Tag: pinterest

Pinterest Told to “Get Green” by its Users and Greenpeace
By Categories: Blog Tags: , , , , ,

solar panelsIt seems that no one has an excuse for not going “green.”

At a demonstration outside Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, influential Pinterest users and Greenpeace activists asked the social network to use renewable energy to power its platform.

Mimicking Pinterest’s interface, the demonstrators set up two 15-foot by 13-foot “boards” with “pins” that stated, “Make Our Pins Green.” The featured “pins” were designed by Pinterest users who have almost five million combined followers.

The activists also set up a solar-powered café in a trailer with functioning solar panels, keeping the coffee hot with solar-powered burners.

Pinterest has 70 million users with 750 million boards and 30 billion pins but has yet to commit to a sustainable energy program.  Other tech companies have committed to using renewable energy including Apple, Google and Facebook.

Pinterest is powered by Amazon Web Services, whose data centers are only powered by 15 percent renewable energy. Greenpeace is pushing all major Internet companies to shift to renewable energy sources. It is inviting Pinterest users to join the campaign and share content from pinterest.com/greenpeaceusa/clickclean.

How Whole Foods Built Awareness on Pinterest
By Categories: Blog Tags: , , , , , ,

whole foods on pinterestPinterest is growing rapidly, with more monthly usage than Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ combined. Time spent on the site averages 77 minutes, compared to Facebook’s 10 minutes.

Whole Foods (WF) didn’t just pin randomly to create their robust community of followers. They had a system:

  1. Growing the community. WF devised a video series for its boards on such topics as urban farming which did not focus on their brand: the aim was to tie the brand to specific food cultures. The urban farming board was entitled: “How does your garden grow?”
  2. Keeping their board topics broad to pull in more people: vegetarians, gardeners, “shop locally” proponents, etc. They built on their broad base by creating boards that were Whole Foods Market-related, like products or recipes using the brand’s products.
  3. Fewer boards with more content vs. numerous boards with fewer pins: They used keywords to find the most popular topics.
  4. Using images to drive traffic to the website: Photos of dishes were repinned often and the recipe ingredients linked to the WF website.
  5. Story telling: WF raises funds for the Whole Planet Foundation, which helps farmers in developing countries through microcredit transactions. Defining this organization was helped by using maps, showing people who benefited from the program and pictures of their food products.
  6. Infographics: Were popular repins, so they expanded their content by adding text to their photos.
  7. Collaboration: Pinterest is for people to share based on what they love. As accounts followed each other, they added to each one’s boards. WF partnered with them to produce events.

Think about how your company or organization can take advantage of this growing social media tool. Remember the old saying: A picture is worth a thousand words.

 

Six Free Tools to Help Measure Your Social Media Activities
By Categories: Blog Tags: , , , , , , ,

Some of my clients are small businesses. Does this mean they should not participate in social media?  Does it mean that return on investment (ROI) doesn’t matter? Of course not. I hear it all the time… “It’s not in my budget. My budget won’t allow that expenditure.”  If you want to measure your social media ROI, there are many tools you can use.

Some typical products used for Facebook, Twitter, blogs and websites are:

  • BackTweets.com: BackTweets is a Twitter time machine which enables you to search through a tweet history for tweets that link back to your site. It doesn’t matter if the sharer tweeted your domain name or it was hidden in a tiny URL, BackTweets will be able to find it. This can come in handy when searching for people who love your product/service or who are out there complaining about it – you can immediately address those issues.
  • Facebook Insights: Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, content consumption, and content creation, page owners are better equipped to improve their business and create better Facebook experiences. Only page administrators can view Insights data for the business pages they own or administer.
  • Icerocket.com: Icerocket works like a typical search engine – except it searches on Facebook, Twitter and blogging systems.
  • Klout.com: Klout for Business is a set of tools designed to help you unlock the reach and power of your most influential audience members. By joining Klout, you will have access to free cross-network statistics, tracking and measuring your audience’s influence, and discovering moments and topics that matter most to your social media audience.
  • Pinpuff.com : On Pinpuff you can measure “Pinfluence,” your popularity, influence and reach on Pinterest. It also decides monetary value of your pins and the traffic your pins generate.  It’s similar to Klout and offers perks for popularity.
  • Pinterest Web Analytics:  Pinterest helps people collect and organize the things they love. It allows you to see what people are pinning from your website.

I haven’t used Pinterest yet, but I hear a lot of great stories about it. I think I will make that one of my work-weekend activities – to think of things I may want to “pin,” join Pinterest and start pinning.

What about you? Are you on Pinterest? Let me know so I can see what you’re pinning!

Pack a Punch Using Twitter
By Categories: Blog Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

“Tweeting” is the new email. With smart phones in abundance, millions are using Twitter to communicate around the world and even to people sitting next to them. How can you use this great communications tool to benefit your business?

Using Twitter to market your business in 140 characters or less can be very challenging. Given that you may want to share a link and add a few hashtags, your message will be greatly shortened. So what can you do to make sure your tweet is read and re-tweeted? You need to be very creative and selective about the words you use.

Your Headline

Using techniques like the ones provided below can definitely draw attention to your tweet:

  • Don’t Make These Mistakes on Twitter or Do You Make These Mistakes on Twitter?
  • How to Attract and Influence People on Social Media (or replace the words Social Media with Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn)
  • How to _  [blank]  __ on Twitter
  • Little Known Ways to _     [blank]_____ on Twitter
  • _[add a specific number]_ Ways Twitter Can Help _[add a subject]__
  •   [blank]   Ways to Get the Most Out of    [blank]    
  •   [blank]   Reasons Why    [blank]      
  • Last Chance to ___[blank]     

Attaching a Link

Twitter links to your blog and news stories can be long. If so, to get the most out of your 140 characters, you should use a URL shortening service. URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct users to the required page.

A few of the services available are:

If you decide not to use a shortening service, Twitter will use its own which could leave you with less characters with which to work. See Twitter announcement here. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/upcoming-tco-changes

Adding Hashtags

Keep hashtags short. There is no need to overwhelm the reader. Pick one that best fits your blog and headline so that it reaches your target audience. Don’t use a lot of random words that mean nothing to your message.

Twitter can be a great business tool if used properly. Make sure you are following businesses in your industry and others that are complementary.

Try it and document your results. Let me know what happens…

Many thanks to Media Creations Group for contributing this blog.

Double for Your Trouble – 5 Easy Steps To Get More from Your Blogs
By Categories: Blog Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s so much more to the Internet than even five or six years ago. Many new businesses, websites, bloggers, news feeds…not to mention the popularity of social networking like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

There is a lot to absorb. Many people are not reading everything they receive in their email. They aren’t visiting all the great websites and blogs. It’s too overwhelming.

Think of your newsletter as mini websites. Businesses created hard copy versions and mailed them. Then came the electronic versions via email (e-newsletters). People are now blogging the information – writing and sharing via social media tools.

If you are a blogger try these five easy steps for getting two for one…:

  1. Why do the work twice? Create an e-newsletter out of the blogs you’ve written the previous month.
  2. If you have upcoming events, add in a calendar.
  3. Include an RSS feed to your blogs.
  4. Include links to your social media pages and links to past newsletters.
  5. Include photos from the previous month, and a list of upcoming topics on this month’s blog.

Get double for your trouble. The information shared is always valuable. Just because the blog was written, doesn’t mean it was read. Create an e-newsletter and get it back out there in a different way.