's Puzzle Solved

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:16:00 GMT

Finding participants and ensuring eligibility and legality are among some of the time-consuming issues businesses face when running a sweepstakes or contest on Pinterest. The popularity of the giveaways, however, keeps increasing.

Creative freedom is one of the many reasons these Pinterest promotions are so popular. Sharad Verma, CEO of Pinfluencer, a marketing analytics and promotions platform, says Pinterest contests or sweepstakes are not just about winning, but they are also about fun and creativity. Participants don’t just hit a “like” button to enter, instead, many contests require them to collect items and put them on their board.

For example, the popular retailer Express ran a “Win Your Wish List” campaign. Entrants gathered items from Express’s Pinterest boards and/or website to their boards for a chance of winning a $500 Express gift card.

This contest is a strong indicator of Pinterest’s e-commerce prowess. Additionally, Pinterest serves as an e-commerce driver because people are collecting products for themselves, and so that lead to low-barrier sharing. Plus, every pin is virtually a hyperlink, which makes Pinterest really a collection of links. Another benefit (in the long line of them) is that people using Pinterest are in a mode to shop, as they are actively planning a party, wedding, trip – you name it.

“Pinning is an act of getting ownership of the product,” said Verma. “Sharing happens as a byproduct of that.”

As for SEO value, Pinterest has it – just in a roundabout way.

“The links on Pinterest are no follow, which means that sites do not get link credit for those,” said Verma. “But the boards can be SEO’d, and they can rank when searchers search for that brand’s name. Really, Pinterest is a catalog in an interesting, unique board.”

For those companies looking to run a Pinterest promotion, and reduce some of the friction associated with them, there are tools can help.

One is the aforementioned Pinfluencer. Launched in Feb. 2012, the platform has hosted and tracked more than 50 holiday promotions for brands, such as Gilt, Jetsetter, WayFair, Martha Stewart, Shape Magazine, and others reaching nearly a half million Pinterest users.

Brands who ran their contests and sweepstakes on Pinfluencer increased their follower acquisition rate by 156 percet while their Pins/day jumped by 125 percent.

The way it works is Pinfluencer creates a Web-based platform for brands, retailers, publishers and agencies to easily create turn-key contest and sweepstakes marketing campaigns on Pinterest and boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality. The platform allows marketers to deploy custom branded contests and sweepstakes with significantly improved user experiences for the participants, resulting in higher entry rates. The dashboard also provides insights into clicks and revenue and saves marketers hours of manual work by automatically tracking user eligibility and allows them to proactively interact with the ineligible participants to maximize the success of the promotion.

“With Pinfluencer we were able to easily run a successful scavenger-type contest that generated 7 million impressions of our Jetsetter pins on Pinterest,” said Jonathan Goldmann, head of social at Jetsetter.com said. “Pinfluencer’s Promotions dashboard tracked not just participants and pins, but also ROI metrics like revenue and clicks and made the reporting very intuitive.”

A scavenger-type contest is one promotion type that can be ran on Pinfluencer’s Pinterest promotions platform. Others include create-a-board contests (like Express’s), repin to a board and pin to win.

WayFair, a U.S.-based e-commerce company, leveraged Pinfluencer to create its "Turkey Day Tabletop" challenge.

"We challenged users to pin items for their ideal Thanksgiving table and spread, dishware, centerpieces, recipes and décor," said WayFair Senior Manager of Social Media Trisha Mack. "We saw a 34 percent lift in eligible entries and a 21 percent growth in pins/day from wayfair.com (compared to the same three-week period previous to the contest). In terms of ROI, we saw about a 27 percent increase in referral traffic and revenue coming from Pinterest during the contest period."

Prior to leveraging Pinfluencer services, WayFair held four contests on Pinterest, on its own. These proved to be clunky, as people were required to email a link of their completed board to WayFair.

Pinfluencer streamlines the process, as companies can host the promotions on Facebook or on their own websites, easily build a contest with custom rules from a menu of options and use the Pinfluencer tracker and dashboard to determine how a contest is performing, check participants’ eligibility and track them. Finally, the platform makes it easy to judge boards and rank participants.

“Marketers can host their contests and sweepstakes on a Facebook tab powered by Pinfluencer and convert their Facebook fans into avid pinners on Pinterest. Every pin has a traffic and sales driving potential,” said Verma.

Curalate, a marketing platform for the visual Web, also offers a Pinterest module – dubbed Promote. This service also reduces some of the challenges marketers face when running a contest on Pinterest by integrating registration, management and tracking into its platform (as opposed to using disparate systems to accomplish the same result).

By making contests easier, Curalate has increased participation and engagement for its clients, which includes Carnival Cruise Lines (see results here).

And, as Pinterest cruises to be more top of mind with marketers, Web workers should expect more Pinterest platforms to capitalize on the overwhelming amount of social and e-commerce potential it has.

Pinterest is also recognizing its power. It is offering more and more business-related tools and guidance, including those for promotions. Check out Pinterest's tips on running a promotion, here.