Listen to Podcast:

Good morning, Internet fans, Ryan Perry, Simple Biz Support. It is Wednesday therefore, it is Social Media Wednesday, it’s where we are, in July 8, 2015. As usual, I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing. Good morning, Sarah.

Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan, how are you?

RP: I’m doing wonderful, thank you. It’s a little cloudy outside. I understand we might have some rain coming, which in Northern California is a good thing, even this time of the year.

SG: Although the grape growers will disagree with you because as it’s… They might lose some crop. I know you don’t care, but lot of us do actually enjoy the wine.

RP: As long as the Mt. Dew keeps flowing, I even wore green. I didn’t know we were going to have this conversation, but as long as the mountain dew keeps flowing, we’ll all be fine. Life will be good. Let’s talk social media, seeing how it is Social Media Wednesday, specifically, we’re going to talk about Pinterest. And you know, a couple of things that maybe people haven’t been thinking about, some little changes with Pinterest, kind of reevaluate if you are using Pinterest, maybe some different ideas. And then number two, if you’re not using Pinterest, hopefully we can kind of open up some of the viewers’ eyes to the value of using Pinterest as a social media tool to grow your business.

SG: Yeah, it’s definitely up and coming platform, it’s a lot more robust than it used to be and some things that people don’t think about, like men. People view Pinterest as predominantly women and it still kind of is, they’ve got about 250 million users, but 21 million of them are men. If you are… If men are in your target market, you definitely want to take another look at Pinterest because 21 million men, that’s a lot of people. Even though it’s only about maybe 20% of… Or 10% to 20% of the total user base of Pinterest, it’s still lot of people and you want to market to them and it’s… You can get it early because of not a lot of people are marketing to the men on Pinterest because they view it predominantly as a female user base.

RP: Right, and if you are going to target men, I don’t recommend shoes, weddings, current vegan recipes and stuff like that. But guys do like to look at cars. We do like to look at tools. We do like to look at DIY projects, woodworking projects, housing projects… Not housing, not like in the suburbs housing, but stuff you could do around your house, fire pits. We love fire and all those type of things. And these are all great ways of using Pinterest to market towards men.

SG: Absolutely. You just… Yeah, definitely, no weddings, no… And even the food. My husband’s the primary cook in our family, so food might even come into their… But it could be, well, how to cook certain things over the fire pit or over the grill. Camping, outdoor activities, things like that. So, you definitely, if you, if that is your target market, take another look at Pinterest for an avenue of marketing to your target.

RP: Okay, perfect. So, now that we’re hopefully got some people thinking about how to target men and make sure your images are manly. We don’t want fluffy images, even if it is like an outdoor patio or barbecue, or something like that. Have some fun with it. Scantily clad women always helps, pictures of beer in the background always helps, you just make sure you engage the male mind though, if you are going to post on Pinterest.

SG: Absolutely, ’cause they don’t want… Yeah, because I want the fluffy fun, girly thing.

RP: No, no.

SG: Another thing you can do is improve your ability to come up in the searches, and there are multiple ways to do that. If you are pinning your own pins from your blog and your website or you’re pinning your own pictures from your blog or website, make sure you’re putting keyword-rich descriptions with it, so that when people are doing searches that you’re actually coming up in it. You also want to make sure that when you’re adding a picture to your website, and in WordPress, it’s really easy you can put a Title tag and an ALT tag. The ALT tag is the default description for a Pinterest picture. If you fill that out with key-rich information and a key-rich description, if other people are pinning your pins to Pinterest, then you’re at least helping yourself come up in the searches because if they don’t change the description, and often people don’t, the ALT tag is what’s default and so you can kind of control how you’re showing up in Pinterest.

RP: Right, and people should understand that typically the ALT tag, if you’re uploading something in WordPress, is blank. So, if you don’t put anything in, you’re going to end up with a blank description. So, I think that’s really a good one. I mean, that ties into Google and SEO. So, there’s a double value there. And if you don’t know how to update your ALT tag and you are in WordPress, a simple Google search, and I’m sure you’ll find a number of different tutorials or even go to YouTube and just do a Google search and you’ll find a number of video tutorials that’ll walk you through that process. It’s actually pretty simple, and it’s just really smart marketing. The other thing is, is if you’re a product-based company and you have a lot of products, a lot of times you’ll end up with a default value that’s in there, like one, two and three and then the next one is going to be one, two, four. That doesn’t really add any value, so it needs to be an actual keyword like “round fire pit” or “black leather shoes with high heels” or something.

SG: Right. ‘Cause if you leave it blank and somebody else pins it to their Pinterest board, you’re leaving it open to whatever the heck they want to put in it, and that’s not good for your business. So, if you’ve got it filled out, granted, they can always change it, but if you pre-fill it out, you have a higher probability of whoever’s pinning to just leave it as is, whatever you said it was.

RP: All right. Perfect. And then what’s next on the list?

SG: Playing around with Rich Pins. So Rich Pins have added data. For any of you have played on Pinterest, you’ve probably seen it mostly on recipes where when you click on the picture and it opens up, it has the entire recipe already there. You don’t have to go to the website. So, this is beneficial because although it doesn’t quite drive traffic to your website right off the bat to get that information, but it does show people, right then and there, if they want to pin it, if they want to save it ’cause they can read the recipe, see if the ingredients are something they’re interested in. You can do it also for articles, where it’ll give a more… It’s not just the description, will give an excerpt of the article like maybe the first paragraph or so, to see, so you kind of entice people to then click through to read the whole article. So, playing around with these Rich Pins with added data would be a good way to pique people’s interests and get them going to your website.

RP: Right. I could see where maybe it won’t necessarily directly lead them to your website right off, but if you could build trust and credibility and they end up following you, there’s a lot more value because now you can get in front of that person multiple times until you build the trust where they do actually click through to your website.

SG: Right. The only caveat is you do need to have something like Open Graph on your website. So, I would say that one is a little bit trickier. So, that’s going to your web developer and making sure that’s turned on so that if other, again, this goes for other people pinning it for you, that information pulls through.

RP: All right. Perfect. And do we have a number four?

SG: We do. Promoted Pins are out. So, advertising, social media’s, it’s only free for so long. But still inexpensive. So, that’s something to look into, especially if you’re running a promotion, either doing a promoted pin so that you show up in people’s feeds more often will really help you if you got a sale going on or if you’re trying to do a lead generation campaign to get people to sign up for, and things like that, it would be a good idea to buy promoted pins and show up in newsfeeds, or in newsfeeds around this platform, but in the feed of people who are doing some more searches where it’s relevant to what you’re offering.

RP: Okay. Perfect. So, essentially where you’re able to buy your way into visibility at that point?

SG: Absolutely.

RP: All right.

SG: I think it would be a good idea, yeah, if you especially if you don’t have a ton of followers yet, and it’s also a good idea to buy into visibility to that you can grow, grow your following, grow your exposure on Pinterest and have it work better for you.

RP: Right. And ultimately if you put together a full tracking sales funnel, if you will, if you’re going to put $100 in the top and you’re able to get $300 out of the bottom, then you know it’s worth to go ahead and spend that $100. So, they call it the cost to acquire a lead. And the big question is, a lot of times, small business, we don’t know. We just know, “Hey, I’m spending $100 every week or something on advertising, but I really don’t know what’s coming through to the bottom line.” So, Google Analytics, any tracking information, having an actual sales funnel in process where if somebody does this action, I can actually follow it down to an actual sale. Because if you know you can pour $100 in the top, get $300 out, why not reinvest that money and then put $200 and get $600, $300 get $900, to see where this is going, and then tweak the funnel so you can improve your return on investment.

SG: Right. And you can do the same funnel but different for each platform. So there are different landing pages so you really know where people came from. There’s a lot of ways that you can track this online. And then and when people eventually contact you, always make sure you ask where they heard about you so that you can have a better chance of knowing where they came from and seeing if that money that you’re pouring into the funnel and the advertising is working for you.

RP: All right, all right. Perfect. And number five?

SG: So, number five is not quite readily available yet. It is Buyable Pins. So, from the mobile app, people be able to click, ‘Buy it now’. As of right now, It’s if you have a Shopify account and you’re using the Shopify shopping cart on your website, it’s available for you. Otherwise, you can get on the waiting list and Pinterest will let you know when it’s more readily available. As of now, Pinterest is not going to take a cut from that. It’s just allowing people to sell directly from the mobile app which is great, as of right now, that’s great for businesses, where people, as they’re looking at it, they’re perusing, “Oh, I want that.” Click ‘Buy now’ and then you fulfill the order. So, that, as it’s rolling out, that could be really good for businesses for those impulse buys, and this is where you go to, you have the shoes, the things that people impulse buy and are just, that, or they’re actively looking to buy, they can buy it right then and there. So again, if you’ve got a Shopify account already, you’re already using Shopify, you should be able to have access to that and utilize it. Otherwise, get on the waiting list for when Pinterest rolls it out more readily.

RP: Yeah. That’s not only for regular day to day type of impulse buys, but definitely seasonal. First thing that came to my mind was Halloween, and you just imagine having the stuff out there and people flipping through it, checking specifically Halloween and then boom, they see that one thing they really like, and simple click, there you go. The interesting part is going to be the fact that if it’s only rolled out to Shopify users right now… And if you don’t know Shopify, just go to shopify.com, it is a e-commerce platform and it plugs in, it’s a utility for e-commerce… Is that, I can buy some things but I can’t buy other things, so user experience, if you’re on Pinterest, that’s going to be a little frustrating in the beginning that, “Oh I could buy this one but I’m not able to buy this one,” and not knowing why.

SG: Right. ‘Cause not everybody uses Shopify. I can also see as this information rolls out, people might decide to switch to Shopify and there are pluses and minuses to that, depending on what your business is, what your products are. If you don’t have a cart already and you are thinking about adding one to your website, definitely do your research. There are positives and minuses to Shopify. So it’s not the best fit for everybody, so don’t just jump on the bandwagon so you can have this, because Pinterest is going to roll it out for everybody.

RP: Right. All right. Perfect. Tell you what, we got about a minute left so if we could do a quick recap of the five things that we covered for Pinterest. This is really to help you as a business owner kind of re-evaluate. If you’re already using Pinterest, are you using it to your full advantage? And then if you’re considering using Pinterest, hopefully we’ve given you some ideas in these five items that we talked about in this episode.

SG: Right. So one is don’t forget about men. If men are your target market, you can target them on Pinterest as well. Two was filling out the Alt tag on all of your pictures so you have a better opportunity to control what the description is for your pictures if other people pin it to Pinterest. Three was play around with the rich tags, making sure something like Open Graph is turned on on your website so that other people can pin using the Rich Pins. Four was…

RP: Something about buying, you could buy something…

SG: Yeah. Promoted Pins. Number four was Promoted Pins, so advertising. And then five is looking into the Buy It Now buttons on the mobile Pinterest app.

RP: All right. Perfect. So there are five different ways that you can make sure that you’re promoting your business on Pinterest as efficiently and effectively as possible. Sarah, as always, I appreciate the time and energy that you put into these episodes. Next week I think we have… We’re going to be talking about LinkedIn. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about LinkedIn on this show, and I think it’s great that we are because LinkedIn is a very powerful platform that I don’t think it’s utilized as much as it could be.

SG: I don’t think it is utilized. Service businesses can really benefit. If you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn can be very beneficial to your business and a great platform for you to consider.

RP: Yeah. Perfect. So we’re going to talk about ways to optimize your profile next week. That’ll be next week’s episode. Sarah, thank you very much for your time and I hope you have a great week. And I will see you next week.

RP: Thanks, Ryan. Hope you have a great week as well.

SG: All right, everybody. Take care until next week’s show. Hope you have a good one.