6 Pinterest Strategies for Small or Unconventional Businesses

For travel agents, artists and fashion brands Pinterest seems like an easy fit. What better way to show off exotic locals, new works of art and the latest trends and beauty secrets. But for many other businesses, out-of-the-box-pinning can be the pathway to new success.

The following strategy points are designed to help any business build and develop a strong Pinterest profile and develop boards that will make them shine.

#1 Create boards with your products. Create individual boards based on brand, type, function, theme or whatever makes the most sense for your business. You don’t need to feature every item, pick out your top sellers or highest profit-margin merchandise and feature. Make sure every pin links back to your website. You do have the option of adding a price so that it will appear as a tag on the actual image. To a price tag to your pin add a “$” sign followed by one or more numbers in the description field of your pin. However, before you place price tags on all your pins, experiment to see how pinners respond. If the pins without tags receive overwhelmingly more re-pins than those with price tags, consider not implementing the practice.

#2 Build boards with the Lifestyle of your consumers in mind. Your Pinterest profile should be more than products. It should be a reflection of the culture and values of you and your consumers. And it should be a profile people want to visit to find new ideas. So show off your creativity and have fun creating boards that you and your clients will enjoy. A great way to do this is with boards for inspiring quotes, your favorite books, humor and art. It can even be specific to your geographic region such as favorite local monuments, destinations or festivals.

#3 Create Themes around special events and holidays. People love themes especially when the themes reflect an upcoming event or holiday. Again, this is an opportunity to show off your creativity so go beyond product shots. You can show your product in use in original ways and mixed with pins that are complimentary that you find from other pinners and then mix that with your favorite recipes for the holiday.

#4 Engage. Social Media is not like traditional media where you talk at your audience (think radio and TV, your audience sees and/or hears you, but you can’t hear them). Social Media means you have an open forum for everyone to weigh in and share ideas and opinions. So go ahead and follow others, re-pin, comment, and ‘like’ other pins. Then monitor the comments, respond, and thank your followers for their engagement. It will build positive sentiment and give your business a more personable feel.

#5 Show Support for your fellow local business and create a board to feature them. Engaging with your fellow business community strengthens all of you. You might even want to consider a shared board as an opportunity to show how you complement each other.

For more ideas, I recommend you visit the following Pinterest profiles for inspiration.
Bevmo
Home Depot
HGTV
iEnhance
Bath & Body Works
California Riverside Ballet

If you need to know the basics on Pinterest account set-up and FAQ’s, please visit Pinning 101 or contact adgrlSu.

17 Quick Tips for Successful Social Media

For some, social media is a black hole of possibilities and they don't know where to start. Having an organized strategy and social media plan is vital, but just keeping the following tips in mind can start you on the road to success.

#1 Engage with the local business community. Reciprocity can go a long way in building relationships and connections.


#2 Monitor your brand image and your competitors by subscribing to them via RSS feed. You'll be able to see their posts and tweets without ever having to "like" or "follow".


#3 Re-purpose content. By changing the positioning statement, you'll find that you content can be used on multiple platforms.

#4 Most tweeters are in the Eastern time zone. Align your tweets with this time zone for maximum effectiveness (for national accounts). If local, stay with your home time zone but still plan for the morning.

#5 For ideas on how to add value to your Facebook brand page, visit others for ideas and inspiration.

#6 Comment on popular topics on Facebook. Your post will be grouped with the others on the subject and appear at the top of people's walls gaining you more exposure and increased reach.

#7 Facebook helpful hint: Customize your tabs. There are many free applications that can enhance and add value to your Facebook page such as a Contact tab and Custom Welcome Tab. Once you add your tabs, you can change the order in which the tabs are displayed by clicking "EDIT" under the list. Missing a tab? Click on "edit page", go to apps, and "edit setting" to enable the tab.

#8 Have you ever participated in a tweetchat on Twitter? It's a great way to extend your network, learn new things and gain klout.

#9 Convert to Facebook Timeline and keep up with any future changes. It shows you are actively managing the page and staying current on trends. 

#10 Create a custom cover photo for your new Timeline Brand Page and implement sooner rather than later. 

#11 Add a monitoring policy on your Facebook business page. Protect your right to remove non-approved conduct.

#12 Use hashtags (#) sparingly yet purposefully to get noticed.

#13 Always let a true personality shine through. Accounts should be managed by real people not just bots. Consumers know the difference.

#14 Remember to be personal and respond to your fans and don't be afraid to upload a quick video of you and your team hard at work or hard at play!

#15 Don’t “post to all”. Not every message works on all platforms.

#16 Make your fans look good. Share their content, like it and encourage their participation.

#17 Let your fans talk to one another without too much interference.

Two Social Media Tools I'm Using Right Now

SocialBro:  SocialBro is a tool to help analyze your Twitter Community. Its has multiple features but my favorite is the Best Time to Tweet data.  The program analyzes your followers and provides a day-by-day hour-by-hour graph of the percentage of your followers who are actively online.  The tool also gives you a breakdown of people you follow, who's active, who's a influential and who's inactive and then allows you to bulk remove tweeters from your friends list. If you're looking to make the most of your tweets, this is worth checking out.  This is currently a free application but I suspect this will change.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social planning tool that allows you to schedule Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other outlets in advance.  The program comes with a link shortening tool that ads a built in trackability function adding value to the service.  There are free and paid versions of this tool (I use the paid version) and it is a great way to control when and where your message posts without having to be live for a time-sensitive message.  When used with info from SocialBro, this can really add power to your message. The program can generate all-inclusive reports, although only the click report is free with a paid service.

I highly recommend implementing these tools especially if you're managing more than one social media profile.

Social Media Design Parameters

Since I seem to be constantly looking these up, I decided to compile a chart of the most used social media platform design dimensions and parameters.  These are constantly changing so consult the respective developer guidelines if you have any difficulty. Otherwise, enjoy!

Please visit http://www.adgrlsu.com/social-media-resources/social-media-design-parameters/ for a larger image.

For some, you may want to test at www.screen-resolution.com due to varying screen resolutions and settings.

Quick Guide for Social Media Beginners to Contribute to their Organization's Strategy

Not everyone within an organization is a social media savvy as the next person.  The following provides a guide for those who wish to contribute to the social media presence and strategy of an organization.

When implementing a social media strategy each member of an organization (Board Members, employees, etc.) has a responsibility to participate and interact and further the efforts of that strategy.  This means "liking" a Facebook page and "liking" posts written on the page as they appear.  This allows your friends to see those posts and make a decision as to their opinion on the subject matter and business.  If they decide to "like" that page then their friends are now presented with the same opportunities and the viral possibilities go on from there.

On Twitter, the process starts with "Following" the organization and "Retweeting" its posts so that those "Following" you can see the original posts.  You can also tweet a message back to the organization and include its name in your tweet to, again, put that organization's name in front of your followers.  This is done by using the @username format. 

If you are new to Twitter and don't have many followers, your first order of business should be to go find those individuals or businesses that interest you and "Follow" them.  In turn, they may in turn follow you.  Be careful not to only focus only on national brands and personalities, look at local businesses, organizations, personalities and entertainment options from your community.  Also, remember to use that account and tweet about things that interest you.  You need to be interesting to grow your follower base.

In Summary:
"Like" Facebook fan pages
"Like" Facebook posts
"Follow" on Twitter
"Retweet" posts
Tweet to the organization using @username