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Last week we wrote about different ways your business or brand can get the most use out of Instagram. This week we’re tackling one that is sometimes slightly more difficult for a brand, as it depends highly on the product and type of business you are promoting.

Many businesses create a Pinterest account because it is one of the many widely used social media platforms. It seems to have become a belief that as long as your account is present, you have a presence in the social media world. This is not true. Many businesses either do not use Pinterest correctly (as well as other social media platforms that we will cover in the next few weeks) or they do not use it at all because they do not see any or enough feedback. Here are ways to use Pinterest in order to get the most for you brand, product or business.

1. Determine your audience: While Instagram is devoted to just images (which can cover a wider scope of businesses and brands), Pinterest is a combination of images and content. It’s also important to remember that Pinterest is a social media platform that caters to DIY crafts, recipes, design tips, fashion, etc. Determine the type of product you are promoting or the nature of your business and whether or not your audience would benefit from your boards/pins. For example, a furniture designer could boost their popularity by pinning images of their past, current or future design projects. One board could be devoted to furniture they have designed, while another board could be devoted to simple, low-cost design ideas for interior spaces. By doing this, they are simultaneously promoting their brand and giving design tips to their followers without appearing to be pushing sales on a specific product.

2. Pinterest takes time: Just like most social media networks, you need to devote a lot of time and patience in order to create meaningful and quality content that will draw attention and get re-pinned. There is no quick and easy way to get thousands of followers and re-pins, so it’s important to be realistic and manage your time accordingly.

3. Stick with a familiar username: If you have a specific username that you have used for your Instagram or Twitter accounts, make sure your Pinterest (and other social media accounts) are the same. If the username is unavailable, alter it (for example a number at the end or a dash in the middle) but keep the name the same. By using your business or brand name for your username, it will be much easier for your customers to find and follow you. When your content gets re-pinned, then your brand or business name becomes visible to a much larger audience.

4. Link  accounts: If you already have established Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts, be sure to link those accounts to your Pinterest. Your followers that are already on Pinterest can now follow you and have access to more of your content.

5. Give your pin boards descriptive names: Boards function as a virtual pinboard where your business or brand can share their latest ideas, designs, etc. Using descriptive names makes it easier to organize your pins and, consequently, your ideas as well. Cluttered boards with mismatched or irrelevant pins are an eye-sore, which could hurt your brand’s reputation by driving away potential customers. Narrowing your boards even further (for example, to specific colours of a certain product) can make it easier for your followers to find a design in that specific colour.

6. Re-pin and follow: Possibly the most important part of Pinterest (we just love alliterations), re-pinning and following businesses or brands similar to your own helps to promote your own business. Re-pinning also helps to get your business’ name out to customers as well as potential clients. If you own a textile company, you could use Pinterest to target a specific designer you would like to work with and re-pin their images. This helps you to network and open up communication between businesses with which you could potentially collaborate.

7. Curating content beyond your brand: This blurb goes hand in hand with the one above in regards to re-pinning. You can devote one specific day a week where you select a unique idea, product or design beyond your brand and re-pin it onto your specific board. You can choose something simple and catchy, such as “Friday Fashion Find.” By curating these unique designs and products, your business is viewed as knowledgeable and up-to-date in the field.

8. Be creative: We’ll keep this one short and sweet. Pinterest is all about creativity! If your pins come off as too serious or are blatantly trying to drive sales, you will lose your followers and your customers’ interest. Pinterest users want to see real people behind the business or brand. By portraying this aspect of reality, or real people behind a business, it enables your costumers to relate more to your product.

• Gaining feedback on service, events and menu items.
• Promoting and showing off menu items.
• Sharing specials.
• Recruiting.
• Monitoring reputation.

To find out how PR agencies (like us) can help with your restaurant’s social media strategy and execution, please send us an email, we’d love to hear from you!

Check out the full list below, along with a handy guide on which social networks to use for each tactic

Earlier in the year, we wrote a blog post outlining how to better your restaurant’s publicity: you can find that piece by clicking here.

first direct (a UK-based financial institution) recently released a study that identified some of the social personalities that are prevalent in today’s online world. You have “The Ultras”, those who check social streams dozens of times per day; “The Deniers”, who insist that social doesn’t rule their lives – but would lose their cool without it; “The Dippers”, who go in and out of their social profiles irregularly; “The Lurkers”, pretty self explanatory; among many others.

Check out this entertaining and perhaps revealing look at what’s becoming a bit of a dirty little habit for some in our connected society.

Now more than ever: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ (among others) are the dominant place for consumers and advocates alike to engage with your brand. It’s so important that these destinations fully reflect your company in a seamless way, and maintain the consistency of your current web and offline materials.

Lucky for us, tentsocial has put together a blueprint that outlines almost all of the specs you’ll need when designing creative for your social-sphere. Have a look below, and be sure to bookmark this post – you never know when you’ll need this helpful infographic again!

These tips come from Jessica Turner at PR Daily & The Mom Creative:

1. Use text on your photos, or create a title graphic 

This is the single most important thing you can do to stimulate pins and repins. When people pin and repin on Pinterest, they are scanning through a lot of thumbnails. Having text on a photo makes it easier for users to identify what an image is and if they want to pin it.

2. Ask friends who are active on Pinterest to pin your content

If your content is relevant to a friend’s Pinterest boards, ask if they would be willing to pin your post. It is important to do this on the first day, when you are trying to gain momentum on Pinterest.

I have seen a direct correlation between asks and posts going viral. That early traction can make a big difference.

3. Push the post out via social media, multiple times over an appropriate period

While I am not an advocate of posting every single blog post to Twitter, Facebook, etc. multiple times, certain posts that I am really trying to push via Pinterest I will share numerous times.

For instance, I had a post that received more than 19,000 pins related to Father’s Day gift ideas. I tweeted about that post almost every day for the two weeks leading up to Father’s Day. Each day, I saw more pins to Pinterest, more traffic from Pinterest, and more sales from the affiliate links within the post. I was creative with my tweets, posted at different times of day and had other unrelated content in my Twitter stream, so it wasn’t like my followers were only hearing about that post.

4. Pin from your favorite sites If you see something you like on a website pin it! (I have the Pin It tool installed on my toolbar, which makes it really easy to pin from any site. It takes about 5 seconds to install.) Pinterest is only as good as the stuff that is pinned on it, so it needs people to pin new items to it. Plus, pins help drive traffic to your favorite sites.

5. Write meaningful descriptions (include key words, @+a name will tag someone) Pinterest requires you to write a description of some sort. Be sure your description tells what the pin is.  It is also nice when you include the blog name or tag someone.  You may have noticed that more and more bloggers are including text on their images to make the images “Pinterest friendly” and helpful for viewers on Pinterest.

Check out these tips from Ashley Zeckman:

6. There are SEO benefits: Pinterest is indexed by Google and should be part of your backlinking and social linking strategy.

7. Create community: Users can easily embed their social sites and contact information into the Pinterest profile description.  This alerts users to all of the ways that they can connect with you.

8. Measure, refine, repeat:  To determine what has been pinned from your boards you can visit: http://pinterest.com/source/yourURL.com or utilize tools like Repinly.com. Viewing your top pins will help guide your content strategy.

Amy Lynn Andrews offers these Pinterest Tips:

9. Write your own summary description. Don’t copy and paste the whole post, the whole recipe or all the instructions from the original post directly in your pin. Not only does it clutter the images with unnecessary text (see my pinterest pet peeves post), it’s not good Pinterest manners. Plus, posts are copyrighted so pasting them in their entirety is copyright infringement (more on copyright below).

10. Space out your pins instead of flooding the stream. If you’re pinning a lot of stuff at once, you can overwhelm your followers. For example, if you’re researching black shoes and spend an hour pinning a gazillion pairs of black shoes to your “Rockin’ Black Shoes” board, anyone who follows you will just see a sea of black shoes in their stream. (I’m guilty of flooding the stream.) Instead, spread it out a bit.

11. Follow individual boards to cut out the noise. One of the nice things about Pinterest is that you can follow individual boards. You don’t have to follow a person and therefore, all of their boards (although you can do that too). So, maybe you want to follow my “handy tips” board but you don’t want to follow my “easy peasy crafts” board. To subscribe to individual boards, simply click on the name of any Pinterest user and you’ll see all their boards. If you follow the person, you’ll follow all their boards. Otherwise, just pick and choose the boards you want.

12. Use Pinterest to connect with brands. You’d better believe companies are taking notice of Pinterest. Of course, we, the little people, have an advantage. That advantage? We’re small enough that we can dive in and get our hands dirty quick. Big companies, on the other hand are sometimes a little slower to the punch. What about approaching a large company you don’t see on there, let them know of the rage that Pinterest is and suggest ideas for the two of you to work together? Be respectful of course, but lead them by the hand and make suggestions from which you can both benefit.

And there is always something you shouldn’t do on Pinterest, Daniel P. Howley explains:

13. The wrong way to post material on Pinterest: The social network discourages its users, even marketers and businesses, from engaging in blatant self-promotion. So adding pins about your company alone won’t cut it. Georgieva, however, says businesses can use this restriction as an opportunity to get creative by pinning topics that showcase the lifestyle their brand represents. Try working pins about your business into these lifestyle boards as a reminder to followers that that board’s particular topic is exactly what your business is all about.

Some interesting insights:

• 40% socialize more online than they do face-to-face.
• There are more devices connected to the internet than there are people on Earth.
• People spend an average of 6.75 hours month on Facebook.
• Facebook is accessed by 7,000 different devices every day.
• 11 accounts are added every second to Twitter.
• Since 2012, 12 BILLION minutes have been spent using Pinterest on the web.
• Every second 1 new user joins LinkedIn.
• 30% of videos account for 99% of all YouTube views.
• 74% of brand marketers saw an increase in website traffic after investing just 6 hours per week on social.

All this and more in the INFOGRAPHIC below:

Have you seen any stand out Pinterest contests/promotions? Share them in the comments!

As I mentioned yesterday, I have the pleasure of speaking about Foursquare and Pinterest tomorrow for Torstar Digital’s University program! I’m taking this opportunity to provide you all with a sneak peek at the slides I’ll be presenting with. Have a look, and enjoy the case study videos! Tomorrow, I’ll have a video of the presentation for you to enjoy and learn with! Thanks for checking in, and let me know  if you have any questions about the deck below!

Also, keep your eyes peeled over the next 24 hours for a guest blog post from my dear friend, @shopwithrobin! She’ll be providing some great insights on interview attire!

Download the FourPin+ presentation here.

On Wednesday, I’m teaching a seminar on Pinterest for Torstar Digital’s University program. Because of this, I’ve revisited marketing tactics for the innovative, image based social pinboard, and I thought I’d share with you some key ways that you can use Pinterest effectively for your business, your brand, or even yourself!

“Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. 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.” (source: About Pinterest)

A picture represents each unique pin. Popular subjects include recipes, memorable blog posts, craft projects and more. Once a post is pinned, others can see the pin and follow a link to the original source. The ideal scenario is that your pictures (ie. pins) will be re-pinned and shared by others!

First off, a quick video that shows some of the key info about this buzz-worthy network!

Isn’t it crazy that Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Google+, Youtube and LinkedIn combined?! Here’s a few first steps that you can take to get a piece of the Pinterest action:

Make Your Site Image-Friendly

Whether you’re blogging, or just enhancing your current website – make sure to have lots of images that are able to be re-pinned! Why? This will ultimately bring you more referral traffic (not to mention make your site a prettier place to visit) while people are looking through the infinite images on Pinterest. A big shout out to some of you readers who have already started pinning my images – THANK YOU!

Get The Browser Add-On

When using firefox, google chrome, or even explorer – you can download a simple add on that allows you to easily right click on images and share them on your pinterest boards, etc. Find more information on where to download these add-ons here.

Place Your Pins On Your Site!

This one seems like a no-brainer. I’m using pinterest for the business I market for (Shopcatch), and am in the process of building out Embrace Disruption’s pinterest page (stay tuned). There’s plenty of widgets out there that you can place on your sites/blogs/profiles that will help you drive up your follower number, and also your traffic numbers by displaying snapshots of photos you’ve recently pinned.

***UPDATE!! You can now FOLLOW EMBRACE DISRUPTION on PINTEREST by clicking HERE.

Get Your Comment Skills ON

Another really important piece to the Pinterest puzzle is engaging. As with any kind of relationship, it’s a give and take! Make sure to comment on others’ pins – and really do the job of listening and viewing other people’s content. This may take some time, but is a guaranteed way to get people ‘pinterested’ in you!

If you’ve still got questions – don’t fret! After my presentation on Wednesday, I’ll post the slides for you to look through for more info. Also, there’s some real crossover in terms of promotional strategy that you can employ from the Twitter Engagement post yesterday.