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Identify your boards by brainstorming ideas with your colleagues
Every brand has a set of values that must be mirrored in the boards and images chosen. When you are looking for categories, consider where your products are used, ideas related to them, social costumes, what your target audience like, your industry, type of images that are shared in your community, advice that can be provided with images, related icons and VIPs. The main risk when creating boards is to be too promotional and sales focused with boring images and with nothing your customer can relate to or be interested by.
See below how some major brands have set up their boards:
Boards:
Who wants dinner?!, Eat Your Veggies, How Does Your Garden Grow?, Super HOT Kitchens, Sweet Tooth ,We’re Used to Reusing!, Go Go Gadgets!, Edible Celebrations, Plant Based Diet Recipes, Delicious Art, Cheese is the Bee’s Knees, Strength, Whole Planet Foundation, Winter Entertainment,Thankful for Thanksgiving Dinner, The Fabulousness of Fall, Greens on the Table, Good Karma Products, Vegan, What building inspires you?, Great Garden Recipes, #DarkRye, #WhyAustin, Our Favorite Books, Keep Calm and, My dream wine, Strawberry Season, Earth Day, Food Tips and Tricks, Mom Rocks, Forkly Faves!, #LanguedocDay May 3rd.
Boards:
Lindt Chocolate Recipes, Lindt Around the World, Fashionable Chocolate, #Pin4Autism, Your Creations, Tips, Ideas & More, For the Love of Chocolate, Lindt Love, View-Worthy Videos, Vintage, Swiss Pride, Celebrity Auction, Gifts, Lindt Gold Bunny Photo, Chocolate Brown All Around.
Boards:
Daily Escapes, Best Sandwich in America, Across America, Beaches, Trip Ideas, We’d Rather Be Here Than Work Right Now, Travel Bucket List, Hotels and Resorts, Street Food Around The World, Animals Around the World, Fall Foliage, Behind the Scenes: Off Limits, Europe, Family Travel, Cultures Around The World, Let’s Celebrate: Spring!, National Parks Revealed, Festivals and Events, Travel Style.
Brainstorming tips
Your brand is involved in a market with a specific type of customer; the following are two aspects to consider when you are thinking about creating a Pinterest profile:
– The competitors’ strategies
Try to differentiate from the others because your identity is unique. Think what you have that your competitor hasn’t that can be the difference between Red Bull being connected to sports and Fanta being connected with fun and enjoyment.
– The Audience
Check their boards to see which images you can upload that can be re-pinned by other uses. For example, an image, which can be included in the following boards – a personal wish list, design or funny photos etc.
Quality
Similar to other social bookmarking tools, Pinterest has loads of high quality images. Low quality stuff doesn’t get viral or benefit your brand.
As soon you have curated your visual profile, what it is needed is a strategy to engage with your audience, drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, improve customer satisfaction or research into your target behaviour. This is the most important part if you want that your social media marketing improve the quality of your brand and i will cover this in Episode 2.
Drop us a tweet @tugagency with your thoughs about Pintest and Ben, Tug social media director will help you with more insights and tips.
Bing has announced a redesign to its search engine, adding a column from users social networks to its natural search listings as well as other features to improve the quality of its results. The new three column layout will include an interactive sidebar dedicated to social results from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger (including competitor social results rather than Google’s approach of excluding them).
Microsoft’s search engine Bing outlines these changes in a blog post, writing that “social media and the ability to share in real time presents an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how search should work. Suddenly an index of documents [websites] that does not embrace these changes is insufficient.”
Bing says that most people use search in order to make a decision, but only a handful make the decision without consulting friends or experts beforehand. Instead of including social results in the core web results, they have been separated in a sidebar, to distinguish the results in two columns providing “information from the web to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.”
Bing now allows for real-time interaction with social results, users can post questions to Facebook from the sidebar, and tag friends to elicit a response, with a key group of “best friends” asked to highlight what they ‘like’, the opportunity to “follow” key influencers via the search listings will be possible.
This screengrab gives an idea of how Bing’s new layout will appear. The web results (on the left hand column) remain unchanged, while a central column feature information, map listings, ratings etc. and a third column on the right brings in a social feed from all the users networks. This layout draws similarities to Tweetdeck in its layout and accommodates for a new way in which people use search engines.
Talk to Tug about Social Search, email: ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk
Facebook is testing a new way of promoting your status updates to friends called “Highlight” that allows you to reach more of the people you’ve befriended. On average, your status updates on Facebook reach 12% of your friends – using Highlight and paying a few dollars will allow you to reach many more who ordinarily don’t get your updates.
This is currently not available and a tiny percentile of the Facebook user population in New Zealand is currently testing this, but if it proves to be successful it could roll out across the whole network.
Highlight could show Facebook’s willingness to try more aggressive ways of making money, which should delight potential investors in the run up to its stock market floatation. But the service has always been free for users, and a feature such as this that allows promotional updates to feature in users feeds could be a huge turn off, especially to its younger and less financially equipped users who couldn’t afford this kind of narcissism.
Harmless “Highlight” updates showing a friends car for sale, or proud parents of a new born seem like one thing, but endless spam and referral codes are quite another which have the potential to ruin the user experience on the network.
Andrew Keen is an entrepreneur and author and gives an excellent TEDx Talk in Hungary about “Digital Vertigo” and what he sees as the “cult of social”.
Keen is known for his view that the Internet and Web 2.0 may be debasing culture as we know it.
Keen is especially concerned that the Internet undermines the authority of learned experts.
In 2006 in an essay in The Weekly Standard, Keen wrote that Web 2.0 is a “grand utopian movement” similar to “communist society” as described by Karl Marx.
He describes Free Culture proponent Lawrence Lessig as an “intellectual property communist”. His book The Cult of the Amateur, is critical of free, user-based Web sites such as Wikipedia that attempt to provide information.
Keen discusses often-overlooked problems with participatory technology and describes the Internet as a mirror of our culture. “We see irreverence, and vitality, and excitement. We see a youthfulness. But we also see, I think, many of the worst developments in modern cultural life, and, in particular, I think we see what I call digital narcissism, this embrace of the self.”
Very interesting talk, well worth a watch.
Facebook are set to launch an the App Centre on the social network, a new place for people to find “social apps”, designed to show off high quality apps and good user experiences.
The App Centre gives developers an additional way to grow their apps and create opportunities for more types of apps to be successful. In the coming weeks, Facebook users will be able to access the App Centre on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps.
All developers should start preparing today to make sure their app is included for the launch.
For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Centre will become the new, central place to find apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify and Viddy.
Each item has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app.
To find out more, please get in touch: ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk
Or follow us on Twitter @tugagency
Facebook Offers has been launched on Facebook Pages to drive new people to businesses and encourage engagement among Page users. The visibility afforded by Facebook indicates a high level of exposure provided by Offers, simply put, if you claim an offer, the chances are that many of your Facebook friends will see that you have redeemed this offer and be tempted to do so themselves. Offers are free for Page Admins to create and share. but are only available to a small number of local business Pages so far.
To find out how to make Facebook Offers work for you, talk to Tug about social.
Join us on Twitter @tugagency
The following suggestions are valuable for the broad online community, from the freelance writer to the guest blogger/link builder. Check these quick wins and get known for your blog posts:
– The basics: heading and subheading
With YouTube becoming so big, our attention span has somewhat reduced since the 90’s. For this reason it is always best to divide your copy into subheadings and paragraphs – increasing the chance that the reader will look at the full article.
– The visual: images and videos
How many readers does the Sun have in comparison to other more political based papers? Much more because people like pretty pictures – so include images and videos in the blog post. There’s a trend in blogs to include funny images, high quality photos, meme, infograph etc.. Do some quick research in Flickr Advanced Commons images or YouTube, and choose what you should embed in your content. Remember to include descriptions if the multimedia content needs an explanation.
– The engagement
For example, your article evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of renting compared to buying, you could include a poll, asking to your readers what they prefer. Alternatively if you are talking about the Olympics you could include a quiz to complete. Going further you can embed a Flash video game if you prefer, sometimes I found myself playing with the ones shown through display advertising.
– You are social
Social buttons are something every publisher needs to have. There’s no way of getting away from it – it’s a big way to get more eyes reading your article.
– Reclaim the authorship
Authors can usually benefit from a blurb at the end or at the beginning of the article where they shows their credentials. Great author boxes contain a photo, a small description, a link to the writer’s blog, social profile and client or company website. The era of Google+ can strongly benefit from this and the new rel=author function. Basically you can connect your G+ profile to your articles. According to the new Google algorithm: the value of the content in terms of SEO is proportional to the influence of the author inside a particular community and the Pagerank, see the function below:
Page rank x Author Rank = Authority page rank
Have you stumbled across other great ways of crafting blog posts? Drop us a tweet @tugagency and keep on talking about best practices.
London 2012 brand sponsors and advertisers are maximising their efforts by making use of social networking sites such as Facebook during the Olympics. As the date draws close, marketeers are using social media to raise awareness and build engagement in the run up to the games, getting consumers and attendees to talk about promotions, taking advantage of the online buzz.
“Back in 2008, it was very much about paid media,” said Mark Renshaw, chief innovation officer at Leo Burnett, a unit of Publicis.
“Now the reason they want to have a relationship (with consumers) is to generate shared media.”
Some of the sponsors to take advantage of this include Cadbury’s “Spots & Stripes” campaign and Samsung who have released a project titled “How Olympic Are You?” on their Facebook Page.
Each brand has recognised that the potential is clear, the sheer amount of time people are spending on social media has increased dramatically since 2008. By the end of 2011, some 794 million people visited Facebook each month, and each spent an average of 377 minutes on the site — more than 6 hours — according to comScore. As of today, the London 2012 Facebook Page has 25,429 talking about this, it only makes sense for brands to start the engagement.
To talk about social media drop me a line at ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk
Follow us on Twitter @tugagency
