How to Use Pinterest Promoted Pins

What Are Promoted Pins?

Ever since the site launched, people have been anxiously anticipating the launch of some form of Pinterest advertising. The Pinterest promoted pins feature was announced last spring. It’s now in beta and only available to certain business account holders in the United States.

Learn how to use Pinterest promoted pins.

A promoted pin is a paid ad on Pinterest. You can target certain locations, demographics and devices and reach customers who are searching for or have shown an interest in what you offer.

Promoted pins run on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. A campaign has a specified daily budget and duration. You pay only when someone clicks though the pin to your website. You can monitor and adjust your campaign as it runs.

Pinterest suggests you be authentic when you choose what pins to promote. Promote only things that are appropriate and be selective and intentional.

Like with any social network, they have a few rules. For example, there can be no promotional information, calls to action, service claims, price listing or deceptive content in the pin image. Ads must be accurate, and lead to a relevant landing page with no signup requests.

Promoted pins are ads you run on Pinterest.

If you haven’t yet been invited to use this new tool, apply here. Note: Approval is not guaranteed or given right away. Early adopters, be patient–they still have some bugs to work out.

Why Use Promoted Pins?

Pinterest promoted pins will help you draw attention to a certain pin when you have something special or unique that you want to feature, such as an event, promotion or special article. They will also help you get exposure to people who don’t yet follow your business on Pinterest. Promoted pins are great for seasonal content, time-sensitive material or anything that you need to drive more drive attention to.

How to Promote Pins

To get started, select one of your recent pins to promote. It can be one of your pins or a pin from another site. If you want to promote something less recent, do a search for that pin.

Once you’ve made a selection, hover over the pin. When it says Promote, click on it.

Hover over the pin and then click Promote.

After you select the pin, it’ll take you to another screen to set up your ad. You’ll begin by entering keywords to help your promoted pin appear in Pinterest search results.

Be careful and strategic when you choose the keywords for your promoted pins.

Before choosing keywords, do your research. Check keywords using Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner, KeywordSpy or whatever tool you’re comfortable using. Also, do some research on Pinterest. Enter the keywords you’re considering using and see what comes up. People use Pinterest search differently than they use Google and other search engines, so it’s helpful to see the phrases the Pinterest community uses.

Next, you’ll be given options to refine your audience.

When you choose your audience, you can narrow it down by gender, location, language and device.

For location, you can select a city or regional area from a drop-down menu. Thenchoose the language, which will most likely be English, since Pinterest currently only offers promoted pins to U.S.-based business accounts.

Target your location and then select the primary language of your customers.

Now, select device and then gender.

Target a device and gender for your promoted pin.

Once you’ve made the audience decisions, choose a maximum cost-per-click bid. Remember, it’s the amount you’d be willing to pay per click, so you’ll never pay more than that. However, you won’t necessarily have to pay such a high amount, especially since there’s not that much competition with early adopters. For example, one of my clients put $1 as her maximum, but was only charged $0.13 per click.

Next, you have the option to keep the pin’s original destination URL or change it. It’s unclear if Pinterest will allow link shorteners in this area that can be tracked. For normal pins, Pinterest tends to mark the ones with redirect links as spam.

Your original URL will be pre-populated, but you can change it.

Name your campaign, give it an optional start and end date and set a daily budget.

After you’ve made all of your strategic ad targeting decisions, agree to the terms of service, set up billing and then submit. Your promoted pin will be reviewed and approved. If your ad gets rejected, they’ll return it to you with suggestions so you can resubmit.

Promoted Pins Tactics

When you decide which pins you want to promote, look at your analytics and see what has already received some traction. If a pin has received a lot of attention, using a promoted pin might help it grow beyond the reach of your current followers.

Split test (A/B testing) with promoted pins for something specific and time-sensitive like an event or contest. Create different images for the same event or contest and run two separate campaigns. Also, change the pin description of the targeted keywords if you aren’t seeing the results you’re looking for. A little testing could go a long way.

Keep in mind, if you don’t know what works yet, promoted pins might be an excellent way to test your Pinterest strategy. At this point, they seem to be relatively affordable too.

Tracking Your Promoted Pins

There’s tracking functionality built into promoted pins. You can see number of impressions (how many times your pin was seen), repins (number of times it was pinned to someone else’s board), clicks (visits), CTR (click-through rate) and total spend (what you’ll be billed).

Susan Schlenger, Landscape Design Advice, Promoted Pins Experience

Susan advertised for one week on Pinterest and chose a maximum cost per click (CPC) of $1.00.

Her promoted pin had 9.47k impressions with an average cost per click of $0.13. It had 31 repins and 61 click-throughs to her website. The CTR was .6442% (poor in her opinion), as it was less than 1%. She spent a total $7.86.

“I am not sure what to make of this,” Susan says. “I do a lot of CPC AdWords advertising with Google. The clicks are very targeted for what people are specifically looking for. This Pinterest pin may or may not be as targeted…”

Susan gets some landscape design projects from Pinterest, though not a lot. So perhaps, she thinks, the advertising works the same way.

“I think I would have to increase my spending a lot to really test,” she adds.

Since the promoted pins feature is still in beta, there’s no doubt the results and features will change as more people use it.

Conclusion

Pinterest promoted pins are another way to get exposure for your website, products and business.

Remember, take all of your promoted pins experiments with a grain of salt. It’s such a new service that the reach may not be there at this point. However, there are benefits to experimenting with a new platform. There’s less competition and potentially more exposure.

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Why Marketers Need to Take Pinterest Seriously

The advent of social media has opened hundreds of new opportunities to advertise and build booming brands nearly overnight. Understanding the benefits of Pinterest is essential for all social media and online marketers, whether you are blogging about cooking, representing a new fashion brand or marketing towards a specific audience and demographic. Pinterest is ideal to reach women and female entrepreneurs, making it a key factor in growing blogs and small websites today.

Ideal for SEO Purposes

Because of Pinterest's skyrocketing success and growth in popularity, it quickly became a great platform for marketers due to its SEO, or search optimization purposes. SEO marketing is essential for most all online blogs and websites. With Pinterest, adding keywords, sharing URLs and distributing virtual pins is a quick way to boost any website's overall ranking within some of the most popular search engines including Google, Yahoo! and even Bing.

Using search engine optimization with Pinterest is a way to cut corners from link-building while sharing legitimate content to keep followers, loyal fans and potential customers interested in what you share on a regular basis. The more consistently you update Pinterest and other social media platforms that allow hashtags and keyword-tracking, the easier it becomes to expand your reach while gaining exposure for your brand and the business you are building or representing yourself.

Create a Name for Your Brand Without Expensive Advertising

Creating a name for any business or brand is possible with Pinterest without the use of large advertising budgets. Advertising online can quickly become expensive, especially when using direct advertising approaches. Sharing new content with hundreds or even thousands of followers is free to do with Pinterest, giving marketers an entirely new platform to boost advertising revenue from users who discover their links during searches or through the uploading of new content.

Hashtags and Keywords

Pinterest allows for hashtags and keywords to be used to help with tracking content and allows users to search for uploading and shared virtual "pins" that are relevant. Using hashtags and keywords is another way to help with boosting SEO, as the keywords are linked to your URL when your blog or website receives new visitor using Pinterest as the source.

Build an Audience in Less Time

Gaining followers is much easier with Pinterest than other networks such as Facebook and Twitter, especially with the use of searchable hashtags and keywords. Adding numerous keywords, phrases and relevant acronyms any time you update new links and content to your brand's Pinterest page is essential to help with building an audience and expanding your demographic in less time, whether you are promoting a local business or an online magazine for all.

Dominate a Specific Niche

Using Pinterest effectively as a marketer is a way to dominate a specific niche. Whether you are promoting new fashion trends, cooking recipes for low-carb dieters or DIY projects that are useful in the garden or around the home it is possible to dominate a specific market with the use of Pinterest. Be sure to conduct adequate keywords research and browse popular categories on Pinterest any time you are thinking of running new marketing campaigns or producing new content to help in shaping an image for any brand or business you represent online.

When marketers understand the need to take Pinterest seriously, it is possible to have drastic results on budgeting and overall marketing campaign costs. Knowing how to effectively put keywords and search engine optimization to use with Pinterest is a way to quickly gain exposure whether launching a new business or promoting an online eCommerce store.

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Has Social Media Become the Most Important Way to Advertise?

Unlike traditional marketing, social media advertising has made it easier for business managers to sell their products, services, or content to online users with less effort and money. No need to turn on your TV or grab your local newspaper to see advertisements in the morning — just check your Facebook or Twitter on your mobile phone. With just a few scrolls, there it is: advertising.

Let’s take a look at some of the popular social media platforms and see how advertising works and why your business should go digital.

Facebook: Like and Share

Photo courtesy of Steve Nicholls via Flickr

There’s no denying Facebook is the most popular thing on the Internet with its limitless sharing and connectivity to about 1.23 billion people worldwide, 945 million of which access through their mobile phones. Brands active on Facebook don’t only enjoy online exposure but can also update their followers on what’s new, promote special deals, and occasionally hold online contests. They also create focused ad campaigns that target a carefully selected audience.

The “Like” and “Share” buttons are viewed more than 22 billion times a day, not only on the network itself but across more than 7.5 million websites worldwide. In fact, Facebook even created Like and Share buttons side-by-side “to drive Facebook referral traffic to your website.” Additionally, brands that use the retargeted ads in Facebook users’ news feeds report 49 times more clicks than right-hand sidebar ads.

How do I begin? Your best bet is to create a Facebook Page (not personal profile or group page) where it’s a free avenue for everyone to peruse on your content, whether they become a follower or not. Next, come up with a plan: your target audience, the number of posts you will write a day, when to post, what material to use, and your tone. Make sure you follow other pages to gain more followers, too.

Twitter: “On the GO” Network

Photo courtesy of Maryland GovPics via Flickr

Twitter is notorious for its no-nonsense 140-character tweet limit that makes content direct to the point. But don’t get discouraged: while Twitter enables visual tweets (photos, videos) in its turf, it seems that its 650 million users worldwide prefer textual tweets more. Plus, a BostInno survey found that 49 percent of respondents would rather interact with brands in 140-characters or less, beating Facebook.

Twitter updates real-time with 9,100 tweets every second, amounting to around 58 million new tweets daily. Since many Twitter users use their mobile phones to tweet, this might just be perfect for business managers to target people on-the-go. Twitter also offers three different kinds of paid advertising: promoted accounts, tweets, and trends.

How do I begin? An official account, of course. Then acquaint yourself with hashtags (#), retweets, mentions (@), and direct messages. Aside from the brevity of your content, you need to sustain visibility by tweeting more often since every tweet has a very short expiration date. Don’t get too trigger happy now – you don’t want to spam or annoy your audience and lose followers.

The “Trends” pane on the left side lets you know the current buzz in the Twitterverse. Meanwhile, business managers can search for keywords related to their business and track people’s conversations, what piques their interest, and how to better improve marketing content. These can be monitored and responded to accordingly using dashboard tools like HootSuite, TweetDeck, or Commun.it.

Instagram: Photo Finish Marketing

Photo courtesy of Jason A. Howie via Twitter

This mobile-based network has hooked more young people than other sites with its limitless photo sharing spiked by image filters and enhancements. What makes this unique is that users share mostly original and creative content, mostly labeled with hashtags (#) so others can have access to their content.

Business Insider reported that 90 percent of 150 million Instagram users are under the age of 35, a demographic many brands could take advantage of: apparel, entertainment, and media. Since it’s a mobile app, people on-the-go are more likely to use it and hit “like” on posts. In fact, this Facebook-owned social media platform can turn into a mini-marketplace as entrepreneurs do a SFS (shoutout for shoutout) where they advertise their fellow entrepreneurs’ content and vice versa.

How do I begin? Interesting photos and creative content posted on a frequent basis. Like Twitter, Instagram operates on hashtags (#) and followers. But you have to use them cleverly, so you may as well acquaint yourself with the most popular hashtags. And do what entrepreneurs do – SFS.

Pinterest: Inspirations and DIYs

Photo courtesy of Bunches and Bits {Karina} viaFlickr

Pinterest is a good place to put your crafty hat on and get your creative juices flowing. Here, content is devoted to provide inspiration for various crafts, recipes, and DIY projects as 70 million users, mostly female, pin them to their Pinterest boards. In fact, Pew Research found that a third of American women are Pinterest users.

According to marketing firm Piqora, each “pin” attached by a user to her interest boards is worth an average of 78 cents in additional sales to the brand whose merchandise is featured, and reported that sales-per-pin is up 25 percent in nine months. Adobe also reported that site visits from Pinterest yield 55 cents a piece in revenue, up 150 percent year-over-year. A study by Shopify also found that orders driven by Pinterest are larger than those produced by Facebook or Twitter, at $80 per order, topping Google and Amazon.

How do I begin? Your selling point is a virtual album bedecked by high definition photos of your product, services, or even your crew. It also won’t hurt to follow the DIY path to lure more followers, but make sure to fortify it with photos, illustration, and other graphic content. Go snitch those pins, tiger.

Google+: The Plus Factor

Photo courtesy of Mookieh via Flickr

Google+ rubbed us the wrong way but it’s starting to pick up speed now. If you want your content to make it to the search results, list and reach out 550 million users that are mostly students, tech-oriented professionals, bloggers, and photographers, then you might want to give Google+  a try and be active.

Unlike other social media platforms out there, Google+ calls for intelligent content — so you may want to make every word count. It’s like digital marketing at its best and Google thinking for you. Thus, you need to use relevant keywords and consider your search engine optimization (SEO).

How do I begin? As a brand, your best bet is a Company Page. As mentioned, you need to craft your content cleverly and weave relevant keywords through it for your SEO. Communities are strong on Google+, so widen your network by interacting with communities related to your business and do so in a clever fashion. It’s like doing business with conscience: offer value to people and understand that participation in communities is mostly about giving. Hard selling and spamming simply don’t work here.

There are many ways to advertise and reach out to various demographics via social media, depending on what your business is about. But all of this would be for naught if you have no metric telling you what these numbers meant or if they translate to profit at all. Avinash Kaushik’s social media metrics are good yardsticks for social media effectiveness.

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Pinterest for Men and Women: Is There a Difference?

Most e-commerce brands understand the importance of social media to their digital marketing strategy, but they may not have harnessed its full potential. One of the social networks many companies have yet to build a strong strategy for is Pinterest.

The popular image-sharing network has risen in popularity since its inception. But it still features a disproportionately high ratio of female versus male users. Pinterest and its fans are making efforts to rectify this phenomenon, but how can you do so without resorting to gender-based stereotypes?

Below is a discussion of Pinterest’s gender problem and how brands can appeal to men and women alike on the platform.

How is Pinterest doing right now?

As of August 2014, Pinterest sits at #4 on the list of most popular social networks. It represents 255 million users, which is close to the entire population of the US. However, Pinterest continues to lag behind Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

According to Morgan Johnstonbaugh of Crimson Hexagon, Pinterest also presents significant crossover value in social media. For instance, “1.5 Tweets were written about Pinterest” in the past three months, Johnstonbaugh points out.

The most popular topics tagged on Pinterest these days consist of crafts, interior design, fashion, and food. Sixty-four percent of Pinterest users are women, which indicates a significant disparity between females and males on the platform.

But is this due primarily to users’ self-selected preferences or does it suggest a systematic exclusion of men?

Pinterest’s efforts to draw in more males

Fully aware of the limitations of domination by one gender, Pinterest has launched a concerted marketing effort to attract more men to the platform. Their goal is to show men that the site is about more than traditionally female-driven categories and encourage them to participate in the community.

Pinterest’s campaign to bring more men to the pinning table has included:

• Marketing imagery. Images on the registration and sign-in pages now feature noticeably more men than they used to.
• New head of marketing. Pinterest recently hired David Rubin, the former VP at Unilever responsible for Axe advertising campaigns, to head up its gender-inclusive marketing efforts.
• Encouraging a wider array of pin topics. Although Pinterest has developed a reputation for being a planning forum for weddings and baby showers, the network continues to market itself as a place for businesses and individuals to share pins on everything from investing tips to tech trends.

Does your business need to amp up its gender-inclusive Pinterest strategy?

Businesses currently active on Pinterest are among those that contribute the most to the diversity of content on the social network. Rather than focusing on traditionally “male” or “female” topics, they share their latest innovations, ideas, and inspirations.

Leaders in a variety of industries are helping to shatter stereotypes when it comes to which gender a specific kind of content appeals to. Whether you run a crafting business or an investment firm, your Pinterest strategy can (and should) come as close as possible to reaching the widest array of audience members.

Regardless of the dominant genders of their followers, brands succeed best at pinning as a market strategy when they:

1. Pin useful and relevant content. Although Pinterest is a fun place to peruse interesting images, the content that will most attract the interest of potential customers provides valuable advice or tips.
2. Share new products and inventions. Industry leaders such as GE use Pinterest to release initiatives to their followers. The people who interact with you on Pinterest should feel as though they are privy to the latest news with regard to your brand.
3. Encourage user-generated content. Rather than telling audiences what they should use or how they should use it, let them show you (and everyone else). Ask followers to pin pictures of how they interact with your product, and everyone will benefit from their ingenuity.
4. Create a community. Facilitating a forum where customers from all over the world can share their insights makes a brand’s Pinterest page a gathering place rather than a marketing gimmick.

With authenticity and thoughtful leadership, Pinterest and the businesses that use it can transcend the question of gender and come closer to being the social network of choice for all users.

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24 Helpful Digital Marketing Tips

It’s time to change the way you think about digital marketing. A lot of what we once “knew” about marketing no longer applies, especially when it comes to using social media as a marketing tool. It’s time for an update, for new stats about digital marketing and how you can use them to your advantage.

 

Tip #1

 

Women use Pinterest four times more often than men do. As you are crafting a marketing message for Pinterest, keep in mind that your audience is going to be about 75% women and 25% men.

 

Tip #2

 

Instagram can now boast more than 55 million photos being posted daily. That means millions of active users, engaging in the platform.

 

Tip #3

 

Instagram is also leaking into Twitter, with about half of what’s being shared, being shared on both platforms.

 

Tip #4

 

Pinterest bests Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn in the amount of time spent on the website and the amount of referral traffic to a webpage. That means, if you aren’t taking advantage of this platform, you are missing out on millions of site visitors.  Of course, it has to be relevant to your practice and your patients!

 

Tip #5

 

Instagram isn’t just for selfies or pictures of dogs. National Geographic is one of the most followed accounts, and their pictures are informative and valuable. Even if your products or services are not fashionable or particularly visual, you can find a way to make use of this platform, even if it is just through visual text posts.

 

Tip #6

 

Of the nearly 700 million Twitter users, about 3% of those accounts are fake. Don’t waste your time trying to buy bot traffic on Twitter—it doesn’t work and it may even get your account shut down.

 

Tip #7

 

About 30% of people say they use Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest to discover new things that they want to buy. If you are not on social media, this means you are only getting a fraction of the traffic and sales you could be making.

 

Tip #8

 

Hashtags improve engagement with a Tweet by more than 20%--especially if you have two hashtags, but no more than three. Two or three hashtags is the sweet spot.

 

Tip #9

 

If you have a video on your landing page, you are more than 85% more likely to turn a conversion than if you did not have a video.

 

Tip #10

 

Only 7% of Americans have no idea what Facebook is or how to use it. Are those 7% even in your key demographic? This means that 93% of Americans either know about, are familiar with, or use Facebook on a daily basis—those are people you want to reach, aren’t they?

 

Tip #11

 

Mobile banner ads are notoriously terrible. Consumers hate them and about 50% of the traffic they generate is accidental and amounts to nothing. That means only half of the traffic they draw actually wants to see your page—now, narrow that number down by the percentage of people that actually make a purchase. Are mobile banners worth your time?

 

Tip #12

 

The shorter your Facebook post is, the more likely it is to draw engaged readers. Less than 250 characters (that shouldn’t be too hard, that’s 110 more than Twitter gives you), is the sweet spot.

 

Tip #13

 

Social media takes serious time. The people who saw the most engagement spent more than six hours a week working on their social media pages. Think of what you could do if you used six hours a day to promote yourself on social media?

 

Tip #14

 

Almost 50% of women say that the blogs that they read regularly have an effect on their buying decisions. Is your blog one of them?

 

Tip #15

 

Almost 50% of Pinterest’s traffic comes from mobile devices like tablets. Is your website mobile friendly enough to handle this traffic when someone clicks through a pin to your website?

 

Tip #16

 

Even business to business marketing can benefit from social media—60% of traffic for these kinds of businesses and their B2B marketing comes from social media, especially LinkedIn.

 

Tip #17

 

Social media is the new word-of-mouth, with plenty of small businesses using their social media to engage with their customers and encourage those customers to share their business with their friends.

 

Tip #18

 

Think a traditional commercial will bring you new customers? Think again. YouTube views top every single network, especially in demographics like 18-24 year olds. If you want to get hip with the kids, it’s time to stop focusing on TV and start focusing on media like YouTube instead.

 

Tip #19

 

Does your favorite restaurant have a Facebook page? Nearly half of people use Facebook when looking for somewhere in their area to eat. If they do have a page, they should make sure it has their location and hours of business clearly posted.  Do the same with your dental practice!

 

Tip #20

 

While Pinterest is great, bloggers are more likely to draw traffic when women are looking for new food or decorating ideas. A blog with posts that can be easily shared to social media is your best chance for drawing traffic.

 

Tip #21

 

Want to leverage your Pinterest posts to get even more clicks? Make them DIYs, recipes, or tutorials. These pins see 42% more clicks than various other pins.

 

Tip #22

 

If you sell electronics, don’t neglect Twitter, as studies show that people take to Twitter to find out about electronics and what to purchase—far more than any other social media or marketing venue.

 

Tip #23

 

A third of people who use Google to search for something click on the very first result. How does your search engine optimization stack up?

 

Tip #24

 

Almost 60% of bloggers say that they have drawn customers through their blog. That’s a surprisingly high rate.

Social media in travel

Between July 7 and 13 2014, eDigitalResearch looked at the social media activity of 80 top travel brands. The research looked at productivity and quality of content.

Here are some of the findings:

• KLM is the only brand to appear in the top league tables across each social network.
• Expedia has made one of the most impressive improvements climbing three places up the Facebook league table to second, as well as now claiming the top spot on Google+.
• Expedia’s rise may have come from its use of Global Pages, which allows brands on Facebook to run multiple, regional dependant pages whilst maintaining a global follower base.
• KLM is the first travel brand to surpass the 1m follower mark on Twitter.
• Hotel brands performed particularly well on Pinterest with Four Seasons taking the top spot followed by Mr & Mrs Smith and Hotels.com.
• The study also highlights that travel brands are posting a lot less across social media platforms during weekends.
• On average, most travel brands are posting less than half on Saturdays and Sundays than they are during the week.

(Click to enlarge)

See the report for more detail on Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus.

How to Measure the Value of What You're Doing

Understanding the value

• Receiving more e-mails than comments: The comments are great, they bring more value to the subject in question and sometimes can generate passionate conversations. However, on a monthly basis I receive more personal e-mails than comments. Intimate e-mails with personal history: this is what you should be looking for, be in touch with the people who read, follow and value your work and what you do for them. That is what changes everything - you start to bond with these people that allows you to cross the street to see them and share with them what you are doing, and getting recommended to their friends.
• Changing people: When your articles, speeches, projects or even tweets allow somebody to start a project, confront their fears, deal with delays, realise their mistakes and enable them to learn from them, or finally understand that they've got the capability to excel in whatever they want, that's when the best results start going the right way. The most powerful KPI is to how much you can change people's work, business results, perception or lifestyle - for the better.
• Being conscious about your work: There's a type of work that can't be measured and it's the one that enhances you as a professional. It might be making a podcast, it might be being reponsable for all the digital work for a NGO or even writing down your thoughts and feelings on a piece of paper and posting them on Instagram every day. Look for ways to impact the relationship between your communities.
• Stop defending and start ignoring: It's like everything, there's always that skeptical person that says, "If you can't count it, it can't be measured." This might be true, but only when you have to back your results up in front of your boss, a teacher or a client. But never think that everything has to be measured; this way of being is only for those who need to count and measure everything they do. The people who don't appreciate your work now, will never do, and that's their problem, not yours.

Always meausuring, exposing your results, showing your superiority and improving your own records. That's all great and fascinating, but only when you can turn these numbers into:

• More economical stability.
• Creating more work for you and for others.
• Changing more lives.
• Starting more projects.
• Having a group of colleagues that will help you in what you are doing.
• Work less and produce more.
• Speak about numbers that can be turned into positive effects for those who can help you achieve those numbers.

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Pinterest and Google Plus: Two Peas in a Pod

Cross-platform strategies are an incredibly powerful social media tool. The approach works exceptionally well with Pinterest and Google Plus. I recently did an hour-long live video broadcast with Peg Fitzpatrick and Rebekah Radice to discuss this topic.

What follows in today's column is a summary of the top lessons from the show. I'll include a couple of video clips to extract the show highlights so you can get most of the value without having to watch the whole show!

Strengths of Google Plus

Firstly, don't believe the articles that come out from time to time saying that Google Plus is dead, or that Google is abandoning it. It's a live and vibrant network with lots of great discussions going on, and Google is actively releasing new features all the time.

Two of Google's recent major releases include: +Post ads which was released April 16, Google Plus Stories, which was released May 20, and Google My Business, which was released June 11. These are major new features that clearly indicate Google's ongoing commitment to the platform.

Google Plus has some significant advantages over other platforms as well. Here are some of the most important ones:

1. The Platform Encourages Long Form Content: On Google Plus, it's quite natural to write lengthy posts. It's also pretty common to get long form comments back as well. The result is that the discussion threads can get very involved and result in a lot of fantastic give and take between the participants. If you want an in-depth dialog, Google Plus may just be the best place to get it.
2. Robust Formatting of Posts: Part of the way that long form content is supported is through more robust post formatting features. This includes the ability to use bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and emoticons. These features are available to commenters as well, not just in the original post.
3. Easier to Make New Connections: Google Plus is more open, in that you can directly message people you are not currently connected with. This gives you more avenues to build relationships without having to rely solely on commenting on someone's stuff, and hoping they decide to connect with you.
4. Impact on Personalized Search: People who follow you will see your content higher in the search results. In addition, if they follow someone else, and that person +1s or shares your content on G+, they will also see it rank higher when they search on relevant terms - often 10 positions higher or more. Properly leveraged, this can have a significant positive SEO impact for your business.

Google Plus is also a great visual social network, with features like full-column-width and multi-column post images, large link images, Auto Awesomized photos and videos, and the new Stories feature that automatically turns your travel or event photos and videos into an interactive album. These visual features are where it intersects with Pinterest!

Strengths of Pinterest

One of the advantages of Pinterest over Google Plus is that on Pinterest, you can save all your most awesome stuff and then find it again easily. People have come up with "hacks" to save favorite posts on Google Plus, but it is not as easy to do, nor is it easy to find them again. On Pinterest, you can have numerous topical boards, and finding an older piece of content you want to share is as easy as visually scanning the right board.

Pinterest pins also seem to have a longer "shelf life" than content on most other social networks. Peg and Rebekah have observed that some pins of theirs that got thousands of repins a long time ago are still getting hundreds of repins today. Pinterest seems to bring content that has received a lot of pins back to the top of peoples' streams again and again.

Here is a short summary of their main points:

1. Create 10 boards.
2. Pin five things to each board.
3. Write good descriptions for the boards and pins that include keywords.
4. Connect with and follow 10 people a day.
5. Pin at least three new things a day.
6. Tweet at least one of your pins each day.
7. Add a link to your Pinterest account in your Google Plus profile.
8. Put a link to your Google Plus profile in your Pinterest profile.
9. When pinning content from your blog, be sure to add a link to the original post on your blog to the pin description.

As with all social networks, getting started may seem tough, but the above formula should get you moving on Pinterest pretty quickly!

Getting Them to Work Together

There is a tremendous amount of leverage when you can coordinate your efforts between two different social networks. As Google Plus has great visual feature support, it's a natural fit with Pinterest. By being on both networks, you can significantly increase your overall reach. You never know where your prospects are most active. If you reshare your Google Plus content to Pinterest, you have the opportunity to be discovered by Pinterest users who don't use Google Plus, and vice versa.

Because Pinterest is such a great platform for discovering new content, one useful tactic is to browse Pinterest for something that would be interesting to your Google Plus audience, and then share the pin of that content on Google Plus with a longer form introduction to get a discussion going. Don't forget to link back to the original pin (with something like "Pin this for later!") in your G+ post.

Google Plus and Pinterest also make a nice matchup because Pinterest is generally a lot lower maintenance than Google Plus. When you create something on Google Plus that has a nice image, all you have to do is pin that image to an appropriate Pinterest board. Of course, you will get greater benefits from Pinterest if you're active there, especially in repinning others' pins, but you can do that whenever you have some extra time.

One of the reasons why these platforms work so well together is that you can use the exact same image in both without having to resize the images. You don't have to create a specific image for each of those two, as you do have to do for other platforms such as Twitter or Instagram. This shortens your time in creation and editing mode while extending your reach and effectiveness.

There are now tools such as Canva that allow almost anyone to create images for their online content that will be more sharable and look good on Pinterest and Google Plus. It's critical now to have large format images on your blog posts. That makes the posts more likely to be pinned, and they will grab more attention on Google Plus, as Google Plus is more likely to display the share as a large image post rather than a thumbnail.

Bear in mind that integrating Google Plus and Pinterest will only work well if you are very clear on your own social media marketing strategy. You need to know your purpose for using social media, who your target market is, and what kind of content they crave. Of course, this is good advice for any social media strategy.

Because they consistently integrate content across Google Plus and Pinterest, Peg and Rebekah have seen traffic to their sites skyrocket from both networks. It has created a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario for them. For example, Peg found that she started having good success sharing some of her best pinned images from Pinterest to Google Plus, where those same images also did quite well.

Content curation is one way Pinterest can help you do Google Plus (or really any social network) better. You can store all your best resources on various topics on Pinterest boards. Then when someone on Google Plus asks you for the best resources on a topic, you can just share your relevant Pinterest board with them. This works best if you have created different boards for each major topic area you address.

Another idea is to create a Pinterest board for "My Hottest Google Plus Posts" and pin your most popular posts there. This can make for great reshares on a periodic basis on Google Plus.

Summary

There are many ways to get these two great platforms to work together. Once you get started, you may find it quite compelling!

As we have noted, being on more than one platform exposes you to new audiences, and Google Plus and Pinterest make a great pairing. Sharing content back and forth across these platforms can bring you a great deal of leverage, and you may find, as Peg and Rebekah did, that it brings more traffic to your site as well!