Pinterest for Business: 5 Helpful Articles to Get You Started

Heard all the buzz about Pinterest? Whether or not it’s just a fad, it seems to be a fact that Pinterest is good for business — at least for now. Mashable reports that web traffic from Pinterest at several top apparel retailers has cracked their top 5 traffic referrers and the amount of traffic referred has jumped 398% from July to December.

For the clients we’ve recently added to Pinterest, they too are seeing a traffic boost if the page is regularly maintained. Here’s more interesting reading on Pinterest for Business to get you started:

• Pinterest Becomes Top Traffic Driver for Retailers - Mashable
• 3 Ways to Use Pinterest for Business Right Now
• 9 Tips to Boost Your Business With Pinterest – Inc.com
• A PR Practioner’s Guide to Pinterest for Business – Step Ahead
• Pinterest for Business: Yes! – About.com Women in Business

A PR Practitioner’s Guide to Pinterest for Business

By Lyn Mettler

Tired of hearing about Google Plus and how it’s the latest and greatest place to be on social media? Well, we’ve got a new one for ya: Pinterest. It’s a good bet that by now you’ve received an email inviting you to this popular new invitation-only social network, but if you’ve never heard of it, it’s time to sit up and take note.

Last month, Pinterest cracked the top 10 most visited social networks at No. 9, besting the latest social media darling Google Plus at No. 10. Time magazine also declared it one of the top five social networks for 2011.

So what is this Pinterest? At its most basic, Pinterest allows you to create virtual “pinboards” with images you come across on the web. Your “pinboards” center around a specific subject matter or topic, say Arts & Crafts homes you’ve come across, purses you love, places you’d like to visit, birthday party ideas, decor for your baby’s nursery, you get the idea…

But it’s a whole lot more than that and the real reason I’m telling you about it is because of its potential to generate results for your business. Pinterest is a social network, of course, so for starters, you can follow others and their boards and vice versa.

Typically, the way a person uses Pinterest is they log on view pins (images) from those they follow, check out Pinterest’s recommended pins and search within the site for images specific to what they’re looking for. There is also a “pin” for your browser’s toolbar that you can click when you come across something on the web you’d like to “pin” to one of your boards.

When you pin an image, you can attach a web address to it and even a price. So if you’re a retailer who sells shoes, you might want to load up boards of your different styles of shoes and maybe even outfits that would go great with your shoes. Attach prices and websites to your products, and when Pinterest users come across your images, they just might go to your website and even better, purchase the product. On top of that, they may “repin” your image to one of their boards, thus sharing it with all of their followers.

We had a retail-based client who recently set up a Pinterest profile, and within days they saw a big bump in traffic from the site and even a boost in sales, better than they see from either Facebook or Twitter. We had another client with a women’s product who saw nearly 100 hits on their site from one pin someone posted of their product.

To get properly introduced to Pinterest, get on the site and play around. If you need an invite, shout and I’ll invite you from my profile. Feel free to take a look at Step Ahead’s Pinterest page at Pinterest.com/StepAheadInc/ to get a feel for what a company can do. It’s not a great fit for every business, but certainly those who offer something visually appealing should definitely poke around Pinterest. Have fun!

Lyn Mettler is the owner of Step Ahead Inc, an Indianapolis and Charleston, SC-based company specializing in social media management for business. Email her atlmettler@stepaheadinc.com for your Pinterest invite!

How Facebook’s Changes Affect Businesses

Step Ahead’s Lyn Mettler recently talked with two different media outlets about how the new Facebook changes — from Timeline and the ticker to Smart Lists and the Newsfeed — affect businesses and their Facebook marketing strategy.

On the WISH TV interview, she quickly hit the highlights of the updates to educate the viewers about what to expect and how to make changes to the settings.

On INside Indiana Business, her article addresses specifically how each of the updates impact businesses and how they should alter their Facebook strategy.

Social Media for Hotels: Reaching More Customers With Twitter

Think back a decade ago, how did you find the right hotel for your vacation? Probably either using a travel agent, seeing an advertisement in a magazine or word of mouth. Well, flash forward to 2011 and that’s all been turned on its head.

Yes, those previous forms of communication still affect the hotel/resort industry, but word of mouth no longer means the same thing as it did 10 years ago. Now, people talk about the resorts they enjoy using social media, making word of mouth so much more powerful and effective, and one of the most powerful ways for guests to get their messages out is with Twitter.

Twitter lets users reach a very large audience very quickly! Not only can users reach their followers, but each tweet is searchable on search.twitter.com, indexed by Google (so anyone can come across it even if they are not on Twitter) and has the potential to be “retweeted” (shared with another Twitter user’s followers), which is how a single tweet can reach thousands of eyeballs in a flash.

So if you haven’t checked out what folks are saying about your hotel or resort on Twitter, make that a top priority TODAY and consider how you can  use that tool to capture new guests, solve customer service issues and influence what people think about your property.

Here are some tips to get you started:

Follow Your Competitors:

In any sound marketing strategy, you always look to see what the competition is doing. Follow your main competitors on Twitter and monitor search terms for them as well. We find using a program like Tweetdeck makes monitoring accounts and search terms in real time much more efficient. Monitoring your competitors will allow you to see what they are doing on Twitter and let you tweak your social media strategy accordingly. By monitoring your competitors, you’ll also be able to find users who are unhappy with your competitors, and then you can reach out to those users with open arms!

Keywords are Key:

To get the maximum benefit from Twitter, set up keyword searches. These searches will allow you to monitor all that is said about a certain topic or phrase. One or your keywords should be the name of your property, as well as phrases that indicate a user may be interested in your service. Try terms that include the name of your area or city and then the phrase “stay,” “visit” and “hotel”.

Using these searches will allow you to reach out to users currently staying at your property, those who are reviewing your property and potential customers who are planning to come to your area. This one-on-one interaction can help sway a potential customer. Just make sure you’re timely in your response, as many on Twitter expect responses, especially to customer service issues, within six hours or less. That means you need to be on Twitter not just Mon-Fri 9-5 but nights, weekends and holidays, too. After all, those are the times when most people are planning their vacations.

Interact and Offer Strategic Content:

Another key component for running a successful Twitter account is what you tweet out into the world. You want to make your account the go-to account for whatever geographic area you’re servicing. Research local events, post photos, inform users about the weather and just be an overall fountain of information for your city and property.

Now you can’t just tweet out content and not interact, that will make your account look too “salesy” and one-sided. It demonstrates that you don’t care about your followers. Ideally, you should be sending out three to four “planned” tweets a day in addition to interacting many times a day with your followers and potential followers. This mix of tweets will make your account look more personal and allow the account to take on its own personality.

Another mistake we see often among hotels is setting up Twitter and not following anyone. We’ll see accounts with a thousand followers who are following 26 people. Again, this demonstrates you’re not interested in what your followers have to say and that’s not appreciated in the world of Twitter.

Don’t Forget to Link:

Another common mistake is pumping out a lot of content without ever linking back to your website. Give your followers the chance to go to your site for more information – and to book a room! They can’t do it if you don’t provide them with a way to do so.

Now, set up your Twitter account, follow us and keep us updated on how you’re filling your rooms on Twitter.