Pinterest – A New Online Marketing Opportunity

With over 6 million users, and counting, Pinterest is the site everyone is talking about. Created in 2008, but only recently gathering pace, Pinterest has blasted into the top ten most visited social networking sites of the past year, and continues to gain popularity.
Pinterest is a social bookmarking site where users can gather images to share with others. It is useful to think of the site as a virtual, interactive scrapbook, where you can organise pictures (or videos) that you find interesting or inspiring. Whenever you see an image you like, anywhere on the web, you can “pin” it onto your pinboard, creating as many pinboards as you like. People are using Pinterest to plan weddings, decorate homes, and collate recipes, but you can create a pinboard for any topic imaginable!

Pic sourced from dabblelicious
So, what can brands gain from Pinterest? At first, you may think the site seems too niche to accommodate brands, but several brands have already signed up to the service, and there are opportunities. As Pinterest gathers pace, more extensive features may be introduced to benefit brands, such as promoted pins, sponsored boards, or subtle advertising. Right now though, brands are using Pinterest in the following ways:
To showcase new product offerings. Retail outlets are using the site to gauge interest in new products, so if a user repins an image, or posts a positive comment, the business will know that they approve. As the site still has a relatively small number of users, compared to that of Facebook and Twitter, brand managers can measure acceptance of a new product relatively easily, and gauge whether it is wise to continue with mass production.

To get seen. Pinterest is a place to discover new things – users follow each other based on interests, and recommend things to others using pinboards. For SMEs with small budgets it is the perfect platform to plug your business, as you don’t need big advertising budgets to get your brand known – the “stumble upon” culture of Pinterest will allow people to find your business in other ways.
To get backlinks. Everytime someone pins an image from your site and places it on their pinboard, you automatically get a link from it. You could get multiple links, if the image is repinned, building a healthy number of backlinks to your site. These links have great potential as the popularity of Pinterest grows.
To communicate a brand. For companies that provide a service, rather than a product, Pinterest provides a platform to showcase brand personality. For instance, a magazine can showcase photos of places it has sent its journalists, or its coverage of events, and provide a description and a link to the original story. This allows the brand to give its story, mission and future plans, all via a pinboard.
Pinterest is an exciting new platform for brands, and as the site gains popularity, marketing opportunities are only going to grow. Once you have added the “pin it” button to your site, it is a good idea to follow others and get your brand known. Encourage them to follow you back and repin your pins by frequently repinning their pins to your boards. You should create boards that go beyond your product and your brand – for example, a bakery could pin images of kitchen appliances to bake with.
In time, the benefits of incorporating Pinterest into your online marketing strategy will become more apparent, but any work you do now should put you in good stead. However tempting, it is not advisable to use Pinterest for self-promotion, as this could get you banned. The most successful brands on Pinterest will be the ones that put aside self-promotion, but instead provide something unique to the Pinterest community.

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Quick SEO Tip – Internal Linking

Hi guys,

I’m going to be starting a new quick tip series for the beginners out there, but there may be some use for the advanced SEO’s out there to maybe recap or spark some conversation. Today’s tip is the truth about internal linking.
Internal linking can be useful to improve information hierarchy, help spiders crawl and spread link juice around your site but it can sometimes be misunderstood when we bring search engine algorithms into the equation, take this HTML for example:
<h1><a href="www.doma.in">Company Name</a></h1>
<p>This is some seo content that is rich in keywords and then
we have a link like this <a href="www.doma.in">Keyword</a> that
creates our internal linking.</p>
This looks great and the link looks natural but how does Google or Bing see this?
If two links are pointing to the same page, according to Matt Cutt’s the first takes precedence. Meaning our link with the keyword anchor text in the content won’t be considered, pretty annoying right? You should take this into consideration when creating a website, if a link that you put in a page is already in the navigation it most likely won’t count. For some more guidence on this check our post on content layout optimisation and best practices.
So is there any secret fix?
There has been tests done previously on ways to get around this hurdle and one way was to add a hashtag to the end of link, for example:
<a href="www.doma.in/#1">Keyword</a>
What this basically does is tricks Google into thinking that the link is going to a different page but really the hash is just a fragment identifier that doesn’t exist, meaning logically both links would count. The success rate of this is rather sparse though and can’t be guaranteed, but why not try it?
I hope this quick tip helped you out in some way and if you have any suggestion for the next one let me know in the comments, cheers.

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The Facebook Fix

I can’t really decide if the following is good news or bad news. A recent study in the journal Psychology Studies has found that the urge for a ‘Facebook Fix’ if you may, is just as strong, if not stronger than the decoy of tobacco and alcohol.
My last blog post for SEO Consult was back in July of 2011, exploring the gamification of social media and in the presence of the social stock market, Empire Avenue. If this recent study is anything to go by, then pardon the speculation, but I’d expect that users Facebook shares have rocketed.

Brilliant news for Facebook, not such good news for many partners, or so called ‘social widows’. Just over one year ago Digital Buzz highlighted that “48% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook right when they wake up… About 28% check their Facebook on their smart phones before getting out of bed”. However that was early 2011 and in the world of social media, that could be decades ago (no exaggeration there at all). At the end of December 2011 Facebook announced that they had 845 million monthly active users with an average of 483 million daily users. Looking again at Digital Buzz (I should be on commission) they highlight a statistic from GigaOm that 25% of college students and young professionals alike experience between 3-5 social interruptions in a given hour, while 84% get interrupted at least once while trying to complete an assignment.
I find these figures astonishing, I am certain that I can go longer than an hour before my mobile phone goes off, granted this should maybe be an alarm for me to stop stalking those at Digital Buzz and make friends in the ‘real world’ but in my eyes the figures speak a thousand words. They are highlighting the true addiction that is Facebook. If I had a pound for every time I heard “I saw on Facebook” or “Did you see what x said on Facebook” lets just say I would be giving Mark Zuckerburgs bank balance a run for its money.
Modern life is only feeding addictions, making it easier all the time for users like myself to check their Facebook feed. So this gets me thinking, I know I’m not alone, but I would like to hear from you if your news feed has become your night time reading and portal to the world each morning. When will you get your next Facebook fix?

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A new social media player in town…

With a staggering figure of 1 billion users expected to be using Facebook by August of this year, Google + reported to have reached the 100 million member mark earlier this week and Twitter to reach 500 million uses by the end of March, there may not be a better time for businesses to exploit these platforms – however have we got a new player on the social media horizon?
Largely gone under the radar of many social media users, Pinterest has slowly become ever more popular over the last year and with this week’s announcement of Facebook’s IPO filing there have been many people looking into the competition that the market leader will face going forward – and there is one on the tips of many tongues…and that is this latest social media craze.
Pinterest can be best described as a virtual pinboard which allows users to post, collect and share their favourite images and ideas from anything from photographs to recipes with other users. One benefit that is brought to light by Pinterest is that “Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests” and this one major user ‘selling point’ discussed by the platform – the sharing of interests.

The site has been around since March 2010 but has recently exploded into life reaching over 5 million users at the turn of the year. Currently getting set up on Pinterest is only achieved through requesting an invitation but with the current high demand and media interest surrounding the platform this is likely to change in the near future to help build its social profile presence in the market.
The ideas surrounding this latest concept are seemingly endless, but one area of interest is how this could be used in the world of business as part of a social media marketing strategy. One difference that Pinterest will bring to companies is the ability to visually illustrate the company and connect with customers through a vastly different marketing channel – a major difference to the likes of Facebook and Twitter that is mainly based through text. A further highlighted feature that could be incorporated into a strategy is the use of ‘group pinning’ which would allow brands to promote within a topic related community pinboard – potentially targeting specific market segments.

Going into the new year social media will continue to play a major part role for organisations to utilise as part of their marketing strategies. However it is key to remain alert and at the forefront of this ever changing social media market, so could this be the year for yet another major player to make their introduction? I believe it’s just around the corner…

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