6 Ways to Promote Your Business With Pinterest Places

Do you use Pinterest to promote your business?

Have you heard of Pinterest place pins?

Whether you have a storefront, products or a travel aspect to your business, consider exploring the geographic elements of Pinterest

In this article, you’ll learn six ways you can use Pinterest place pins boards to promote your business or products.

Pinterest’s new Places boards have really taken off.

How Place Pins Work

Businesses now have two ways to associate their pins with a geographic location. In addition to rich pins, Pinterest introduced Pinterest place pins in November 2013.

Place pins use Foursquare‘s location API combined with Mapbox’s map technology. Plus, if a location you want to pin doesn’t show up, you can simply add it.

Brands can create a board to focus on places in a single city or country, or a board that focuses on similar places across the globe.

This board from Outside Magazine shares places across the United States.

This tool is a dream come true for companies in the travel industry. Just check out Hotels.com‘s Hit the Slopes board of best places to ski, New York City: The Official Guide’s Free (and Almost Free) in NYC board and all of the #VXTraveler City Guides on Virgin America’s Pinterest page. Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts has a variety of place boards, showcasing everything from concierge suggestions to honeymoon destinations.

However, just about any company can think outside the box and come up with a creative way to use Pinterest place pins.

Outside Magazine created a board to share places across the United States that offer lots of outside recreation opportunities to their residents.

Use place pins not only for your locations, but to share other places that would be of interest to your followers.

How to Create a Pinterest Places Board

 

To get started, select Place Boards in the menu from the upper left-hand corner of your Pinterest profile.

The Place Boards option has been added to the main Pinterest menu.

From there, click on Create Board. As you fill in the fields, make sure you select the Add a Map option.

Be sure the Add a Map option has Yes next to it.

On the next page, start adding pins by clicking on Add a Place.

Place pin boards display with a map behind them.

This is where you assign a city location to your pin. Once you choose a city, your searches will return results for venues in that location. For example, Bonefish Grill has several locations across the nation, but only the Boise location showed up in my search.

Manage the location of your place pin by changing the city.

As you add place pins, you can change the city location at any time, which makes it easy to share multiple locations for the same vendor on one map.

Now that you know how to create a board for your place pins, let’s see how you can use them in everyday promotion efforts.

#1: Map Your Brick-and-Mortar Locations

 

How great would it be if people who found you on Pinterest knew exactly where your nearest location is?

Whether you have one location or a dozen, Pinterest place pins let you provide your customers with a visual guide to where they can find you.

Starbucks Coffee did a nice twist on this concept. They created a Store Design board and pinned the locations of their uniquely designed stores.

Starbucks’ Store Design board has pins for uniquely designed stores throughout the world.

Create a Locations board to highlight your locations in one country or around the world. Whether you want to add a unique slant, as Starbucks did, is up to you.

#2: Pin Your Clients

 

Part of positioning your brand or business is pointing toward the clients you choose to work with.
When you display your current clients on a map with Pinterest place pins, it’s easy to see how far your geographic influence reaches. You can also provide a link back to their sites so potential clients can see the companies you work with and what they do.

Create a Client board to showcase both the quantity and quality of your current clients to anyone who’s thinking of working with you in the future.

#3: Pin Ideas for Your Clients/Customers

 

Another option is to create a board with tips for your clients based on where they’re located.
Simple Skincare created a places board called Winter Skincare Around the U.S. The board has skincare tips for different climates, and illustrates the best ways for the people in those regions to use their products.

Simple Skincare has a places board with skincare tips for customers who live in different parts of the United States.

If you can add tips for customers based on the place they live, that can raise your expertise level and the value of your brand.

#4: Introduce the Team

 

Every business is made up of employees who come together and work as a team. They provide the product or service that makes your business successful.

Pinterest place pins can help your customers to get to know your team as people.
Using place pins, map the hometowns of all of your employees, alongside their favorite restaurants or shops. Better yet, create a group board with all employees and let them pin their favorite places and spaces on their own. These insights give customers a glimpse of your team members’ personalities.

People like buying from people they trust. A board featuring employees helps customers get to know your team and build that relationship.

#5: Share Your Inspiration and Process

 

Every brand or business is inspired by something. Learning about that inspiration helps people identify with you.

Tundra Restaurant Supply in Boulder, Colorado created a places board to showcase their favorite places in their state, so the restaurants they work with could get to know them better.

Tundra Restaurant Supply created a places board so they could share how much they love their state with their customers.

Customers love transparency, and using Pinterest place pins to show them all of the ins and outs of your business makes them more likely to trust you.

Use Pinterest place pins to share the locations around the world that inspire your products or services. If you own a cafe, show customers where you get your coffee beans. If you run a Chinese restaurant, tell them where your dishes originate. If other businesses work with you to create your final product, pin them too.

You can also share your whole process from start to finish. This will encourage loyalty from current customers and attract new customers.

#6: Demonstrate Your Customer Reach With a Competition

 

No matter where you’re based, chances are that your products and services are used across the country or even around the world. Let your customers tell that story!

Encourage your customers to pin pictures of your products or services from wherever they are and offer a prize to the pinner who lives farthest from your location.

A competition gives your customers a reason to share the product they bought from you. Not only will people see how popular your products are, each new pin increases your visibility.

Over to You

Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms currently out there, and it’s continually growing. There are a ton of creative ideas popping up on how to embrace new features like Pinterest place pins.

Whether it’s to showcase yourself, your employees, your clients or your partners, use these tips for inspiration on how you can use boards with Pinterest’s place pins to connect your brand to customers around the world.

What do you think? Are you using Pinterest place pins? What ideas can you share for this newest Pinterest feature? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

Four Great Tactics to Make Social Media Work for You

Social media pages form one of the foundations of inbound marketing -- they're where you can post your valuable content, using a call-to-action to drive visitors to your landing page, where they may become qualified leads.

The challenge, of course, is making your social media pages stand out in the crowd.
You can find plenty of social media tips to boost your visibility on the web, but these four give you a range of options that suit your goals and resources.

Make it easy -- then, fun. No visitor should have to search around to find your social media pages. Use naming standards for your home pages that make it immediately clear who you are.
Then, have some fun. Categorize your Twitter content -- blogs, tweets and videos -- with hashtags that engage, inform and contain relevant keywords - like these examples, which actually won "best hashtag" awards! (Note: hashtags are for Twitter or any other platform that allows for "click through." They do not work on Facebook.)

Look beyond Facebook. While there's no denying its paradigm-shifting impact on social media and personal relationships, Facebook is highly saturated -- to the point where some analysts reported decreases in overall usage and app downloads in 2012.

That doesn't mean you should shun Facebook, of course -- it's often the first choice for social searches. But you can also consider outlets that may provide a better fit for your services via a smaller, but more influential, audience.

• For example, LinkedIn is the world's largest business network for a reason -- it's highly credible, deep platform for making connections. If you are targeting B2B (business to business), some relevant connections from LinkedIn could put you in touch with influential people who may not otherwise pay attention to Facebook pages.
• If you have B2C (business to consumer) goals and a product or service that is highly image-driven, Pinterest (which recently transitioned from invitation-only to all-access) draws millions of hits daily -- particularly from women, who make up nearly 60 percent of its audience.

Find advocates. Most advocates of social media tips would agree: few marketing tactics enhance credibility like kudos from impartial third-party source. Satisfied customers, industry awards and good reviews boost your profile and are easy to link from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social sites.
You can go the extra mile by finding brand advocate -- people who promote your products or services, but who are not on your payroll. Your best customer, for example, can star in a blog interview or host a how-to on YouTube. Such tactics would not only boost your credibility, they practically guarantee that the customer will be sharing the content on his networks.

Be a mensch. Not every message on your social site needs to be tied to sales. A company that reaches out to its community or the world at large is often seen as credible and trustworthy. Use your media to publicize worthy causes; then put your money where your tweets are by donating products, services or money and encouraging others to do the same.

Want to get more personal? "Like" and share great posts from your customers' pages, or those from your community.

Social Media Tips Can Work for You to Drive Links and Traffic
Yesterday's marketing tactics have been largely eclipsed by inbound marketing, which reflects the way consumers behave today. Getting the most from social media will help you make your mark in this wide-open environment.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7495113

Pinterest - The Beautiful Social Media

Pinterest is the newest big Social Media phenomenon after Facebook and Twitter. Although the beta version of Pinterest was launched in March 2010 which operated on an invitation-only basis, it eventually opened to everyone only in August 2012. The interest in Pinterest has been so great that it has become the fastest website in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark which was reported in January 2012.

When you visit the Pinterest website, what strikes you straightaway is the imagery. It is just full of beautiful images which you could not imagine existed. There are pictures posted of everything but mainly of places, clothing, food, babies and cute animals. But it is not just limited to these. The current statistics from Pinterest states the most popular pins to be in the order of Food and Drinks, DIY and Crafts, Home Decor, Women's Fashion, Hair and Beauty and other categories. In short, Pinterest has been taken to heart by the female population. Some estimates suggest the proportion of female users to range anything between 72-96% of total Pintrest users.

So how is Pinterest similar to or different from Facebook and Twitter you may ask. Imagine Pinterest to be at one extreme of image-to-text scale and Twitter at the other while Facebook is somewhere in the middle. In Pinterest there are features just like in Facebook and Twitter that make them social such as the ability to follow, like, share and comment on other users material, which in the case of Pinterest are only the images. The more powerful the image, the more interest you will provoke in visitors to your profile which in turn will result in your profile attracting more followers. As In other social media platforms, followers can be converted to customers.

So, if you have never been on Pinterest, this is how it works. Everything on Pinterest is organised around images. You can pin your images on pinboards which you can create around whatever category you choose. For instance you can create a board on your hobbies, events, businesses, travel, fashions, foods etc. You can even repin other users images you to one of your own boards.
If an image is liked enough, there is a great opportunity for it to go viral. Just imagine the effect that would have on your website in terms of the traffic it would attract if one or more of your images linked to your website went viral!

However, one of the major disadvantages of Pinterest must be finding attractive images to post regularly. Unlike Twitter and Facebook where you can conduct your social interaction with words, you cannot do this on Pinterest without first posting an image. To, overcome this issue, you can post images from third party sites such as Google and Flickr. You must always post images that are relevant to your pinboard and you must adhere to the copyright of the image you pin.

Just as in other social media, if you show interest in someone by following or liking, they are most likely to return the favour. And if those you follow are interested in your niche and they followed you back then you have accomplished what people in internet marketing strive to do, which is to get targeted traffic.

Images are very powerful and emotive objects to humans and therefore a great potential exists to monetize them. The easiest way is to attach affiliate links to the images. Unfortunately from internet marketers' point of view, this practice is frowned upon by Pinterest who have been known to alter the affiliate links to their own advantage. This practice by Pinterest could potentially land them in deep legal waters.

Unlike words which are plenty and readily available, images are restrictive but more importantly they are subject to copyright laws. Certain websites have opted out of having their images pinned on Pinterest by deploying a special meta tag that was released by Pinterest. This puts further limitations on finding attractive and unique images that are readily available.

All social media are evolving entities, including Pinterest. Perhaps it will adapt and evolve into something different in the future. However for now, it presents an enormous opportunity for internet marketer to do business on Pinterest.

Pinterest, as part of the overall internet marketing strategy could make a significant contribution to your online business. It is yet another viable source to make money online.
To your social media success!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7333332

52 Social Media Facts - Blow Your Mind

Today I came across 52 up to date social media facts. Some of these I found truly mind boggling. It just goes to show how huge social media is these days! It's so impressive how these social platforms have grown in stature.


Facebook
1. 85% of women are annoyed by their friends (note – I don’t think this is just limited to Facebook!!).
2. Links about sex are shared 90% more than any other link.
3. More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome.
4. 25% of users don’t bother with any kind of privacy control.
5. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

Statistics from Economist, Social Times, CNN.

Twitter
6. 750 tweets per second are shared on Twitter.
7. The original Twitter beta was launched on the birthday of CEO Evan Williams.
8. If Twitter was a country, it’d be the 12th largest in the world.
9. 30% of Twitter users have an income of more than $100,000.
10. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined (24 billion versus 4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).

Statistics from Compete, Twitter Press Centre and BNN News.

LinkedIn
11. Two new members sign up to LinkedIn every second.
12. LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities.
13. Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012.
14. LinkedIn’s revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years.
15. There are more than one million LinkedIn groups.

Statistics from LinkedIn Press Centre.

YouTube
16. YouTube was founded to share dinner clips of a party due to the files being too large for email.
17. The most watched video is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, with 470 million views.
18. The most watched non-commercial video is Charlie Bit My Finger Again, with over 458 million views.
19. The average visitor spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube.
20. It originally started life as a dating site and was influenced by the Hot Or Not website.

Statistics: Techzine and YouTube Archives.

Blogging
21. 3 million new blogs come online every month.
22. 60% of bloggers are aged between 25-44.
23. 20% of bloggers have been blogging for more than 6 years.
24. Professional bloggers upkeep an average of four blogs.
25. 35% of corporate bloggers worked in a journalism, media or professional writing role.

Statistics: Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011.

Pinterest
26. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.
27. Users spend an average of just under 16 minutes on the site.
28. The most popular age group is 25-34 year olds, accounting for 27.4% of the user base.
29. Pinterest receives 1.3 million visitors per day.
30. 97% of the fans of Pinterest’s Facebook page are women.

Statistics: Modea

Instagram
31. 25% of Instagram users upload more than three pictures.
32. Over 5 million images are uploaded every day.
33. President Obama is on Instagram, having joined in January 2012.
34. Earlybird is the most popular filter, with 12.5% users preferring it (zero filters is the most popular way to use Instagram, with more than 47% of users going au naturel).
35. There are 575 Likes per second.

Statistics: Instagram Press Centre, ReadWriteWeb, Social Media Delivered.

Google+
36. “Student” is the number one occupation of Google+ users.
37. More than 2/3 of its users are male.
38. The Google +1 button is used more than 5 billion times per day.
39. Google+ is adding 625,000 new users every day.
40. More than 42% of Google+ users are single.

Statistics: Google Blog, Techcrunch, Google Investor Reports.

Social Media Influence Platforms
41. Klout has 50 times more traffic than PeerIndex, its closest competitor.
42. Kred tries to measure offline influence by allowing you to add achievements away from your online activities.
43. Klout changed its privacy model to allow opt-out from its service after a negative backlash in 2011.
44. Empire Avenue has users in more than 150 countries.
45. Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect Klout score of 100 (says it all, then).
Statistics: Social Media Today, The Next Web.
The Mobile Web
46. 42% of phones in the U.S. are smartphones, with 44% of European users on a smartphone.
47. More than 110 million smartphone users in the U.S and Europe access social networks and blogs on their phones.
48. Tablets took just two years to reach 40 million users in the U.S. – it took smartphones 7 years to reach this figure.
49. China is the number one country in the world for smartphone use, with approximately 1 billion users.
50. In the U.K., there are twice as many smartphone users than cigarette smokers.

Statistics: ComScore and SoMobile.

Bonus Facts
51. Social gamers are expected to buy $6 billion in virtual goods in 2012.
52. One in 5 couples meet online; 3 in 5 gay couples meet online.

Statistics: eMarketer and Stanford University.

Are there any there that you are truly surprised at? Let me know in the comments!

Social Marketing: 3 Ways Your Brand Can Benefit From Pinterest

Pinterest is beautiful. That's not a word that typically describes a social media site, but this platform is seriously gorgeous in terms of online presence, web traffic, and interaction. This triple threat has made Pinterest a firm second in terms of referral traffic, and it's about time marketers recognize the boundless benefits the site has to offer. Here are 3 ways your brand can benefit from the growing platform:

Consumer Interest

Pinterest has grown significantly in popularity and versatility among usership since the beginning days of its female-dominant stereotype. The platform now has over 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly Facebook-connected users, and 2 million daily Facebook users, according to Inside Network's AppData tracking service. Even stronger, as of February 2012, Pinterest is the second social media site under Facebook for increased referral traffic for brands. People love pinning and your brand can only benefit from the heavy weight of consumers that participate on the platform each day.

User-Friendly

There are no bells and whistles with Pinterest; it is simple and hassle-free! It's straightforward with two basic elements: pins and boards. Even more user-friendly is the ability to create traction and interaction with consumers. People "follow" and "repin" brands more readily, as users are engaging with the themes and ideals of your company, rather than your brand as a whole. The platform is also less focused on the "when" of pins, so the pressure to be constantly involved is not currently a "best practice." Creating your account is easy too.

Offline Content Can Now Go Online

Pinterest also creates a venue to house aspects of your brand that may have been left offline. For instance, you can highlight company style, inspirations, or the city your office is in. We took advantage of this aspect of Pinterest by creating boards like, "We Love L.A." and "What's For Lunch," as culture and food are hugely popular on the platform.

Pinterest in a nutshell: Strip away your marketing department, your business initiatives, and salesy content. Think color, tone, design, and themes. Imagining Pinterest as your company's magazine/lookbook/catalog is a strong strategy. Think of your boards as the "hub" for users to peruse and discover aspects of your brand that they find interesting or useful. Successful boards are generally food-related, fashion-forward, innovation-focused, creative and, most importantly, visual.

Find a way to showcase these elements, while emanating your brand's overall tone and mission, and you'll be on your way to become 'pinteresting' in no time.

The floor's all yours: How is your brand using Pinterest?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6970877

The Best Pinterest Tools and Apps

Pinterest is definitely on its way up on the social media scene. Marketers are starting to see the value in the photo-sharing style of this new social network. Like other social media sites, Pinterest has many helpful tools and apps that can help enhance your experience with the site.

Here are a few of the different apps and tools that are available right now for you to get the most out of your use of Pinterest:

PinReach

This tool (once called PinClout) is very similar to Facebook Insights. It helps users track their success on the network as well as monitor current trends. Signup is simple- just enter your username for Pinterest and choose a username for PinReach, enter your email and a password. You will be sent a confirmation email. Once you confirm your account, you will be able to look at your PinReach score and how it changes over time.

This will give you a better idea of how to boost engagement with users and increase your influence.

PinPuff

PinPuff is another service that is available for users to measure reach, influence and viral aspects on Pinterest. They will be given a Pinfluence score and see a monetary value of their pins.

WiseStamp

The email app-makers have brought us a new Pinterest App, which allows you to add a "Follow Me on Pinterest" button to the end of your emails. That means every email you send will now encourage others to become an active follower of your Pinterest pinboards.

Pinerly

When this site launches, users will be able to gain access to free analytics and metrics on their pin campaigns. This gives companies a convenient way to manage each campaign with scheduling and controls for following and unfollowing.

Pin a Quote

Some web pages have no images to pin, just a great quote or other piece of text that you want to highlight. With Pin a Quote, you can easily share that text on one of your pinboards.

Snapito!

Sometimes a full-page screenshot is what you want to have on your pinboards. Snapito! is an easy and quick way to do just that. You can choose to pin only a part of or the full screen shot of the site to your page.

Check Your Pins

You can easily see how many people are pinning your website by typing into your browser: [http://pinterest.com/source/YourWebsite]. Then Ta-DA! You will get to see any and all pins that users have pinned from your website.

It's still in the early days and many new Pinterest tools and apps are still in testing mode. It won't be long, though, before there are even more tools available to help improve and enhance the way you use Pinterest for marketing as well as personal use.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6967846