Pinterest Brand Pages – Should My Company Pin Up?

There’s been a lot of talk about Pinterest, the new social discovery network for visual content. So by now you might be wondering: What about Pinterest brand pages? Should my company pin up? Absolutely. Reaching almost 4.5 million unique visitors this month, Pinterest gives brands plenty of opportunity to grow their audiences and engage loyal customers by curating visually compelling “pinboards.”

Before we go any further, let’s quickly review the nitty-gritty. How does Pinterest work? Users can create online pinboards (like a bulletin board) for any number of categories—such as “DIY and crafts,” “food and drink,” “things to buy,” and more—and then “pin” items to them. You can pin content in three ways:

• By installing the Pin It button on your browser to grab an image from any website and add it to one of your pinboards
• By uploading directly to your pinboard from your computer or phone
• Or by repining other people’s pins

Easy enough, right? Well, businesses beware: Unlike broadcast channels Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest is not a tool for self-promotion, according to its pin etiquette. Instead, it’s designed for you to curate and share things you love.

So how on earth can you make the platform work for your brand with that restriction? There are a handful of companies that have begun using Pinterest to support the ideas behind their products, which is what Pinterest Co-Founder Evan Sharp believes is crucial. “For most consumer brands, the idea behind your brand makes sense on Pinterest,” he said in an interview with Mashable. Pinterest encourages a more holistic approach to marketing, and, if done well, it can be more effective than traditional marketing because consumers can really see how your brand fits into their lives.

Here are a few examples of companies that are already using the new visual social network to support the ideas behind their products and some other strategies you might consider:

Chobani: The yogurt brand’s winning strategy is to engage their community through recipe boards for treats that substitute yogurt for ingredients like sour cream.

West Elm: The furniture brand posts images categorized by aesthetic themes like “modernist,” “naturalist,” and “globalist” to inspire the designer in you—without taking an overtly sales-y approach.

Rent the Runway: The fashion-rental site groups its boards by occasions to help you craft the perfect look for any event.

As we’ve learned from Facebook and Twitter, running contests is another strategy for capturing the attention of your fan base. Recently, Land’s End Canvas ran a successful contest on Pinterest called the “Pin It To Win It” campaign. Users’ official “entry” for the contest consisted of a curated pinboard with 10 to 20 images of Land’s End apparel. With around 200 boards created for the contest, roughly 4,000 images of Land’s End merchandise were injected into the Pinterest feed at no cost. Running contests like this is a great way to expose your brand to a large audience, given the viral nature of these images and the engaged Pinterest audience.

You might also consider using Pinterest like a focus group. Since your company’s followers will volunteer a lot of information—by pinning products they love, places they enjoy, foods they salivate over, and things that inspire them—you can track what they’re pinning, see who else they’re following, and use this information to glean insights about your target consumers.

The addictive, visually stimulating social network has taken the Web by storm. According to SeedWalker, Pinterest often drives more traffic than Facebook and has already exceeded Etsy, Picasa, and Flickr in visitor count. In 2012, all indications are that Pinterest will be the new darling.

Ranking the Social Media Big 4 – A Strategy Intro

Okay, let’s settle down and take a deep breath with this Social Media thing.  You’re not going to burst into a ball of flames if you don’t do Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and LinkedIn RIGHT NOW.

Saying you don’t have the time and resources is a legitimate concern.  So are questions about how your business is actually going to grow through Social Media, or whether these social media sites have anything to do with your customers.

For one, social media isn’t one-size-fits all.  A real estate agent is going to use it much differently than a stock broker or a retailer.  Two, like all marketing initiatives, you have to do the strategy groundwork to make sure you’re casting your net where your customers are swimming.  Last, you better have some good, creative talent in-house, or be prepared to commit to outsourcing if you’re going to make it work, because it isn’t a one shot deal.

With this in mind, I’m doing 3 posts (maybe 4) that rank the big 4 social media sites for different businesses:  B2B, retail, real estate, and a yet to be determined 4th option.

The goal is to express that, at the end of the day, you need to make social media work for you, not the other way around.

The first is the B2B Social Media Rankings Edition.

We’ll do the others soon.  We’d tell you when, but we’re a small business here and we have lots of things to do, so keep your pants on and subscribe.

Growing your Personal Brand By Connecting Twitter to the Real World

There are two types of tweeple in this world: Celebrities and non-celebrities. If you’re Conan or Ashton and you’re a twilebrity, you won’t have any trouble finding followers. Same goes for guys like Matt Cutts and Copyblogger, big names and Twitter captains in their field.

For these guys Twitter is a bona fide marketing channel, one that came from a previously minted fame or celebrity, not the other way around. Conan noted in his super funny sit down at Google that the “Legally Funny on TV” tour was sold out with one Tweet, which pointed people to a website. One free and all powerful Tweet.

If you’re Joe Tweep you don’t have the opportunity to leverage Twitter to capitalize on your already established fame because you aren’t famous. In this case the road to a meaningful following is going to be arduous and winding, and — if not done properly — may not be worth it at the end of the day.

The easy option is to solve your non-celebrity by gaming the system. There are sites out there that allow you to pay or trade for followers, like boosttwitterfollowers.com, where you become a VIP member, and you essentially pay to follow people who promise to follow you back (I haven’t tried it) for as little as $49.99 per month.

The problem with this and other spammy services is that regardless of the faux-credibility received from the size of your following, there’s still no brand. Yeah you might have 100k followers, but who are those people? Why are they following you? If 99 percent of those followers were brokered, then all you’ve got is a very large and very soulless following. No brand means no trust, that no one will re-tweet or connect with you in a meaningful way that will result in more business.

The real means to a legitimate Twitter following is through hard work and networking. Good followings are grounded in real people in real communities, as you likely have with your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn, where you know the people and they are likely to comment or Like what you’re doing.

For Tweeple who aren’t concerned with celebrity but still want to use Twitter as a business tool, you’ll need to find a community of tweeple and establish legitimate two-way relationships. And the best way to ensure your followers read and retweet your tweets is to meet them in person.