As the latest social media star pupil, Pinterest has been gaining popularity steadily and looks set to confirm this status as the fastest growing social media platform of 2012. Think of a virtual pin board where users pin items of interest and make a real connection with someone else who may well share the same pastimes, interest or hobbies. And that’s Pinterest. But why should you consider Pinterest for your business?

You could say it is almost the most human of social networks. As it has been set up to let you organise items of interest to you in the form of images. It has been used to plan weddings, decorate homes and organise recipes (which is a personal favourite of mine).

The guys at Pinterest are also pretty clear in what they’re trying to do. Their mission states…“Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests”

What’s so great about Pinterest?

• Helps build your brand online and increases exposure of your products
• Cross platform collaboration with Facebook.
• Great analytics – you can easily see your activity and others activity on your boards etc
• Pinterest also provides two pin it buttons. The Pin It Button, allows your site audience to click on that button and could even pin your articles or content to their pin-board. The other button which is the “Follow me on Pinterest” button allows you to send people to your own Pinboards. This really is very beneficial for a website or even a blog.
• Each image links back to the page the image came from originally
• It’s so easy to use … re-pinning and sharing is simple.
• You can overlay your price. You can simply put the price in the description field and the price overlays the image, allowing pinners to see how much the item costs and click back to where they can buy it (Only working with $ and £ at the moment but we hold out hope for the €)

So, can the images on your site be pinned? If you don’t know you need to find out – and fast. Download the Pin In plugin for your browser and start pinning your own images http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

And if you’re not on it yet, just let me know and I can send you an invite…

Check me out on http://pinterest.com/sandrahennessy/#

The arrival of social media has heralded a change in how we view our customers online. Social media platforms now offer the facility to cement your relationship with clients and customers. These applications give businesses an opportunity to lay the groundwork for repeat business. We have found that there is a five step plan any SME can put in place to get their social media strategy right.

1. The time of day you interact with customers is likely to be on a routine or unofficial scheduled basis. When someone buys a newspaper in your shop at the same time every morning, they may also log on to Facebook at the same time each evening. We are creatures of habit and every business must establish when the best time to interact with their customers through social media is.
2. Social media offers a branding platform like no other. It is important for SMEs to brand every aspect of their social media presence. Whether that means using the same corporate colours or ensuring your logo is clearly visible, make your branding an integral part of the overall Social Media strategy.
3. Engaging in conversation is what social media platforms offer us perhaps more than anything else. Businesses must be aware of the difference between talking and selling. Hard selling in a social media environment will not come across well. A general rule of thumb is to adhere to the 80/20 ratio. Spend 80% of your time networking and making connections and spend the remaining 20% selling.
4. It can be tempting to focus on gathering fans and to concentrate on the number of fans that can be attracted. It is far more advantageous to have fewer fans that interact with you and each other than hundreds who joined on a whim and who do not spend any quality time on your profile.
5. And finally, when it comes to newsfeed optimisation, simply because you post something, it does not mean everyone will read it. Make sure your posts are automatically highlighted by Facebook (everybody can customise but if a fan does not customise their newsfeed, Facebook will decide what is highlighted).  The following issues are usually taken into account – how recent the post was made, what your connection is like with your Facebook fans and whether it is a post, video or photo.

Keep these five key issues in mind when executing your social media strategy and make the most of this excellent opportunity to connect seamlessly with your target audience.

Great news for all you folk out there that created a profile page for your business instead of a fan page. You can now migrate your profile to a page. To explain this further, if you are collecting “friends” on your business page it is the incorrect type of page. You need to get people to become a fan or “like” your page. Facebook frowns on people who set up a profile page for a business, another reason you should have a fan page is that the profile is limited to 5000 friends so once you get to 5000 you can go no further.

This new feature will allow you to migrate your profile to a fan page but be aware it will not sync up all content. Your friends will be changed to fans or “likes” and your profile picture will transfer but everything else will be lost so it’s a good idea to download your images etc before changing over.

This is excellent news and long due. For more information click http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate

Do you manage your companies’ social media? Are you finding it hard to find the time to update Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?  Did you know that the average office worker is interrupted by co-workers, emails or phone calls every 11 minutes and it takes the same time to re-focus? Does this happen to you? 

Millions of people each day use social media to interact with companies, friends and family and by interacting with them you are influencing where they spend their time and money.  Here are some tips to try easy the pain:  

-          Use applications like Tweet Deck and Hootsuite to schedule your posts.  Take an hour a week and schedule the most important posts. You will always know special offers and event details ahead of time, so ensure that you have them scheduled well in advance.

-          Want to cut out the interruptions?  Why not start work 1 hour early, one day a week.  I can already hear you all screaming at the computers as you read this, saying things like, it’s easier said than done, I cannot get up any earlier etc etc,   but I tell you it really helps.  You will get so much more done when there are no interruptions and it may take less time than you thought so maybe you only need to get up 30mins early next week.

-          Make it count – find the right time of day. Analyse when your connections / followers are online.  If they are online at 5pm then ensure that your posts go out at 5pm.  If they go out earlier they will get lost in amongst all the other posts from companies, friends and family.  If you are timing it better and getting better interaction and results you may find that you don’t need to update your pages quite so often.

-          Focus on the social media sites that your existing or potential clients use.  All too often I meet people who are active on all the major social media websites, just because. Why not find out which ones your clients are most active on and focus on these.  Better to use 2 well than 6 badly.

-          Remember to sync your accounts together; this means that your Facebook posts can feed into Twitter. Twitter into LinkedIn etc.  This will reduce the amount of work needed, but be careful to ensure that this works with your strategy. If you are targeting different sectors on different social media sites this will not work as the information needs may be different.

Happy posting