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Good morning, internet fans. Ryan Perry here, Simple Biz support. Today is Social Media Wednesday. It’s January, Wednesday, 27th, and as usual, I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing on the other side as our social media expert who’s here to give us great new social media information every week. And Sarah, this week we’re going to talk about Pinterest analytics. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about Pinterest analytics.

Sarah Giometti: I don’t think so either. And if we have, it’s been quite a while. They’ve recently given it a little bit of a face lift. So, I thought it’d be a good time to kinda come back around and talk about the data that you can find in their analytics, so you can do a better job and get more out of it.

RP: Alright. Perfect. And is this available do we know on both mobile device and on web?

SG: You know, I don’t know. I’ve only ever looked at it on the web, so I’m going to maybe say no on mobile, but don’t quote me on that ’cause I don’t know. I just… I’m so used to looking on a computer, I haven’t looked for it on the mobile.

RP: Not a problem. It’s just a question that popped in my head.

SG: Well, stop those difficult questions.

RP: Generally, we try and pre-plan the questions that pop in my head before the show actually starts. So, analytics, Pinterest, images, short videos, why do I even care? I mean, I’m posting stuff, people seem to like it…

SG: Well, you care because you want to know what they like, so that you can better tailor your pins to what your audience likes. You also want to see what your competition is doing to kinda help you… We’ve talked about this many times, but don’t reinvent the wheel. See what your competition is doing. See what they’re having success with to help generate some fresh ideas for yourself and your own strategies. So, there’s a lot… You always want to check your analytics on what you’re doing, because if you’re just throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping something sticks, most likely nothing is. And so, you want to watch that to see… You might think your board is performing really well, and it really isn’t. So, that’s one you might want to table and try something else.

RP: Okay, perfect. So, you’ve got five different things that you want to cover today specifically to Pinterest analytics, correct?

SG: Correct. So, the first is you can see what your competition is doing. So, in the analytics you can dig in, and you can look at what your competition’s doing, see what’s working for them, what’s not. This is part of your competitive analysis. Is your competition even on Pinterest? And if they are, what are the types of boards and pins that they’re putting out there and having success with, ’cause it’ll help you analyze what you’re doing, and seeing if you’re on the right path or not. And so, this is just… It should always be your strategy is checking out what your competition’s doing, what kind of content they’re putting out there so that you can compete on a level playing field, or jump frog them and do a better job.

RP: Okay, perfect. Two questions that come to mind. One is going to be, where is the analytics in the first place? Is it easy to find? And then number two, how do I determine who my competition is? Are we just going to use hashtags?

SG: No, no. You can do a search in the analytics… I’m sorry. I’m looking over the screen ’cause I have it open. You can do a search in there, and do a search for the actual name of the companies. So, you are going to have some of the bigger brands pop up, ’cause you’re always going to be competing against the bigger brands like the big news feeds, the… Depending on what your industry is, industry leaders, so you’ll want to sift through that, see if you can find some of your local competitors if that matters. But, it’s all in analytics, and analytics is easy to find. If you just Google Pinterest Analytics, it comes up. But the URL is analytics.pinterest.com, so it’s really easy to find, and get in to so that you can get access to all your data.

RP: Alright, perfect. I’ll put that up in the side bar there so people have that information.

SG: So, the next one is… A really important one is you can see what device your users are using. So, are they on desktop web? Are they using a mobile web browser? Are they Android app, iOS app? Are they the tablet apps? And the reason this is important is because the pictures and boards show up differently on each app, or each different screen size. So, it’s important to know if 90% of your users are using one of the mobile apps, either iOS and or Android, the… You can look and see is your picture too tall? Is it not showing up on the screen? Is it… Because the screen is so much smaller, is it too hard to tell what the picture is? So, there’s too much detail in the picture. These are a lot of things that you can analyze just based on, what are they using? If most of them are finding you from their desktop, great. You can have kinda bigger pictures, it’ll pop up bigger when they pull it up, they can see the detail. But if 90% are on mobile, you’ve gotta watch the detail ’cause we all know how difficult it is to see something on a smaller screen. Even with having… Being able to zoom in. So, this is a really piece of data that you really want to look at, so you can tailor the size and scope of the pictures that you’re pinning to your boards.

RP: Okay. And then obviously, there’s also seems to be a distinct behavioral style difference between the Apple group and the Android group, where Androids I think are a little bit more geeky, more analytical, your Apple group is a little bit more creative, free thought, free thinking, that type of… On a very basic level.

SG: Very basic, ’cause I consider myself very creative, and I don’t touch Apple at all, so…

[chuckle] But, it’s also the rebellious. So, a lot of people view Apple as kind of the “cult culture” and I tend to be a little more on the rebellious side. So, I’m not going to do… Follow the trend. But there are definitely demographics between the two. And even to go with apps. Apple users have been trained from day one to purchase apps, whereas Android’s been so open sourced we’ve been trained to not buy apps, and it’s a long… It’s a stretch for an Apple user… Or I mean for an Android user to even buy an app, to spend the money. So, you want to take that into consideration. What was I… I was just looking at something, and it was like a seven dollar app, and it was like, “Nope.” So, you’ve gotta take that into consideration too, is the demographics and the behavior and the mentality, the purchasing mentality, of the two different groups. So, there’s a lot that goes into what they prefer, and so you definitely want to know that information.

RP: Okay, good.

SG: Next, is you can figure out how they organize your content. So, what board did they pin it to? Maybe they’re pinning it to things you didn’t even think of. They’re using slightly different verbiage. That’ll help you narrow down, or change/tweak your own strategy, is seeing what kind of words they’re using, how they’re organizing your content, what boards they’re pinning it to. That kind of stuff is really important because… For instance, if I am pinning things to social media and my followers are pinning it to social media strategy, then I might want to look into creating a social media strategy board, and separate them out and having two different boards with different pins to it in a different… Strategy’s not the word… The right word I’m thinking of. But, yeah. Having a different theme… There we go. A different theme for the two, and dividing it into a less broad category than social media. So, it’s important to see what your users are saving your pins for, and what they’re naming their boards.

RP: Okay. And that’s… I think that’s a really good one, because when we create content we always have an idea of how people are going to perceive it, or the way we want people to perceive it going out. And it’s really important to understand how people are actually perceiving it from the outside looking in. If we can match those two, the inside looking out and the outside looking in, I think we’ll have a better response.

SG: Right, we definitely want to match what they’re thinking ’cause who cares what we’re thinking? If our audience is not thinking the same terminologies we are, we’re dead in the water. So, this is really helpful in seeing their thought process and how they’re seeing things and trying to match that up, so then you’ll show up more, too. Because if I go back to social media example, if somebody is posting to social media strategy, then I’ll know to use those words more to come up in search more, because my audience is using that phrase more than they’re using just the generic social media phrase. So, it’s just the more knowledge you have in things like social media, it’s the more powerful you can be and the more successful you can be.

RP: Okay. So, that kind of also tie-in maybe, to the way you’re using hashtags, then?

SG: Yeah, definitely.

RP: In Pinterest. Okay.

SG: ‘Cause yeah, you can see what they’re using… Again it goes… You can see what they’re using, what they’re saving as, what they’re… And it goes into the next one, what their interests are, and you can modify your hashtag strategy as well. ‘Cause the next one is, you can see what their interests are beyond what they’re pinning of your stuff. So…

RP: That’s the next tip that you want to talk about?

SG: The next step is to see what their other interests are. So, if… We’ll stick with mindset of I suddenly see that a whole bunch of my people are really interested in food and/or exercise, something lifestyle wise, then even though I’m an online marketing agency, it… You want to have the personal stuff too. So, if my audience likes some of these personal things, and I like them too, then I can start creating boards that will help get me better exposure to them in other areas. So, then it’s kind of that well-rounded approach where they’re like, “Oh, well they’re really cool. ‘Cause not only they give us really good information, but they like the same personal, lifestyle stuff that we like too.” And so, it better endears you to them because of the similarities.

RP: Right. And the whole part of online marketing, because I’m not able to talk to people face to face when they visit my website, or my Pinterest account, or Twitter, or Facebook, wherever they happen to find me, is how can I create that emotional connection? And so, I love the fact if we’re always talking about business, business, business, okay that’s great, I probably gave them really good information. But, are they actually connecting with me, because without that connection, they’re probably not going to want to do business with me.

SG: Right. People do business with people they know, like and trust. And you can still get that without being face to face with somebody. And the “like” part would be this: Adding some of the lifestyle similarities. Maybe 90 percent of your users love movies. Start pinning stuff about movies: Movie quotes, movies that are coming out, stuff like that. You want to start to match… But don’t, don’t be fake about it. You want to match your interests to their interests. So, find what’s in their interests that you like also, so that it’s genuine and you engage them in conversation and pins, and liking and things like that.

RP: Alright, very good. So, by taking one of these five steps, or even all of these five…

SG: I have one more.

RP: Oh, that wasn’t five?

SG: No, that was four.

RP: Holy smokes.

SG: So, the fifth one is quick, though. You can also see what your most successful pins are. And a big reason why this is important is that it should be this month if it hasn’t rolled out already to everybody, Pinterest has the promoted pins. They did the beta testing, and their plan is to roll it out to all businesses in January of 2016, which we’re almost done with. And so, I haven’t seen one way or the other if it’s delayed or not. But, if you have… If you have access to the promoted pins and you can see you’ve got some really well-promoted or well operating pins organically, you can put a little bit of money behind it and use those as your entry into utilizing promoted pins, because they’re already successful, they’re already preforming well, and then you can push them a little bit more to perform even better. And so, that enhances your strategy to again, improve your exposure, improve your engagement, and get more of an audience.

RP: Okay. Now, you have to refresh my memory. Is it Pinterest that’s tied in with Facebook? You have to do the ads through Facebook?

SG: No, that’s Instagram.

RP: Okay, my bad.

SG: Instagram ads have to be done from Facebook, Pinterest ads are done through Pinterest.

RP: Okay. Alright, very good. So, those are five different things then that you can use, and like we always say, “If you can only do one today, that’s fine because at least you’re making a step in the right direction. If you’re able to incorporate two or three, that’s even better, but at least doing something to move forward is going to improve where you are today.” Out of the five, Sarah, do you think one is like… Outshines any of the other ones?

SG: I think the mobile, like what platform they’re looking at will really help you streamline what you’re doing and take a look at your images. I think that’s a really big one for people to start at ’cause images do show up differently and if you’re… Maybe you’re putting images that are too big or too complex and all of your users are on mobile, it’ll help you kind of rethink your strategy a little bit.

RP: Okay. And if you happen to be an iPhone user versus an Android, maybe you’ll want to check out the different devices and then if you don’t have an iPad, maybe check it out, see what it looks like on an iPad, just so you can actually see how your information is coming across, versus how you think it’s coming across.

SG: Yeah. Whichever one you are, I’m sure you have friends who have the opposite. So, next time you see them for dinner or hang out for drinks or whatever, grab their iPhone, iPad, or Android phone, or tablet and take a look at what your pins look like so you can see them across all the image… All the different screen sizes. Also, remember about desktop is you got everywhere from a 13″ monitor on a laptop, to I’m staring at a 27″ monitor. So, if you can look at it in different monitor sizes as well, that would be helpful too.

RP: Alright, perfect. So, that is five different ways you can use your Pinterest analytics in order to improve your visibility, and ultimately the idea here is to create enough credibility that you can sell something. That is our show for this week. Next week, I actually know what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to be talking about Facebook and one of the things I don’t think people really pay much attention to, but it can used across all social media channels and that is creating a persona. Who is this person that is your ideal client that you want to create content for? That’s going to be next week’s episode of Social Media Wednesday. This concludes this week show. Sarah, as always, I appreciate the time and energy that you put into the show, and we always like to see ya here.

SG: It’s always a pleasure, Ryan. Thank you.

RP: Alright, everybody, that’s it. We will see you same place, same time, same computer screen next week. Take care.