Pinterest For Business - A Valuable Marketing Tool

Pinterest has often been underrated in its power to be used as a tool for companies hoping to expand their digital marketing. With an audience of over 70 million users, and as the fastest growing social media platform in the world, there is huge potential for businesses to capitalise on the opportunity to visually advertise their products.

Who does it benefit?

Businesses who focus on highly visual advertising, such as interior designers, clothing companies, restaurants and many others can benefit in particular from the ability to create a Pinterest site. With 72% of Pinterest’s audience being women, it can be an exceedingly valuable tool for targeting a specific demographic and allows you to interact with your customers in ways that other social media platforms can’t – it can act as an impressive visual showcase of your products driving traffic to your own website and increasing sales. If your business is highly visual, then there is a lot of potential to advertise through this form of social media, with 60% of major brands having their own Pinterest accounts. Smaller businesses should also be encouraged to take up this approach in their marketing strategy as it provides a ready-made audience and Pinterest itself provides educational materials specifically for businesses to learn how to market themselves through the business site.

Marketing your brand through visual images can be an overwhelmingly positive method of advertising products, and is often very effective. In January 2012, Pinterest drove greater traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube combined, showing the potential power it can have as part of a marketing campaign.

There are a number of new Pinterest apps and tools which businesses can use to make the most out of their accounts:

1)      WiseStamp:

A beneficial tool for businesses that enables them to show their most recent pins in their emails. Very useful for Pinterest for businesses as it can be added to existing newsletters, encouraging existing customers to become a follower of the company’s Pinterest pinboards.

2)      Pinterest’s open board:

A great way to interact with your customers and make them feel involved in your brand. If your company offers an open board allowing customers to pin photos of themselves, family members and friends enjoying and using your products, it will create a positive image and entice others into trying your products.

3)      Pinterest Contests:

A good way to advertise your brand on Pinterest is to run competitions offering prizes to those who repin your images or post to your open boards. This will help to increase the audience of your brand creating new followers and driving and increasing amount of traffic to your site. It also helps to connect with your existing follower base.

4)      Rich pins:

Rich pins makes it much easier for people to act when they find something that they like on Pinterest – which can only benefit your brand as it makes it easy for Pinterest users to buy your products. Rich pins include automatically updated details like prices, availability, movie reviews and ingredients.

5)      Pinpuff:

Download the Pinterest app Pinpuff to find out exactly how much of an impression you are making on the Pinterest community. This app will measure a user’s reach and influence and assigns a monetary value to each user, giving you a clearer idea of how profitable your boards might be.

6)      Pinstamatic:

Pinstamatic is an interesting Pinterest app that helps you to create more creative and original boards to draw in customers, and helps you to stand out from other customers marketing on Pinterest. For instance, it allows you to add quotations and sticky notes to your board and allows you to share music, location maps and more. This allows you to add to the visual content on your Pinterest page with text, audio, locations and websites, enhancing the utility of your Pinterest page and attracting users for greater periods of time.

What do you think?

Do you think Pinterest is a valuable marketing tool for businesses?

Facebook Ad Changes: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?

Facebook Ads Get New Formats: Facebook advertisers now have more options in ad sizes to choose from to best suit their needs. ”The changes mostly impact page post link ads, page like ads, offers ads and event ads, because these ad formats weren’t originally designed to work across all placements on Facebook.”


Facebook increases the size of images in many of their "ad units to give advertisers more room to display their brand or products."


Google+ Introduces Embedded Posts: After embeddable tweets, Pinterest posts and Facebook updates, you can now also embed your Google+ posts onto your website. “Text, photo and media posts are all supported, and the embeds are fully interactive, so visitors can +1, comment and follow you inline.”


You can now embed your public Google+ posts to your website pages.

Google Integrates Google+ Sign-In With Author Attribution: This is currently only being piloted on WordPress.com (not for self-hosted WordPress.org blogs) and Typepad. ”So if you connect your WordPress.com account with Google, for instance, the articles you publish will now be associated with your Google+ profile automatically.”


"Today users may see your name, picture and/or a link to your Google+ profile when your content appears in Search, News and other Google products."

Facebook Announces New Tools for Surfacing Conversations: “Selected news organizations can begin to integrate Facebook conversations into their broadcasts or coverage by displaying public posts of real-time activity about any given topic.”


"From favorite television shows to sporting events to the latest news; the conversations are happening on Facebook."

Foursquare Lets You Search Menus: Foursquare expands Explore search to include full menus. “Type in the dish you’re looking for” and Foursquare will scour their “menu database of over 43 million menu items from over half a million places to find exactly what you’re looking for.”


Foursquare will show you all the restaurants nearby that serve the dish you're looking for.

Don’t miss this:

Social Media Success Summit 2013

Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a special online conference designed to help you master social media marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner).


Social Media Success Summit 2013.

Forty-five of the world’s leading social media pros will show you how. Instructors include Jay Baer (author, Youtility), Chris Brogan (co-author, Impact Equation),Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Mark Schaefer (author, Return on Influence), Jesse Stay (author,Google+ for Dummies), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies) and experts from General Electric, Sony, E! Online, Kelly Servicesand Discovery Channel–just to mention a few. Fully online. Click here to learn more.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.

5 Mistakes You Might Be Making on Social Media

Guest post by Shanna Mallon from Straight North.

Let’s be honest: To most brands, social media is still confusing.

Use Facebook to boost business—but how? Find success on social networks—but what does that mean?

If these are questions that you’ve asked yourself, you’re not alone. The truth is, most brands are making the same mistakes on social media, and you might be one of them. To help you find out, here’s a look at five of the most common mistakes happening on social networks. Take a look and see if they describe you.

1. Ignoring Social Media Completely

Brands that don’t understand the impact of social media may overlook it completely. Calling Facebook a distraction and Twitter “empty noise,” they miss valuable opportunities to connect with fans, reinforce their brand messaging, and promote their products. While their competitors engage with audiences online, they’re nowhere to be found.

2. Thinking “Likes” = Sales

A lot of brands get on social media with the goal of “getting a million likes” or some other arbitrary number. Getting affirmation on social media is fun, but it’s not the ultimate goal. Will a certain number of likes translate to a certain number of sales? The truth is, probably not. And because likes don’t equal sales, you shouldn’t make them your end game.

3. Talking More Than Listening

Nobody likes a blowhard. But when all you do on social media is talk about your own products and promotions, that’s exactly what you become. Fans will get bored of listening to your constant hot air and likely run the other way. Plus, what’s even worse is that you miss the chance to learn about your audience. Make social media a conversation instead of a monologue. Rather than only talking, try listening to what your readers and customers have to say. When you learn to listen and engage, you learn to build meaningful community—and that usually translates to more sales over time.

4. Being Inconsistent

This week, you’re on Facebook every day; next week, you forget all about it. Today, your Twitter voice is helpful and professional; tomorrow, you’re cracking casual jokes about your customers. Who are you? What is your brand all about? If you don’t make the answers to these questions consistent, your audience will notice—and they probably won’t stick around to watch your changing tides. It’s important on social media to be consistent, both in terms of voice and content, in order to make the most of your influence.

5. Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

With so many social networks available today—from Pinterest to Facebook to LinkedIn to Instagram—and more developing all the time (Vine, anybody?), it’s easy for brands to bite off more with social media than they can chew. Rather than taking on every social network, brands do well to strategically choose a few to which they may devote more time. Take time to figure out which networks mean the most to your audience, and stick to those.

Your Thoughts

Is your company guilty of any of the above social media blunders? If so, take heart: You’re not alone. What’s more, it’s never too late to start making changes.