Tips

3 Things to Remember When Using Pinterest

Pinterest, the virtual scrapbooking site, has fast become one of the hottest social media platforms around. While you probably spend a lot of time sharing interesting links on Pinterest, did you know that it’s also a great tool to spread the word of your products and services? Especially for those businesses that provide design, fashion or retail services. When using Pinterest, however, there are three crucial things that you need to be aware of.

Broken Links

There is nothing more frustrating than reading a great teaser on Pinterest, clicking the link to read more, only to have the link fail. When you’re pining for business, this can cost you clients, credibility and business. Please take the time to ensure that each and every link you post takes your readers to the right place. There is nothing more frustrating than a broken link.

Sharing = Endorsing

Like with most social networks used for business, a valuable piece of advice is this: Do not share any link unless you’ve read it first. In social media, sharing is endorsing. Even if the link you are sharing comes from a seemingly reliable source, there are things that can pop up in an article that may not be appropriate to share with your audience. There may be some questionable links at the end of the article or advertisements that do not mesh with your business values. So unless you’ve looked at the whole article, image or video, do not hit that Repin button.

Watch Where You Link

When you’re sharing a site on Pinterest, make sure you link to the permalink, and not to the main page of the site. A permalink is the URL that will bring you to the specific page the post can be found on, and not just the home page of a website. With most websites, people post new content on the homepage so it changes often. What was on the homepage one day, may be gone the next. By going deeper into the site to find the right page and linking to that specific URL (or permalink), you’ll be able to ensure that your audience will always be able to find what they’re looking for. For small business owners, Pinterest can prove to be a valuable, fun way to build brand awareness via visually driven content. It’s a great way to highlight your products and share your expertise to show your audience who you are and what you do. As an added bonus, Pinterest is an incredible driver of traffic to websites - more than Google+. Youtube and LinkedIn combined. While you don’t need to invest hours of upkeep each week, with a little TLC, you could be pining your way to business success.

Have you joined Pinterest yet? Please follow us on Pinterest for more great tips and information.

,

The anatomy of a blog post

,

We’ve been talking about blogging a lot lately because we believe that a blog is one of the most valuable tools a business can use. Here’s a great post from the archives on how to create good, sharable, clickable content for your blog!

*****

I don’t know about you, but I’m a blog post skimmer.  I wish I could promise that every blog post I open gets all of my attention and I take the time to read it all - but I don’t.

Here are some tips on what I find makes a blog post easy to read, skim, and decide if I want to spend more time reading all the words.

1. Clear content

Introduce what you’re going to be talking about and what the goal of the post is.  I did this by introducing the topic by saying I need blog posts to be easy to skim and saying I was going to give tips on what I find works to achieve this.

2. Section headings

If the post is broken down by section headings that jump out at me and give me a feel for the topics in the post, I’ll have a better sense on whether or not the post is hitting points of interest for me. It lets me quickly skim the post to see if it’s what I thought the post was about and whether or not I want to keep reading what the person has to say.

3. Bullet points

  • skim-able
  • succinct
  • don’t require full sentences
  • people don’t like to read long paragraphs of text

4. Photos

Photos in a blog post make your post more readable by:

  • giving a visual relating to what you’re talking about
  • breaking up the text making it more appealing to the eye
  • making your posts more clickable

Here’s why: When posting to other sites (like Facebook) it will pull in a few lines of text as well as an accompanying image. It has been proven that having a thumbnail image in a link update increases click thrus.

5. Questions

If you want to make it easy for people to engage, ask a question so they know you want their opinions and input. The more specific and easy to answer the question is, the more likely you are to get a response.

What additional tips would you give for generating good blog posts?

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required
Email Format

Sixty Second Social: Broadcasting vs. Engagement

We’ve all seen the social media users that do nothing but tweet out links, quotes or statements. You look at their profile and there’s rarely any interaction with their followers.

Traditional media is about broadcasting. New media, social media (whatever you want to call it) is about an ongoing dialogue:

Twitter
Scroll through the tweets in your timeline and find nuggets to retweet or respond to - it only takes a few minutes. Don’t forget to reply to those who mention you. It doesn’t have to be every single mention, but it should be as many as possible.

Facebook / Google+
Scroll through your stream and comment on the posts that interest you. Share them with your followers if appropriate.

Blogs
Leave meaningful comments on other blog posts. You don’t have to agree with the person’s thoughts, but commenting lets others know that you’re out there - and there’s no better way to promote your own work.

Engagement isn’t quick or convenient, but it’s absolutely worth your time.

What do you think of users who exclusively broadcast content rather than engaging followers? Do you think a “broadcaster’s”content is valued as much as content from someone who actively engages their followers?

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net