How can businesses benefit from Pinterest?
Pinterest.com is a social photo sharing website where users can create and manage theme-based image collections that look a lot like mood boards or digital scrapbooks. Many of the images refer to Etsy classifieds for handmade or vintage items, or are Instagram pictures (taken with a smartphone app that allows you to apply a vintage effect to the pictures you take).
The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting."
Techcrunch.com recently reported that an estimated 97% of Pinterest users are women.
From All You Wanted To Know About Pinterest @ pagetrafficbuzz.com:
As a business owner/webmaster you can get a lot of traffic to your site from the social platform. [...] You must add your website to your Pinterest profile. Additionally, you must link your site to Pinterest too. There is a Pinterest-provided code that you can paste on to your website to create a “follow me on Pinterest” button leading straight to your Pinterest profile and your boards. There is also a code offered by Pinterest where you can add a little ‘Pin It’ button next to all your product images, making it easier for people to share them. The more mentions you get, the more traffic to your site.
One last tip: the Pinterest Gifts section is, particularly on a day like today, very popular with people looking for last-minute gift inspiration. To have your pin included, you include the price (in U.S. dollars) in your tags and your product will be pulled into the gifts section.
15 free social listening tools
Social Listening Tools by Rosie Siman outlines some free tools you can use to better understand your brand, your audience, how your audience perceives your brand in the social space. These are also great tools for researching bigger conversations, themes or trends in the social space.
This is my favourite one:
Bit.ly (now Bitly.com, since .ly is a Libyan domain extension)
Bitly is a URL shortener, but can be used (sneakily) to find out how influential a brand or person actually is. By adding a +to the end of a bit.ly link, you'll be taken to a stats page where you can see how many people have clicked on that specific link, where they were when they clicked on the link (physical locaIon and site location) and when these clicks happened (dates) amongst other things. If you have a client with a Facebook page, you could have them share a link, shortened by bit.ly about themselves and one about something else to see what their fans are most interested in. Or if youre looking at a brand or a competitor's Twitter feed, you can see how many people click on the links that they re sharing (if they share links using Bit.ly.)
10 social media tools, and a Social Media Map
- socialeye.com (Overdrive Interactive's own tool) is an end to end social media management and reporting platform that allows you to manage, schedule, approve, publish and moderate your social media messaging (tweets, Facebook posts, etc.) from a single and secure environment, and optimize your social media marketing ROI with powerful tracking and dashboards that report social connections (fans and followers) social site traffic and actual leads and revenue.
- tweetdeck.com (acquired by Twitter) allows you to use Twitter as your social dashboard.
- ubersocial.com, a popular Twitter app for Blackberry and iPhone.
- cotweet.com is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyze conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities today, Twitter and Facebook.
- hootsuite.com allows you to monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter using the HootSuite dashboard.
- radian6.com (acquired by Salesforce.com) is a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.
- telligent.com, social community software for the enterprise.
- socialmedia.alterian.com allow you to monitor brands, identify key communities and influencers, address customer service issues, conduct unbiased research, and generate new sales leads
- buzzient.com provides a next-generation solution for social media analytics and integration of this valuable content with enterprise applications
- klout.com: The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure how many people you influence (True Reach), how much you influence them (Amplification), and how influential they are (Network Score).
Any tools missing from this list, besides the obvious Engagor?
More where this came from, in Overdrive Interactive's Social Media Map:
Fmeme tracks what’s “Hot On Facebook”
From sharing is more than fans friends and followers @ blog.joelrubinson.net - based on a March 2011 scan of 7 billion pages that use the ShareThis widget:
Sharing is bigger than fans, friends, and followers. Facebook accounted for 38% of inbound traffic driven by sharing activity. [...] Sharing is big. It accounts for nearly half of the referral traffic that search accounts for.
But how do you track what's being shared on Facebook around a specific topic?
Fmeme tries to map that, by displaying the Hottest Links On Facebook in several categories, like Arts, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, or Offbeat. It also has a pretty decent search function, but no ways of "following" the content with e.g. RSS feeds or email alerts.
To give you an idea, the most popular BMW related content on Facebook in the past week is:
- BMW 1M - Helipad - MPowered Performance Part 2 @ YouTube.com
- BMW Museum ArtCar Exhibition Videoclips @ bmw-artcartour.com
- BMW logo evolution @ logodesignlove.com
- BMW Museum ArtCar Exhibition Videoclips 40 minute video @ bmw-artcartour.com
- BMW 5-series commercial is remade on the Shell Ferrari ad of 1997 @ usa.indiandrives.com
5 tools to measure your Twitter influence
In The Conversity Model I discuss a number of tools and tactics which will help you to locate the influencers in certain domains or within certain topics/themes. Once you've found the influential voices in your market, the next step is to try and assess on the ones with the most impact. The number of followers/fans/friends/subscribers gives you a broad idea of their reach potential, but you should really look further.
First of all, you need to find a way to sort your long list of influencers, so that you can focus your efforts on the top ten for your market. Specifically for Twitter, there are a number of other on-line services that allow you to assess a Twitter user’s influence. In What Is Your Twitter Reputation? "Chief Digital Evangelist" Jeff Bullas discusses six tools to measure your Twitter influence with:
- Klout
- Social Chiefs - not included in this post since they don't offer instant stats
- Peer Index
- ReTweet Rank
- Twitalyzer
- Twitter Grader
Klout
The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.
Peerindex
PeerIndex is a web technology company that is algorithmically mapping out the social web. The way we see it, the social web now allows everyone endless possibilities in discovering new information on people, places, and subjects.
Retweet Rank
Retweet Rank ranks you based on number of times you have been retweeted recently. One of the ways to track your retweets.
Twitalyzer
Twitalyzer is Twitter's most popular measurement solution for business and personal users, focusing on influence, impact, engagement, generosity, and nearly 30 more measures of success in Twitter.
Twitter Grader
Measures the power and authority of your twitter profile. One of the only tools with a pretty decent dashboard for top Twitter users per country or city, e.g. Top Twitter Users in Belgium.
What tools do people use to manage their Twitter conversations?
I like the classification of different Twitter tools in Oneforty's All about social media monitoring tools infograph. I've added a few more - the ones I use most often are in bold.
- Desktop clients: Seesmic Desktop, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, Twitterrific, Echofon
- Mobile app: Twitter for iPhone, SocialScope, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Ubersocial
- Picture app: Mobypicture, Twitpic, Plixi
- Scheduling tool: CoTweet, Hootsuite, SocialOomph
- Syndication tool (feed your blog content to Twitter): Twitterfeed, Feedburner
- Analytics tool for Twitter users: Klout, Twitalyzer, Peerindex, TwitterCounter
- Analytics tool for shared links: BackTweets
- Web-based client: Twitter.com, Brizzly, Ginx, Seesmic Web
- Auto-follow tool: SocialToo, TwitterMass, Twollow
- Notification tool: Boxcar, Qwitter, Social Oomph
- URL shorteners: goo.gl, bit.ly
- Twitter account management (e.g. unfollow who doesn't follow you back): ManageFlitter
What tools do you use?
World map of your Twitter followers
Great visualisation tool: http://www.mapmyfollowers.com/
TweetReach: Great tool to discover your advocates
TweetReach "gives you detailed reach analysis for any search term on how tweets about that term have spread on Twitter — all in one simple report. See how many different users received tweets about your topic. "
The free version allows you to run a report and see stats for the most recent 50 tweets.