Pinterest For Business: A Social Media Agency Perspective

Speakers: Chris and Mike McLaughlin

Chris: Hi this is Chris McLaughlin, CEO of Social Media Agency Maximize Social Media and I am joined today with our president at Maximize, Mike McLaughlin, actually no relation between us but we do share the same name. Mike, are you on with us?

Mike: I am. Good afternoon Chris!

Chris: Okay. Mike, you are definitely coming in faded.

Mike: How is this now? Is that better?

Chris: Is that good for everybody? That’s good Mike. Right. Lots of people are saying that. So Mike has been our Pinterest expert and well as an amazing social media consultant and he is going to lead this discussion today on Pinterest for brands. Mike, let me turn this over to you and let’s get started.

Mike: Great! Great! Yeah, you know I hesitate to use the word ‘expert’ when it comes to anything social media related as you know. I would like to say we are social media professionals because the world of social media changes so quickly that it’s hard to become an expert one thing before something new and more important comes along. Pinterest is certainly an example of that but we, being a social media agency that handles many, many clients Pinterest has been in our radar for quite some time. We’ve been doing all the research. We’ve been experimenting ourselves. So, we are ready to go ahead and share some of the things we’ve learned. You know, when we do this webinars, hopefully many people were in our Facebook for Timeline webinar last month which just go straight my points but how much social media changes. We always try to do more than give you kind of a talk over infographics. I mean you could certainly go out and do some research and learn what we have learned to a certain degree. But what we like to provide for these webinars is some analyses, some of our expertise, some of our thoughts and opinions. Here’s the stats for what does it mean for the future, what does it mean for the brands, how can you have actual intelligence that you have to inspire you and make you to be the next innovator instead of just follower. Hopefully, we do some of that today. Hopefully, that you feel that we are. That’s certainly our goal in putting this together. It’s to give you than just a little bit more than the facts. But we will certainly do that as well. There’s going to be something in here for people with zero experience on Pinterest. I think there’s going to be a lot in here. There’s going to be a lot for people who have been already utilizing the platform and want you to get even more out of it than you have already been getting. With that being said, I am going to jump in.

What we are going to learn today?

 Just a quick summary:

Why Pinterest matters? Why is this important?

For those of you who are familiar with maximize, you know that we love our Facebook. You know that we push Facebook very hard as the platform that businesses need to be on maybe more so for some of the ones out there. But the fact that we are doing a Pinterest webinar tells you that we feel like there is something here that you need to hear about that it’s not just another fad. It’s definitely more than that. That’s what we are going to talk about. We are going to talk about Why we think that is?

Why Pinterest is popular?

with a little bit of the psychology behind of Pinterest and people think why we are responding to it in record numbers.\

Additionally, we are going to talk about some of the basics of Pinterest.

The mechanics of how it works such you understand the ins and outs because it’s simple and simplest and it’s complicated as it’s most complicated. So, we are going to run through some of that as we go through here.

Then we are also going to look how Pinterest is being used as practice. What are some of the patterns that we are seeing as far as they say that people are using the platform?

Finally, if you saw how you found out about this webinar, it may have seen that we are going to have some 8 action steps for brand and you will certainly see that by the end of the presentation. Some simple steps you take not only in Pinterest but also with your web presence, Facebook presence to integrate the Pinterest into kind of maximize overall impact of Pinterest, not just in Pinterest account but really tying it all together which I think is where you can see a lot of value very quickly with minimal effort.

So, we are going to run through all that and hopefully that gets you excited and interested on what we are going to talk about. First thing I am going to show is just a… for those of you who don’t know what Pinterest is and maybe a few of you out there, this is what Pinterest looks. The three or four sentence elevator pitch essentially Pinterest is visual pin board. When you open up Pinterest, you see images and videos that have been posted by other members of Pinterest network. There are links associated with these images typically. You get a feed from the people whom you follow. It’s very similar to Twitter. I’m probably reducing it too much but it is kind of a visual Twitter to a certain degree but there are a lot of differences that we are going to talk about as well. What you typically see and what really works in Pinterest in general are beautiful images. It is eye catching as you can see right here. It really is about catching people’s attention is very viral and addictive. Particularly, it seems addictive to certain audiences and we are going to talk about that in more detail. If you jump on this webinar and you don’t know what the heck we are talking about, this is what it looks like. As you can see, it’s a nice, clean interface that has a lot of visual pop and so it’s definitely went to level set for anyone who does not have any familiarity with it.

So let’s jump in to: “Why Pinterest matters?”

What’s the power and reach of Pinterest? It is something that is really on the rise. It already has the third largest audience of any social network out there. That means bigger than Linked In, bigger than Google+, bigger than Form spring. The list of social networks out there could go for an hour just about that. I obviously don’t want to. But this is obviously, when you see Google+ there, with the marketing and effort they put in there trying to platform out there, I think it’s very impressive that Pinterest is blown by them with record setting growths. They publicized…

Chris: What I found…

Mike: Sure.

Chris: What I found interesting with regard to their growth is they actually owe, I believe another growth to Facebook.

Mike: Absolutely.

Chris: Most people are, when you first joined the Pinterest, you want to log in on your Facebook page or not and lot of people are logging in their Facebook page because they want to have an integration there as well. Then they do a very seamless, you know when they wish to invite all of your Facebook friends to join you on Pinterest. I have been getting a lot of invitations as well from many friends. And I know when I joined, I mean , I probably followed almost a 1000, probably 600 or 700 people always in just a day simply by the integration by Facebook. All of them are my Facebook friends that happened to be on Pinterest. If you look at the growth, it’s almost a little amusing because as we talked about, Facebook had just brought Instagram mainly because I believe they want to protect themselves from the great growth of Pinterest and what’s going on here and they wanted to have that type of look and feel. I want to make sure that the context… We got some really interesting context coming up between Facebook and Pinterest so I’m not going there. But I do want to share to everyone that they do owe a lot of their growth to Facebook, in the Facebook platform. Now worse day, they may be seen as a threat or maybe it’s complimentary. We are going to get into that as we go along.

Mike: Yeah. I think that’s obviously interesting purchase happened yesterday. You know, we can’t necessarily read their minds on what they are thinking. But I think, Chris’s theory is valid. I tend to think that the last one you made is more accurate which is Pinterest is definitely a complimentary product and does not overlap. But it does not necessarily mean that Facebook is going to try and maintain those minutes. They are going to make sure that they keep users on their site as long as possible. The fact that we are going to see some things here about usage, you know, of course complimentary with Facebook too. But it did not stop Facebook from launching check-in deals. Those are the kinds of things that they are trying to dominate the market like any other business would. But at the moment, you are absolutely right. About 80% of the people who are on Pinterest are also having their Pinterest account connected on their Facebook accounts. That is definitely true and definitely part of their huge success. Now, as far as some other things that we want to talk about; as far as the growth of Pinterest. This is really impressive considering the head start of Twitter has. It was a virtual tie for second a website referral traffic. What do I mean by that? Website referral traffic is based on how many people are clicking on links to website content that’s linked to those 2 networks. Facebook is above both of these but Twitter and Pinterest are right there neck-and-neck competing for the number of clicks that they are generating for their websites…

Chris: It is truly amazing you consider, I mean, they have gone from 0 to 100 miles an hour just a few months. That’s how quickly the growth it has.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: Amazing!

Mike: Yeah! Absolutely!  With a smaller user based, there’s a key metric that Pinterest is already beating Twitter. That is on the next illustration: the average Pinterest user is on Pinterest 89 minutes/month. The average Twitter user is on 21 minutes a month. This is a stat that we have looked up for Twitter for a while now. It’s one, as I mentioned, Maximize really pushes Facebook hard. The reason why we pushed Facebook hard is because of the amount of time people spend on the platform versus the amount of time they have spent on Twitter. It certainly has some applications for some certain types of businesses but you know Facebook has the eyeballs. They have more people. Now, they have more people, they have more people on the site longer. Pinterest is on the same type of trajectory. In fact, the latest number I saw was the numbers going up. I did see one article for 98 minutes a month in comparison I saw on Facebook was 405 minutes a month. Facebook is still dominant in sense. But Pinterest is 4 times the amount of time they are spending on Pinterest versus Twitter. That’s the…I have mentioned of having an addictive nature. There’s a lot of pretty things to look at, words or pictures, and so. That’s leading to people spending more time on site. But as I kind of hinted it several times, Pinterest is still dwarfed by Facebook. We are talking about approaching 20 million users versus 850 million users so Facebook has not to worry about at this point. There are definitely some differences on the platform that I talked about more. But that does not mean that Pinterest is not on board. Pinterest is quickly becoming…most people say its number 3 right now. I think, it’s on its way on being number 2 in a very short order if the trend continues. We have seen over the past months growth has leveled up a little bit. It’s not like what it was over the 2 months, they exploded. But expect to see continued steady growth particularly as the demographic mixed start to change, which we are going to talk about in a minute. The impact of Pinterest activity is that it can increase the Web Traffic. These are some reasons why you should be paying attention to this if you are doing Marketing for brand. You are going to increase your website traffic but being on Pinterest, you are going to increase your Social growth so you will have more interaction with your fan’s customers. Also, it will help grow your other networks as well you can link this up as we mentioned. You can link it up with Facebook. You can link this up with Twitter as well to grow your Twitter following. So, that’s overall going to make you more active in the social sphere and give you more growth. You are also going to see increase on sales. We are going to talk about some click through and how Pinterest has done a great job about driving people directly to the purchase decision. Finally, there’s a little asterisk beside this one, Search Engine Ranking. There have been recent changes which Pinterest have definitely limited the impact of Search Engine ranking. There’s a lot of the activity on Pinterest was to try and drive back links essentially to your site. Pinterest has made a change with to a no-follow policy. You know, I want to get.. Maybe Chris you want to talk about… Chris is more of the SEO guy than I am.

Chris: Thank you Mike for that. We are going to get this in more detail but one of the big AHA moments if you will is that if you are familiar with SEO, of course, I am very familiar with this. There was a Panda update which Google put out and made some other revisions to the Panda update that are frankly putting less business on back links in any way. But I can tell you without shot of a doubt that social signal matter. It matters significantly for SEO rankings now. We don’t know exactly Google algorithm is for that but understand that even if they have gone to no-follow from the new follow links, and even your ability to do back linking was not, isn’t what it was 4 months ago, you certainly are going to be able to send some traffic. Any traffic with unique ideas addresses other destination, which of course helps your SEO ranking because Google wants to make sure that you got a lot of traffic from all over the place not just the spam traffic, not from the traffic that we see from our hush tag. For people who are looking on hush tag right now we love you guys but there are some plenty people out there  trying to get paid daily and indulge those hush tag not those guys. God bless you. You are trying to make money, we understand. But anyway, we’ll keep going.

Mike: Sure. You are just jealous that you are not doing any…

Chris: Exactly!

Mike: Hopefully, those numbers that we talked about, the growth and then this impact, make you realize that hey this is about webinar need to be on because Pinterest is making an impact and can make an impact in my business. I should be definitely paying attention to what’s to come. So, let’s get into something… This is something I like to talk about that maybe you don’t see in every webinar that you attend, is I want to kind of dig in to psychology of Pinterest user. Why people are on Pinterest? Who they are? What it is that they are getting on Pinterest that they are not getting in other places? I think that this is very important as a marketer for you to understand the psychology of the user network that’s out there because it’s going to impact your decisions. I actually want to frame this as the difference between Facebook and the difference between Pinterest. On Facebook, it is about: Who you are, Who you know, where you are. Whereas on Pinterest, it’s about: Who you want to be, who you want to know and where you want to be. Those are very, very different. We are talking about the difference between an “Aspirational and Situational” framework that we are dealing here. On Facebook, it really is kind of about: this is what I am doing right now, here are my friends. Here’s what’s going on which is great particularly for Facebook advertising network. You could really start your target on the right customers because Facebook has a lot of data on who these people are. You can paint a picture on the people on Facebook based on the way they put themselves out there. You understand their situation. You understand who they are. You understand you can raise your target there with advertising. That’s very, very powerful. Pinterest is powerful on the different way that you start to see what people find cool, interesting or interested in what they buy, things they wish they would have. As marketers, of course, that’s a huge part of what we do. We are trying to get people to get the step from here’s where you are but here’s where you want to be. Please buy our product in order to get there. So, for Pinterest, the pretty pictures, the products that you want, the wish list kind of mentality is something that… You can translate that. You can do that on Facebook but Pinterest is all about that. It really is! It’s less on creating content about yourself. It’s more about creating concept on what you want. I think that it is extremely powerful. Another reason why to get excited to get on Pinterest if you are out there selling things. If you are selling things to find a lifestyle or upgrade people’s lives in some way, Pinterest is ideal for those kinds of brands. I think that’s very exciting.

As a result, I don’t want to be stereotypical but I think that ties in a lot of who’s on Pinterest right now. Women between the ages of 25-45 in suburban neighborhoods in the mid-west are the dominant force on the Pinterest right now. These people are decision-makers and influencers when it comes to buying products and setting trends. Not just influencing, not just making personal decision, influencing families’ purchase decision.

Chris: I am not aware of a better demographic than this.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: Were you?

Mike: No. If you are out there selling products, it’s not necessarily for every single product but I am sure almost who are listed on this calls is selling that audience unless you are selling something specifically for kids and senior citizens even for kids! We need to convince the moms that this is something that the kids needs. It really is a great place to start for social media network. Absolutely! Also, I think that this correlates very favorably to how Facebook became the dominant player in the first place. They got attraction to this particular audience in a way that the predecessors such as MySpace did not really get. By keeping it simple, clean and interesting, Facebook was able to get these people. Now, Pinterest is kind of following the same model. I always say that when women are on social media, men will follow. It’s just a matter of time.

Chris: [laughs]

Mike: So, we are definitely seeing that, that was a trend on Facebook. That was a trend on Pinterest. It is exciting for them to see where this is going. I think this is the right start because I know the first time I saw Pinterest was over when my wife showed on her IPad. As a social media professional, the instance I saw it, I was instantly drawn in as the way it look. I just want the content that spoke to me.  That’s the biggest challenge that Pinterest has right now. My mind is making sure that they are bringing those demographics in over time so there’s more interesting contents for those people who don’t fit in this demographic. That’s why they are not quite as big. Well, obviously they are new. That thing is going to be there… if they have enough struggle,  see if those struggle is to get more men on the site, get different contents so that they can continue to grow their user based. But for marketing perspective, obviously as Chris said, this is the best. You can come for a better audience than this.

So now, I am going to get on the basics. I am going to try and get this relatively quickly because I know there’s probably people on the call that have been on Pinterest for months now and don’t want to hear how to do all the basics. But I know there are also people here that never seen Pinterest before. I definitely want to get through that and throw some insights as well for those more advanced as we go along. As for the Pin, the Pin is an image or a video as I have said before that a user posts. Those pins can be either manually uploaded through the Pinterest interface by just uploading a photo like upload in Flicker or something like that or Facebook and then you can add a link to that. You can add a description, a caption like here, Eggplant bacon anyone? You can add hush tags like the hush tag there. Then you share with your followers. Those pins actually live somewhere. They live in your pinboard. You can actually have some multiple pinboards. These are really cool thing for marketing because one of our clients whom I know who’s on the call, they sell the 2 very different audiences. They can have audience A pinboard versus audience B pinboard. They could really do something that it’s hard to do on Facebook, which congregate those audiences and speak to those audiences. As a user I can choose… I can choose the files specific pinboards that allows the user to customize content they want to see. So this is Mod Cloth stuff. They have done excellent job on Pinterest. They got all kinds of cool things going on from boards from different contests and things like that because they want to showcase them. We’ve definitely paying attention to what they are doing but you know I got multiple different things. I have a lot to follow on these accounts based on what I’m interested in. I don’t necessarily have to follow everything they are doing if it does not interests me. That’s a very cool feature. You can pretty much name your pinboard, whatever you want. You want to make a name to get people’s attention. It’s obviously a great idea. You got a lot of flexibility there. You can set a different cover photo depending on how you want to do it. I don’t want to ramble on about this. I want to keep moving so I will go on the next one. Then, there’s a bunch of Interactions that you can…

Chris: Mike, let me just interject real quickly.

Mike: Sure.

Chris: Mike, let me just interject real quickly.

Mike: Sure.

Chris: I think some of the folks that I was poking fun at the… for spamming or hush tag are now posting some links that are probably inappropriate for youth and youngsters. Well, we welcome everyone today in our open discussion. We will encourage not to click any link if you happened to be on Twitter right now, doing the #maxpin do not click the link that you see. No matter who you see it from. This is for us to have questions and you guys should talk to us. Isn’t it something better if you guys have to do and sit there  post these interesting images? Please don’t click on those link. Those have some virus on that too.

Mike: This is why I love Twitter so much.

Chris: WE love live webinars.

Mike: Yes.

Chris: We can’t mix it with stuff like that. At least, you know that it’s a very popular webinar. A lot of people want to see it.

Mike: Okay. Well, there you go. Anyway, as far as interaction that you can have with pins. When you see someone who pins something, you can re-pin it, which is a popular thing to do. I am going to talk about it later. So, you essentially take their pin and put it in your board. You can like the pin. You can comment the Pin. You can tweet the pin. You can e-mail the pin. Of course, you can click through the link as well to see where you are being pointed to. So, it has a lot of different options on how you interact with the pin. I’m going to talk about what people are actually doing here in the next section. So, that’s the usage patterns.

What you are seeing is that Pinterest is a social network obviously. It’s built on user content. There’s following, followed back type of activity that happens. But it’s not quick as social as some of the other social networks. I think there’s a big differentiating factor on the visual nature of Pinterest and Twitter. Twitter is more about conversations whereas Pinterest is certainly are conversations that happened in comments. It does not happen as often. It’s more editorial comments. It’s more about really showing admiration and having emotional response in clicking like and re-pinning. Maybe because it moves you. It makes you laugh. It’s cool. You think your friends will like it. It’s less about creation as well of your own things. It’s a lot about re-pinning and sharing which is great for the viral nature of it. As we go to the next slide, this is very impressive number that is 80% of pins are re-pinned. Re-pinning really drives the action on Pinterest. When you look at to that number in comparison to how many tweets are re-tweeted which is about 5%. The viral nature of Pinterest is beyond anything we have seen in any social network. It is definitely about sharing. I think a lot of that comes back to when you look those beautiful images, not everybody has all those on their back pockets you know. To have an image that stands out or info graphic or tons of cool stuffs laid out by graphic designer and all of those stuffs. People don’t have time to create that stuff and so a lot of their content is built through sharing. You want to have a presence on Pinterest, you want to be actively engaged, and you have to do a lot of re-pinning in order to do that. Certainly, there are some copyright issues that will come up on that. There have definitely been some policy changes with Pinterest where they really encourage re-pinning more than… before they are saying: “don’t promote yourself.” Now they are saying: “Create your content and share but make sure you protect peoples’ intellectual property rights.” But still, in order to get those impactful images, there’s certainly is a lot of borrowing that goes on. You just want to make sure that when you are re-pinning, you are giving people proper credit from where you got it. In fact, you are creating original pins through yourself, I would suggest that you should go ahead and click the put your own branding and credit to yourself right there in the image just to make sure that people understand that this is your image and you are not getting any intellectual property rights. I am digressing that to the legal stuff,  I am going  to forget that I went to law school and get back to the creative side and say that this is extremely viral so that is very exciting. That’s why you are seeing high for your traffic out of Pinterest. It is because people are taking cool photos. They are sharing it around. They are clicking on the link and driving traffic to websites which is very exciting if you representing a brand out there.

Chris: Without a doubt, we are in the wild, wild West, if you will,  Intellectual property being, you know, re-pinned on Pinterest, I just likened the parallel to really napster in what’s going on to music. I just finished on reading Steve Jobs’ biography. If you really think about that, that wild, wild west that ended up creating up opportunity for iTunes. Now music has changed dramatically and how we interact with music. So, just something to be aware of, there’s a whole lot of violations of intellectual property going on right now. It will be interesting to see how a year from now that has created a new solution as well when it will be beneficial to more consumers for iTunes as well. It will be interesting to see staff. Let’s get on to some action step right here Mike.

Mike: I was actually going to mention this a little bit later but just kind of put a wrap around the bow in the intellectual property piece. If you do have a website when you don’t want people share your photograph, Pinterest is actually released some code that you can have to your site to make it impossible for people to directly pin from your site. Meaning: when you pin from your browser, you can block people from pinning directly from the browser what they call a pin market which is an app that pins the website that you are on pinboard very quickly. Facebook utilizes that. Flicker utilizes that. There’s ways around that. We are going to talk about that a little bit specifically if you are trying to integrate your own content in to your Pinterest, these are action steps. If you are out there and say I am a content group. I don’t want people pinning stuff. You can at least slow them down with some new content that has been out there that was put by Pinterest to help alleviate that. I want to focus on the things that actually get you more costumers and get you a bigger following. So let’s move off of that and talk about action steps. We got 8 action steps that we are going to put out there.

8 action Steps

Request an Invite- Pinterest is technically on beta mode. So you do have to get an invite from Pinterest. Just add a curiosity, I have been on it for a while myself but I went and invite on different e-mail address and it took about 6 hours to get off the waiting list. So, not an overly long waiting time. You can get on a little bit faster if you have a friend that is on Pinterest. You can ask them to shoot me an invite.

Chris: If you are finding a friend on Facebook, it will *expand* dramatically.

Mike: Like with Google+, when it first came out if you have friends already on the network, they could get you on right away. That’s the first step obviously because you need to be on. It is important to know that there are no such things as business accounts on Pinterest at this point. I am going to walk you through on how you kind of turn your personal profile into business profile here on one of the next steps. It is again, important to know that it is definitely kind of have to massage your way into it. But the one thing that I would suggest when you do set this up is to make sure if you have a Twitter presence, if you are utilizing it, there’s an e-mail attach to that account. Make sure you use your Twitter e-mail as your Pinterest email if you want to link those two together. You can’t link a business page, a Facebook business page with Pinterest at this time. You can link your personal Facebook profile but you obviously would not want to do that if you are doing your brand page. That’s probably some function that will come at some point… I believe that probably has to do more with Facebook than it has to do with Pinterest. Brand pages are treated differently than personal profiles on Facebook. The next step is actually learning that you need in your own website or blog and you need to add visuals. If you are not utilizing visuals in your blog posts or on the pages that you would like people to pin, then you need to add visuals so that you make sure you make an impact when someone pins your stuff on Facebook. What it does when someone pins whether its through putting URL or putting in or using the pin it button that they can get on the browser a dialogue pops up. It gives some images to choose from and what images you want to pin. Obviously, you want the user to pick the one that’s going to make an impact that’s going to be re-pinned, get commented on, you want to click through on. You can dictate that to a certain degree. There’s actually some plug-ins I have seen out there that kind of allows you to kind of force people to use a particular image. But even if you don’t do that step, you can certainly get people. People are going to use the coolest image that they are going to put on their pin boards. You must make sure that you have those visuals. It’s going to definitely help people to get through to your sites by having those visuals on your blog. The other thing that you can do on your website is add the “PIN IT” button just like you have the “LIKE” button , “TWEET” button, your Google+1. You can add the pin it button. You can get that off, it depends if you are using word press or something like that, there’s plug-ins that do that. There is also a code that you can get from a Pinterest off their goodies page, its what it is called. If you go out in the About Pinterest section on the main menu, you can get a pin it code. You definitely want to put on you are blogging or any pages you want people to share Pinterest. It is very quick and easy. It also has a call to action to share content for you. That’s going to get you more attraction on Pinterest.

Then it’s time to start to strategize. You really want to have a plan because once you want to go live on Pinterest, just like you would want to populate your blog, some blog posts or have some content on your website , built your Facebook landing pages, you want to have plan for your Pinterest strategies. You want to plan your board; you want to think what different types of information do I want to get out there? What are my different audiences look like? You want to plan that out. You know what you are going to do and certainly change it and tweaked* it as you go along but I think it is a great first step to plan your board. You also want to focus on getting the right types of images, info graphics or great striking images work great or both work great. As much visual contents as you can get, you definitely want to get those. You also want to think about how is this content is going to get viral. What would people share about my brand? We are going to talk about these things like contests and promotions and information relevant to my customers. They are going to be relevant to my customers and customers’ friends. Lots of good information, lots of good visuals, things that people are going to share. The next is to integrate you other social media campaigns. When you are running a promotion on Facebook, you got an app built for that. You can put together a landing image that you upload to Pinterest as a pin. Associate a link to that, a link backs to Facebook application and for both your Facebook application and promote your Facebook application in Pinterest. Because of the viral sharing nature of Pinterest, you could get quickly some attraction to have enough followers if you build your audience to drive people to your Facebook application. Get Facebook likes. Get Facebook e-mail addresses on your entry forms. Those are the kind of things that kind to drive, maybe with other types of sharing, some things like that Pinterest is at any extensive way to get a more traffic to your other accounts.

Then also, do a lot of looking around. Watch and learn, I say here. This is a wild, wild West as Chris pointed out. There’s going to be an innovative idea every week that we have not seen yet because we are in the beginning stage of this. So, it’s great that you are listening to this webinar. I can’t show you everything that everyone has thought of. But I can tell you that you need to be paying attention or you need to have an agency paying attention for you as to what’s working and what’s going to help you make successful. It’s always good to have strategy before you start anything.  We got your invite. You know what you are going to do. Go ahead and open your account.

Populate your profile. As you can see here, I mocked this up here today. If Maximize is going to do a Pinterest account, we do have a Pinterest account, this is for us Maximize. First name: Social Media. Last name, of course it is not accurate but it shows up as Maximize Social Media. This shows up exactly how we want. That’s our username. I put this here on purpose. This is actually would not be allowed. We are actually Maximize Media Social on Pinterest cause I want to point out that you can only have 15 characters on Pinterest. That maybe limiting to some people like us who have a long name. It’s a pain to type up e-mail sometimes. But you have to cover the username like you do on Twitter or Facebook. So, that’s going to be your URL: pinterest.com/maximizesocial if you want to follow us on Pinterest. Then, the gender you can set up is on specified which is cool for business. You definitely want to take advantage of the About Section. This is where you can give a description about who you are, what you are about. So people know who do they like or who they are following I should say. I got Facebook on the brands. Yes. But you want to give information about your business. You can also put in your location and your website address which will actually show up as a link right underneath your name. That’s cool too because you can then drive some additional traffic to your website through that link. Of course, a profile image, just like you would have on Facebook or Twitter. But it’s, like I said, set up as a personal profile. The main thing you need to know is the first name and last name; you could put your company name in there. Great!

The next thing you want to do is to connect.

Connect. We need to connect to people. The ways to do that are populate your boards. People have interesting content Have people to see and see and re-pinned, like and comment on. You can also promote your other channels. This is one of our community members did this morning. I saw this and I have to change the presentation cause I just love this. I mean this is very funny. Of course, we all know that babies and social medias are like babies and cats. You can’t go wrong with that. We’d love that. I hope Candy, our community manager who did this on the call. I gave her little props because she is hilarious and I love what she does. Anyways, this is one way you can do it. You can do this for Facebook advertising. You can do it for Tweets. I think Facebook advertising is a great way to kind of work the two together because we are big believers of Facebook advertising because of the targeting capabilities and target customer to follow you. It’s such an inexpensive tool to get leads and to get people involved so you can send people directly. From those ads, you can send people to a post on your Facebook wall, I’m sorry, Timeline. Everyone wants to do that. But you definitely use the other channels if you are already established and get people on to come over to Pinterest.

Additionally you can add hush tags. I have mentioned that before that hush tags are allowed in the comments. You can use those just like SEO keywords. One of the first things I did when I went on Pinterest is I want to see who’s talking about social media. You can surf the hush tag and if I’m using the hush tag, I got a better chance of being found that way so you know, really like a lot for a search engine optimization.

Chris: Mike, it’s just funny some people go to webinar and typed in, you know you have a big one spammer so take it over your hush tag cause we have so many people on this webinar. There’s a lot of excitement but unfortunately there’s quite a lot of folks having a lot of fun spamming us and frankly putting a lot of inappropriate things on our hush tags. So, we are changing our hush tags right through the middle of the presentation. So, if you would like to type in some meaningful questions, well we don’t have to filter all of the adult content. Just reverse the hush tag we are using. We are using Maxpin. Instead we are going to use a new hush tag now which is PinMax. Actually, I already tossed it out and somebody have done that. Transpose it on accident. Go quickly before all these spammers follow us. You can start typing pinmax use hush tag (#pinmax). Hopefully, we will be able to have at least a couple of minutes to get found. That’s the one thing about Twitter network. Other things happen when you got a share amount of people doing things. People look for trending hush tags and then they pop on as spam.  It’s unfortunate but it is what it is. Our new hush tag is #pinmax.

Mike: Alright! It give me a chance to get a drink of water because I starting to lose my voice. Now, we will sprint to the finish. If you know us, you might know the engage and amplify things.

Engage. So, if you started to connect with people, you can engage more. With other people, you continue your audience be re-pinning, commenting and liking, staying active on the network. When you re-pin somebody else’s stuff or at least start following them, it’s a neat little feature on Pinterest… As you follow people, they get e-mail and they have got set up that way and: “Oh! They are following me and I’m going to follow them back.” That’s how you start to grow by interacting very simpler like the Twitter on how that works. You want to be actively following people and also managing that so your follows are valuable. I would not get on the detail with that. Basically, the idea is to engage with people because they are getting engage back with you. They will share your stuff if you will share their stuff. That’s an excellent way to continue growing in Pinterest

Chris: It’s consistent with Twitter friends. Unfortunately, as what we have witnessed here, there’s spammers and folks that kind of take over but with Twitter, there’s kind of an etiquette that if somebody follows you, you follow them back. I imagine that same etiquette will continue with Pinterest as long as the spammers don’t show up plus that’s one of the way folks if you ask how do you get people to follow you, well, follow other people. They will follow you back. Frankly, they can also outsource back. You could get a VA over the Philippines if you wanted to. You could go out and follow everyone who’s interested in health and fitness. If they are interested in certain topics, then you can build an audience like call you back.

Mike: So, now the next action step is you want to try and amplify whatever audience you have got.

Amplify. That comes from viewing from something that really gets people excited. You can run a promotion on Pinterest. It’s something’s better than Facebook’s allows you. Facebook, they have attempted to run promotions on there. You know that a guy launch some restrictive on how you can utilize their mechanics like the Like Button and commenting like that for entries. So, you do have the ability to custom app by the book and within terms of service. But with Pinterest, you can have people go out and say: “Create a board. Do 10 pins. We are going to pick from our favorite board and list this name and these hush tags associated. We are going to announce the winner by certain time.”

So, you can have one. From Mod Cloth, they have done this, you can do a creative blurb and have a hush tag on ModCloth. That’s getting re-pinned and growth starts that way. Promotion should encourage re-pinning. You should interact with people who run into your promotions. You should be utilizing user-generated boards. This is also, as I have mentioned, a very powerful way to really amplify your audience in a hurry. We have seen several success story with that with various brands. Just like on Facebook, having a landing page that has a sweepstake or some type of contests. It’s a very powerful tool that people are going to take steps on finding you, to liking you. Same thing here but it’s actually even more viral typically than what we have seen on Facebook. Especially, when you do it right especially when you have come out with something interesting and creative. It really gets people to engage in a way that gets our creative juices flowing and involved and see over time that brands who utilize Pinterest will have more brand loyalty than those who don’t. Click link if you are asking for contributions whether be pin boards, whether be crowd sourcing ideas, you can really develop some exciting things here because you are going to inspire people’s creativity which is going to get them a sense of accomplishment and excitement that I think is going to have an impact on how they feel about your brand. Those are your eight steps.

Chris: We are getting a lot of great questions on the spam free pinmax right now. Ross, a minute ago just said: “Are you aware of the firm that will filter or identify people that are following back?” Obviously, Twitter has a gazillion of those. I am not aware yet of any such program but if anyone would like to respond to that, if you all know a program, please let me know, of course something can do on a customize basis. In the hope that we don’t end up ruining Pinterest that you might kind of have a lunch today, we are talking about great things Pinterest… we are talking about Pinterest for business, Pinterest for brands. What we hope is it does not become, you know Pinterest spam central. I don’t think that it is going to be because the major thing in Pinterest is visual. So, at the end of the day, if the visuals are not striking, if they are not capturing your imagination, if they are not giving you the aspirational side of things that you might talk about, it’s not going to last for long. They will quickly disappear. I am sure just as Pinterest has recognized by having the new follow links that have invited a lot of SEO, spammers if you will, to the party, they have already closed this loophole. The hope is certainly it becomes, if brands can take advantage of Pinterest, the brands can emphasize what’s going on with Pinterest and that can certainly happen. I think well, Mike and I in our business partner certainly had invested an interest in another supermarket chain and not in the home food, I do want to give credits, home food is one of the great job. Using those visuals, you can search for that and click on their boards but they have done a very nice job for a branding perspective and also in creating a lot of awareness of various food and various products that are now available.

Mike: We have reached the point in the presentation where I am going to let Chris take over. I hope that I delivered on the promise of giving you some insight and some opinions and some  things that you can take with you. I think we will definitely see in the future. We can do another one of these webinars simply in the future with more examples of things that people are doing. I do want the level set in this particular webinar. More than that, I want to make sure that you have understood why this is becoming so popular and what the impacts are going to be. So you can start to strategize and innovate like I talked about. But Chris is going on the additional resources that we have available in more detail. I hope you can do a Q&A after we finished this section.

Chris: I know there’s definitely some conversation on analytics that people like to get into this so we can talk about that which of course, I think frankly, interesting. Mike, if you want to show the next slide real quick. Of course, we will take your question. But of course, we are a social media agency. If you are businesses out there and got a little overwhelmed by listening to our presentation about:  “Gosh, you know what, I just don’t necessarily need to be doing all these!” Feel free to schedule strategy session. Myself and Mike are executives from our team. You can do that by just going to maximizezsocialmedia.com. Then clicking on the big button that says: “FREE Strategy Session“. Again, our clients are spending over $1500 a month. Make sure that you know, we do have resources available, if that is not your budget, we will talk about that in just a second where we can sit in mastermind together. The other thing is we do know that we have social media agency. We have other advertising executives out there. Maximize also work behind the scenes on a White Label basis. If you are interested with that, you can also join us at maximizesocialmedia.com and click on White Label. There’s a little application there and we can share with you how to White Label our resources. Obviously, we do a great job as we have discussed in this presentation. Finally, if you are interested in joining the mastermind which is there’s only 50 spots that we are putting up which we would like to have no more than 50 people on the webinar so we can talk. That is just a dollar and we talk afterwards about that. Just go to maximizemastermind.com as well for that. If you would like to get an opportunity on this particular broadcast, given to you again. Mike, maybe we can just jump out and go to our Facebook page so everyone can find us. Advance a slide there.

Mike: Right there.

Chris: Facebook.com/maximizesocial media or you can go to Pinteres.com/maximizesocial. We are also going to take your questions now. We will just going to leave this particular slide up as we jumped over to taking a look at newsfeed and we can go there…OH! It did not take long. The spammers are back!

Mike: [laughing]

Chris: What was that? They were back! Bless you guys. I hope you have better things to do.

Mike: I think you are just encouraging them.

Chris: Well, it’s out there for the open. That’s one example. Once you type in Drew Canole, let me just show how you can embed your link. He is wealthy. Drew Canole is a friend of mine who is in San Diego. I think he has done a nice job.

Chris: I think it’s on the right hand side.

Mike: this is making Pinterest less appealing.

Chris: Isn’t it guys? You can do your hush tag and tell all the people what’s going on. What we are going to show you is how is he embedding his link. You just click on Juice Up Your Life over there on the left hand side Mike. He’s got a notice. Right there. It is an example. He’s got the link there. He’s got the link embedded in the image too. Now, you can click on the embedded link and the embedded link on the image.

Mike: The whole image is linked

Chris: Right.

Mike: In theory, maybe that was not… You should have added that as a link. You should have advertise here but he did not do that.

Chris: Anyhow, just another example of people how are attempting to monetize it.

Mike: This is a good example of simple magazine cover style photo. This is obviously not necessarily like a A+ on your graphic design. But this concept of having a call to action built on your image is definitely something that you can utilize on Pinterest. I think it looks better if you really kind of go for the super slick magazine cover type look. I’ve seen a lot of brands out there doing that specific call to action. What’s on the other side of the link? Make sure to deliver that promise on the other side. That’s something about any other businesses could utilize. Pinterest is going to be a boom to a traffic designer all over the world. Twitter has artful words, artful images and so I think the more help you can get with it from professionals, they can do outstanding jobs, the more bang that you are going to get through your Pinterest blog. So, I think this could be even more powerful with pumping the graphic design a little bit. But getting the stock photos and descriptions can certainly help you out. That’s something that we have. But you got to start thinking about visuals as I have mentioned in the presentation in order to be really successful on Pinterest.

Chris: Absolutely! Some people have asked Mike. There’s a lot of questions about Pinterest analytics. Of course, we are such in an industry because you have going on so fast. But basically, the three tools that I am aware of is the Pintics. Mike you might want to just jump over to that if you want to share to people. Then there’s pinreach as well. You also have pinerly. So, we can have take a look at these various analytics. We love for you all if you happened to use this and relinquish the kind of this thought; feel free to use a hush tag to tell us what you kind of think about that. You can see trending pins. There’s some interesting things going on this particular deal. Of course, national…  about a week ago add a nice article on pinerly. You can check out pinerly as well.

Mike: I was going to show it. You can quickly see what your site is producing on Pinterest by using this code that’s up there, above the Pinterest.com/source and URL should bring back the pins, but also people who re-pinned your stuff. That’s a quick way to check how you are doing. I bet Chris you just pinned that. That’s a quick simple way to see who’s pinning your stuff. You can also utilize Google analytics as well. Google analytics will tell you where the traffics of your website is coming from. If you are getting lots of traffic from Pinterest, it’s going to show up in your regular Google analytics. There are other sites that specifically measure Pinterest stats.

[Choppy voice; Inaudible]

Chris: Look at those. If anyone is using them, and you are very happy with them, feel free to shoot us tweet about that and let us know.

Mike: I am a bad speller. I missed that. Sorry about that.

Chris: P-i-n-e-r-l-y. Pinerly.

Mike: There it is.

Chris: There we go!

Mike: My fingers don’t move as fast as Chris’ fingers move.

Chris: [laughs]

Mike: That’s a self-criticism. There’s definitely some tool out there that you can utilize. I think that the challenge with Pinterest is very similar with the challenge that Twitter and that. If I go back to my Pinterest feed, there’s a lot of stuff. We are just kind of scratching the surface. This why it becomes addictive to people: because it’s so much to look at. That can become challenging. There’s definitely a value in pinning a lot which can be labor intensive. You definitely want to factor that in your position of how you are going to handle your Pinterest strategy. There are lots of activities like Twitter. You are probably posting a lot more on Pinterest than you are on Facebook for example if you are doing it right. I know we are getting close to an hour and a half here. I don’t know… any demonstrations that you want to do, just put up the…

Chris: Let’s go show… we have couple of people just said, if you would like to get a replay. If you came in late, join our Facebook page: facebook.com/maximizesocialmedia. Also, if you are a business or social media manager and like to do business with us. We would love to run your business and please go to maximizesocialmedia.com and we have free strategy session. We will discuss with you how can we generate more leads for business using social media. We are having tremendous stuffs in 40 different verticals from now. Lots and lots of happy clients. We would be glad to make you the next customer. Thank you guys for being with us. We will just leave this up on the screen there and we will try to take your questions. Probably the easiest way to get on to us would be actually just go to our Facebook page. That way, we can actually get rid of the spammers and we can washed  them from our Facebook page which is nice. Feel free to ask questions over to our http://www.Facebook.com/maximizesocialmedia. It’s kind of interesting experiment with Twitter of using hash tags on our webinar that’s so popular. We have thousand of people on this webinar today in the middle of the day. What happens is you start using a hush tag that is trending then it’s get picked up by spammers and correspondents I guess everyone is trying to make a dollar here and there. We appreciate everyone being here with us. Let me type in, everyone can ask on the website link. I will read the chat bar. If you go down to chat, we will send you the link if you are interested in free strategy session, just go to maximizesocialmedia.com click on that free strategy session button. We like to talk about that. That’s for company spending $1500 or more. We also do a great job with Facebook PPC management. Also, we have a very happy client this week down to just 6 cents per click on a national basis. Lot of great things that we can do for your clients.  or for you, for your business if you have. Okay Mike, any last words of wisdom? I think we are going to jump off the hush tag because we have too much spam. We want to encourage you guys to go to facebook.com/maximizesocialmedia to ask questions about this. We are happy to take questions and we will be able to get rid of the spammers. There you see some value of Facebook over Twitter because when this does happen, it’s not a whole lot of fun. What did happen to the rest of us? It just showed. We are a big company with a lot of reach. We are getting a lot of people on this webinar. Thanks guys! Mike, anything else?

Mike: No. I am glad everybody came out to listen to what we have said. I hope it’s valuable for you and definitely keep in touch if you need any additional help. We are always here and ready. Chris, thank you for your support too.

Chris: Yeah. Somebody just asked a question. It was Marge. Can I pay with PayPal for the mastermind? What’s that link again to the mastermind? You might want to edit the slide.

Mike: Actually, it’s on the previous slide. PayPal is available as a purchase option.

Chris: Yes. You can use it. There you go. Hopefully guys, let’s just jump over on Facebook and let’s see who’s coming over there. We got a very nice, friendly, non-spammy group of people. Hey! We want to welcome [inaudible], Harper just joined. There is going to be a lot of new friends on Facebook. We can all kind of make fun over here…

Mike: [laughs]

Chris: Feel free to type in some questions. We will be happy to answer as well. Okay guys, thanks for being with us. I am going to hung up. Mike’s going to keep the screen up. Unfortunately, we would not be able to take questions via webinar. What we would like to do for the benefit of everyone, go ahead and ask your questions on our Facebook timeline. We can type back to you on that. Also, we would like to know what you feel about the best analytical tool out there for Pinterest analytics. If you are using pinreach, if you are using pinerly, let us know what you think. We would like to hear your thought as well.

Mike: We’ll just go ahead and post a question on our Facebook page on that so people can comment instead.

Chris: Yes, which is the best for everyone.   If you need social media consulting and social media management, please keep Maximize Social Media in mind for all your needs in the future.

Chris: Thanks guys!

Mike: Thanks. Bye-bye.

***END***

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