How Whole Foods Built Awareness on Pinterest

By Montrie Rucker AdamsOctober 22, 2013 Blog branding, marketing, media, pinterest, sharing, social media, whole foods

Pinterest 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:

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?”
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.
Fewer boards with more content vs. numerous boards with fewer pins: They used keywords to find the most popular topics.
Using images to drive traffic to the website: Photos of dishes were repinned often and the recipe ingredients linked to the WF website.
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.
Infographics: Were popular repins, so they expanded their content by adding text to their photos.
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.

Does Your Social Media End at 5pm?

By Montrie Rucker AdamsJune 19, 2013 Blog facebook, hootsuite, inbound marketing, linkedin, sharing, social media, twitter

Occasionally I receive emails from my web developer who also assists VMI with our blogging and social media activities. She often reminds me that social media doesn’t stop when I shut down. “Your business is open 24/7 and is seen all over the world…. and in different time zones… so why don’t you tweet after 5pm?,” she asks.

Back on May 3, 2013, she sent the following email out to her clients – Subject: “Does Social Media Stop on the Weekends.”

To my social media clients,

A client recently contacted me to see if I would also do their social media on the weekends. I said sure because social media is ongoing – it’s going on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To be honest, why share only during your regular business hours. Your website and business technically is open for business all over the world. Are you missing an opportunity to reach out and touch one of your customers in a different city, state, country? Time Zone matters!

This intrigued my client because I told him that I now have clients in Alaska (4 hours behind me), California (3 hours behind me), Texas (1 hour behind me) and one in London, England which is 5 hours ahead of me. So what about the people in those areas? Are they even seeing what you tweet/share? Probably not if you are doing it only in YOUR time zone.

Donald Trump says, “Your Fired!”… My Client says, “Girl, you are HIRED.” Made me laugh.

As I was reading a few news items and blogs today, I came across a blog from Inbound Marketing Agents entitled, “Social Media 101: Your Perfect Posting Schedule.” There is a great infographic found in the blog stating the best time to post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. For instance, the best time to post to LinkedIn is from 7am to 9am and 5pm to 6pm but not between 10pm and 6am. It says avoid posting in the evening because traffic fades. I am also assuming that in most places, many people may be asleep.

If you’re working in different time zones, you can always adjust your post times. If you’re using Twitter, there’s HootSuite, an online tool that helps you schedule when your tweets will go out. I’ve talked about HootSuite before in my blogs.

Take a look at their blog. They have useful tips for creating a posting schedule that will meet your posting needs.

Montrie here’s the link to the blog – http://www.inboundmarketingagents.com/inbound-marketing-agents-blog/bid/294669/Social-Media-101-Your-Perfect-Posting-Schedule

Use These Clever Tools to get Likes, Followers and Shares

By Montrie Rucker AdamsJune 12, 2013 Blog content lockers, facebook, lead generation, sharing, twitter

When you make the decision to use social media, you are making a decision to share what you know. You’re being “social.” You want people to read what you have to say. If they don’t, the outcome is like standing at the podium before an empty auditorium.

There are a few clever little tools out there to get your web visitors to share your content and to generate leads. My website is built on the WordPress platform. I’ll share a few WP tools, but there are other non-Wordpress tools you can research that work the same way.

Pay with a Tweet – This allows your visitors to download files after publishing a tweet on his/her twitter account. For example, you have a free eBook you’d like to give away. Once the visitor clicks the download button, a Tweet screen will appear for them to Tweet your message. Once the Tweet is sent, they are returned to your website where they can then download your eBook.

Content Lockers – There are several branded content lockers available to lock down content. You place a small code in between content and when a visitor comes to your website – they must either “follow” you on Twitter or “like” you on Facebook. A few free content lockers are:

Easy WordPress Content Locker – Easy WordPress Content Locker allows easy implementation of content lock gateway widget code to monetize your content. It works with code from CPALead, Leadbolt, BlamAds, Adscendmedia, Adgatemedia, MGCash, Dollarade and many other CPA Networks.
Facebook Like – Content Locker – With this powerful Content Locker you can lock your entire blog for a user, until he hits the Facebook “like” button.
Twitter Content Locker – The plugin allows the user to lock part of a post or page. The user must share it on Twitter to view the content.

If you aren’t a WordPress user, you can use Google to search for these keywords to find codes that will be suitable for your website. You may find that there is an increase in “likes” and “followers” by using one of these tools.