The tremendous growth in social media over the past few years has captured millions of individual users - and businesses have been able to attract new leads and engage with existing customers.
Social media has become a life "essential".
It's now reached a point where many people would be completely lost if they could not access their social media accounts. And this is not only true for personal use. Nowadays the promotion and marketing of a business cannot seem to survive without social media, or if you do ignore it, you are deemed to be behind the times. Experts everywhere talk about tips, methods and techniques necessary for a business to promote itself.
Over 42% or 3.3 billion social media users are on a mobile device and nearly 1 million more use mobile for the first time each day. Those numbers are staggering, so of course you must be mobile friendly when promoting your business. But which social media app or apps do you choose to focus on, without running out of marketing budget - assuming you have one? It can be confusing knowing where to focus.
There are a number of popular options. Most people can’t live without Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, YouTube is a go-to search engine for millions, tweeting is short and sweet and gets a message across, Instagram is good for sharing images, LinkedIn is a place to meet other business people, and what else? Oh, yes, Pinterest.
Isn’t Pinterest for posting pretty pictures, sharing women’s interests, fashion, food and trivia……? Who on earth is using Pinterest for business?
Well, you'd probably be surprised, like we were, so maybe we have this all wrong? Let’s look more closely at some of the social media possibilities…
Facebook: The most popular social media site!
Facebook boasts that just under 75% of the US population are active users. An impressive number, but FB presents a big problem for people who want to share anything on its platform.
The reality is, that if you create a post or share a photo or video on Facebook, not everyone you want to see it will actually see it. This is true even if you’re only sharing to your family and friends. Why? Facebook deliberately limits you with its mysterious algorithms. FB has decided, in its money-making wisdom, that only a certain percentage of the target audience for a post will ever get to see that post.
So how do you guarantee to get your ad or message to your audience in Facebook? Spend money on ads or promoted posts. Around 50 million small businesses have a Facebook page and 4 million of those pay for advertising to help get noticed. That's good revenue for FB but a money pit for all of us who are trying to grow our businesses!
Instagram: Influencers rule.
Instagram relies on personal connections and is driven by “influencers”. You make connections with appropriate influencers to request that they endorse your brand. This third party endorsement carries more weight and viewed as more trustworthy than if you simply promote yourself. Therefore you need to make connections and find relevant influencers in your target markets. Once again, you need to be spending time and maybe money to achieve that.
Twitter: Engagement not sales.
Twitter also has limitations, not least that only 336 million users are active, out of a total of 1.3 billion. (Pete is amongst the inactive ones!) Also, due to its "instant" nature and the fact a tweet is lost quickly down the feed in such a fast-moving channel, Twitter is recognized as being best suited to engaging with existing customers and followers, rather than promotion to new audiences.
YouTube: "How do I ...?"
YouTube's user base is nearly as big as Facebook, with over 1.8 billion active users each month. It's clearly the search engine of choice if you are looking for how-to information, product tests, reviews and opinions. So this is a great place to promote your product or service via your own channel or advertising. However, unless you do have your own channel and content, it will be hit or miss if your ad appears before a video is played, and then only on channels that allow ads. And how do you find the right channels to promote on?
Guaranteed exposure on YouTube requires a monetized channel and video content, in other words: expertise, money and time.
LinkedIn: No soliciting here please!
LinkedIn has become a place for networking, but open promotion of products or services through the messaging system is frowned on and may even get you blocked. Again, how would you promote your business or service on LinkedIn? You guessed it: spend money on ads and promotions.
Pinterest: the quiet achiever?
According to Wisemetrics and Piqora, the half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes, whereas the average half-life of a Pinterest post is 3.5 months. That means a Pinterest post lasts 1,703 times longer than a Facebook post!
But surely Pinterest isn’t a serious platform for businesses? Well, we were surprised to discover that this is a complete misconception since it's a very useful and successful method for generating traffic, and is mostly overlooked. Hence we are setting out to rectify that misconception and spread the word.
In contrast to the other social media listed above, Pinterest is an open community that encourages sharing of information, ideas and other people’s content for free. Pinterest allows everyone to see everyone else’s content without restriction or time limitations, and thus can be considered a truly open search engine.
You can create an account, post and promote your content or pins, and hyperlink these pins to wherever you want to send the traffic. Pinterest actively promotes and wants its users to be "sharing" or re-pinning other people's images, which means your pin can go viral and keep working for literally months.
But does Pinterest actually drive sales?
Good question. Here's a few stats:
Pinterest has over 300 million users.
87% of Pinterest users have bought something online after browsing pins.
93% of people on Pinterest use it to plan their purchases.
Over half of Pinterest users make $50,000 or more per year, so they have disposable income to spend.
The average order value of a sale from Pinterest is $50.
In our search to find out more, we came across Pinterest aficionados John Kramer and Daniel Hall who have been playing with the sharing economy for many years, promoting books, knowledge and products. They’ve learned a lot in that time. In fact, John says that one simple pin he designed in 15 minutes has resulted in over 1.4 million repins and more than 500 visits a day to his website. And he’s still getting clicks on pins that were published over 3 years ago.
Well, they certainly persuaded us of the value of Pinterest, and how it can be used to generate FREE traffic for your business. This has now become one of our favorite traffic generation strategies. And yes, it's free!
Want to know how this could work for your business? Rather than us trying to cover it in this article, we recommend you watch a webinar by John and Daniel so you can hear directly from them. Register below:
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