Category Archives: Social Media

Read Time: 6 minutes

Pinterest is the fastest growing social media platform on the market today. It has 100 million active users spending more time on the platform than any other social media site. Over 80% of its users are female and they are using the site primarily to learn how to do something or drive a purchase decision.

These metrics are stunning and should be of pointed interest to all marketers. So what is Pinterest, and how can it be of use to your business? This article will outline a few tips and tricks we have used to help businesses to succeed at Pinterest marketing.

But first, we have to define what we’re talking about.

What is Pinterest:

Pinterest is a platform where people create online collages (Boards) for different topics they are interested in. People add images or videos to the boards by “pinning” them (much like bookmarking). The difference between Pinterest and other bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon or Pocket is that the site is driven by visuals.

What is great about Pinterest is that you can upload your own images or pin images you find on the web making the site a depository of images from around the world.

So what does the dashboard look like?

Pinterest Lingo:

We have to clear a few things up

• When you share something on Pinterest, each bookmark is called a “pin”
• When you share someone else’s pin it’s called a “repin”
• You group pins together by topic onto various boards or pinboards in your profile.
• You could have different boards for a ton of different topics. Such as dresses, food, home goods, cars, etc

Advertising on Pinterest:

So, how can you promote your product or service and capitalize on this growing social network? By effectively advertising on the site.

Pinterest breaks down their advertising into 4 easy steps:

• Pick a Pin
• Decided who sees it
• Pay for results
• Track what’s working

But it’s not that easy. Finally, we get to the good part. Here are a few great tips for a successful Pinterest advertising campaign.

1) Create Amazing and Engaging Content:

Remember, Pinterest is all about the visual. It’s about conveying an idea, a lifestyle, a desire. Ensuring you have amazing creative is the first piece to a great Pinterest campaign. Don’t skimp on keywords but don’t over think it like search engine marketing. The pin itself should do the work for you.

Use high-quality, vertically oriented images as they work the best to capture your audience’s attention and interest. Again let the image do the work for you.

2) Use One Pin per Campaign (A/B Testing):

Test creative content in multiple campaigns instead of grouping and testing multiple pins in one campaign. Take the time to set up multiple campaigns. This will help determine what pin works the best. This is because when you group pins together in one campaign a huge portion of impressions and spend will go to one image.

If you break the images (pins) into different campaigns you will be able to test to the same audience a different image and set similar budgets for each, allowing you to compare performance.

3) Include a Call to Action in the Description:

Pinterest does not allow you to have a direct CTA in a promoted pin description. But that does not mean you can’t have them at all. People still need to know what they are supposed to do, so having something as simple as “sign up today” or “download this free ebook” are acceptable CTAs.

4) Use Your Best Organic Pins:

Using your best organic pins as promoted pins is one of the best ways to advertise on Pinterest. The reason is that if the pin is performing well organically than it likely has value and will probably do well to a larger audience. This is where Pinterest Analytics comes in. Use this tool to see the pins you have that get the most clicks, repins, and likes.

5) Keywords Are Still Important:

Although creative content is the most important aspect of Pinterest, keywords still matter. When structuring your campaigns try thinking of each campaign as its own category with an overarching theme and keywords that go with it. For example, a Car Detailing business might create campaigns like GM, Ford, Lexus, Classics, etc

Pinterest allows you to have 150 keywords in a promoted pin, but a lot of the times the biggest mistake is trying to reach that max number, thus pigeonholing your campaign resulting in low click-throughs and conversions.

Although Pinterest is making strides to be more of an exact match outlet, broad match is still the dominate keyword search function. As such, a broad match should be assumed when choosing keywords for your promoted pins. A good number of keywords to start is around 30 or 40. Let these build enough qualitative data and then grow your list of keywords from there.

6) Run Separate Campaigns For Mobile and Desktop:

Separating mobile and desktop campaigns allows you to control costs, since mobile CPC is lower on average, and will give you better data as to what channel is working the best.

7) Track Everything:

Understanding how your pins are performing is important and Pinterest offers one of the best analytics tools in the game.

One of the reasons the Pinterest Analytics tool is one of the best is because of the audience insights they provide for your promoted pins. For the first time, Pinterest is giving you access to details about the audience that is interacting with your pins.

Offering multiple insights is a huge game changer. Pinterest gets pretty granular, offering you the ability to see demographic data including language, location, and gender. Pinterest also offers interest data which allows you the ability to see what people are talking about or searching for, giving you the ability to share relevant content.

Conclusion:

Pinterest is a fast-growing social media site and any business would be smart to have a presence here. With the tips outlined above, you should have everything you need to successfully run a Pinterest campaign from start to finish.

Read Time: 3.5 minutes

Twitter has grown as an instantly connected social media platform since its inception in 2006. Everyone from celebrities to politicians to industry thought leaders and everyone in between use the site to voice their opinions, learn particular topics and engage with one another. Because of this, Twitter has become a place where people go to connect instantly with their favorite people and brands.

This allows brands an opportunity to connect and engage with their consumers. In fact, 85% of Twitter users report feeling more connected to a brand after following them on Twitter. There are multiple ways in which to engage these brand-conscious consumers on Twitter. Following are some tips that will help you build your following and create a better brand experience on Twitter.

1. Go Mobile:
First, you have to understand that 80% of Twitter users are using the Twitter app via a mobile device. This means that it is very important to have a landing page that is responsive and optimized for mobile devices, as well as desktop users. We talk about how important responsive landing pages are in this blog post. If you’re landing page is not responsive, you’re already behind the curve. We highly suggest using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if you’re firing on all cylinders.

2. Choose the right Conversion Metric:
Want more visitors to your website? Want to get people to download your app or sign up for your event? Twitter is a great way to promote these types of business objectives. This is important to know because Twitter isn’t great at getting people to fill out a forms/surveys or registering for a webinar.

One of the best conversion methods on Twitter is utilizing their website card. It is a great option to increase quality website traffic, drive app downloads, or increase engagement with your audience. Twitter website cards are great because it allows you to add both a picture and a call to action to your tweets.

3. Choose your audience:
Like most other social media advertising, you can get granular with your targeting. You can advertise to certain genders, devices, interests and locations.

What’s really cool about Twitter is that you can target people that are followers of specific handles. Have a thought leader or business whose followers might also be interested in you? You can target those followers with your ad. This is known as follower targeting.

So for example, if I’m selling tickets to an event, (let’s say the NCAA Men’s Water Polo Championship) I can target the followers of specific teams. Follower targeting gives you some pretty great metrics as well.

After your campaigns are live you can see which particular handle is performing the best compared to others. This allows you to see which handles are converting better and allocate funds to them as opposed to ones that are spending a lot but not converting all that great. Twitter will also suggest particular handles that are similar to the handles you are targeting which helps drive more traffic to your brand.

4. Set your budget:
Like all marketing budgets, you have to first determine what a new lead is worth to you. With this information, you can better determine how much you should allocate to finding and capturing those leads as customers. You should set your budget less than what the result is worth to you.

Once you have these figures, you need to divide that amount by the number of days you want your campaign to run and you have your daily max budget.

You should adjust these as your campaign runs based on your comfort level and what makes sense for your business.

Conclusion
Twitter offers small businesses the ability to target people in a place that is increasingly hard to serve ads to their mobile phones. Taking advantage of a platform where users are engaged and willing to share their thoughts about your brand to the world is a great practice to get started with. 

Follow these four steps and you will have great success when starting out your Twitter advertising campaign. Just remember, good advertising takes time, effort and a lot of planning and revision. Don’t get frustrated if you don’t see the results, just go back to the drawing board.

Read Time: 4 minutes

Today Facebook is the largest social network connecting over 1,500,000,000 (that’s billions) users PER MONTH! It’s no wonder advertisers are taking notice of the power of Facebook to advertise to their target audience. But Facebook isn’t just for the big advertisers, it’s for small businesses as well. In fact, Facebook sees a huge opportunity to offer small businesses the ability to inexpensively target their consumers.

It doesn’t take a lot to advertise on Facebook but it can get overwhelming with all the options. We have created a few tips to help you get started.

1. Set Goals, Write them Down, and Follow them:
You can talk about your goals all day every day but until they’re written down and actionable they are just words. What are the goals you want to accomplish with your Facebook Advertising campaign? Do you want more calls? More Facebook likes? More website visits? Choose your main objective and write it down. The reason you want to do this is because the Facebook Ad type you choose will depend on what goal you’re trying to accomplish. Facebook’s advertising scheme guides you to recommended ad formats based on your primary goal.

2. Call to Actions are important:
Whatever ad you choose include a call to action in the body text of your Facebook paid ad to drive Facebook users to take your desired action. A good call to action is imperative to the success of your ad. If you’re not telling the user what you want them to do your ad won’t be effective.

3. Select your bidding option:
One of the best parts of Facebook is that it’s so versatile in how you can set your budget. You can bid for clicks, impressions, or clicks. If you choose the recommended (and selected by default) option of bidding on your objective your bid will automatically be set to help you reach said objective. Bidding for clicks or impressions allows for more customization.

4. Choose between daily and lifetime budget:
The best part about social media advertising is that you’re in total control of the budget and how much you want to spend per day, week, month and year. A daily budget controls how much you want to spend on your ad in a given day, the ad will stop showing once you have met this threshold based on your objective. The lifetime budget lets you set a ceiling on how much you want to spend on each campaign. Remember that each campaign has a separate budget so it’s always helpful to create a marketing plan prior to engaging in any advertising initiative.

5. Mine Audience Insights:
Because Facebook is the largest social network and people are willingly giving up their location, age, gender, number of kids, family connections, race, occupation, and likes and dislikes. These insights offer powerful metrics to advertisers wanting to target very specific groups of people. Facebook’s Audience Insights allows advertisers to get a better sense of who their target market is because Facebook takes the data of people that already like your page and creates a buyer’s persona to help you better target your future ads to the right people at the right time.

6. Landing pages are important don’t overlook them:
The landing page is one of the most important aspects of any digital advertising campaign. You should not be pushing people to your website or product page without sending these visitors first to a quality landing page that mirrors the message in your ads. Landing pages are important because they help to educate users before they buy, creating smart buyers saves you time and money in the long run and helps your consumer to understand that you are the right company to be buying from.

7. Images are important:
Ads with images have a higher engagement rate than just text based ads. It’s important to show an ad that catches the eye and makes people want to engage with your ad. It doesn’t even have to be of your product, service or business just something that is relevant (if possible).

The Conclusion:
Facebook advertising, when done correctly can have a huge impact, at little cost for your business. With these 7 steps you have a good road map to make the most out of your facebook advertising.