PINTEREST Watch - Curated by Jan Gordon & maxOZ

"Then comes Pinterest, the latest social network that everyone’s talking about. You may have already seen your friends sharing links to it, but unless you’re interested in dresses, crafts, and cooking, you likely didn’t give the site a second try. Then, the whole world started using it, and even the President is sharing his favorite things on it."

WP Pinner is a plug-in built for WordPress users to track Pinterest sharing. It mounts a dashboard in the WordPress admin area for stats.

A case study by online boutique Boticca.com showed that Pinterest users buy and spend more than their Facebook counterparts and brings more new visitors.

Pinterest over the last 6 months has become the social network with buzz, which provides a visual platform that offers the ecosystem to experiment and play with images as a means of marketing and engagement and even selling."

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterst Watch"

See article here: [http://bit.ly/KSoHWy]

Pinterest ain't perfect....

Pinterest may be the hottest new media play on the block but a fascinating analysis of its users and traffic by analyst Ben Hovaness of TBG Digital, a major seller and manager of ads on Facebook and other social media, reveals that Pinterest ain't perfect.

Most disconcertingly, there's less sharing than you'd think on the site, TBG claims.

Read more: http://read.bi/KsgfeL  

Pinterest Outperforms Twitter, Facebook For Purchase Power

Is Pinterest here to stay? Perhaps. Certainly, the evidence is mounting that the pinboarding network of choice is making a big dent in the social space.

Studies have shown that users spend more time on Pinterest than on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ combined, and new data reveals that the (ahem) interest in Pinterest is now so strong that the platform is outperforming both Twitter and Facebook for click-through revenue.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/IktpOY]

A selection of ten of the best Pinterest apps, hacks and tips that will help you get even more out of the service, or use it for even more fun!

While most users of the site are still individuals, brands and big businesses have taken note of the major traffic the social media site has been seeing in recent months, and many have begun creating their own Pinterest boards, pinning things from their own sites as well as from around the web.

**There are hundreds of brands currently using Pinterest for marketing (a number that will undoubtedly grow before the year is out), and some surprising companies are making the site’s visual features work for them.

**Read on to learn about some of the unexpected brands that are drawing in loads of fans from Pinterest.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/J7uVyg]

This piece was written by Lisa Pluth for socialfresh

Pinterest is all about images, right?

Wrong.

In Pinterest users build boards around interesting categories. Keywords play a prominent part in the structure of the site.

Words play an integral part in gaining followers and being re-pinned. This article looks at using words effectively to get the most out of pins.

In Pinterest users build boards around interesting categories. Keywords play a prominent part in the structure of the site.

Each board has its own name and description. In addition, the user or others can further categorize each board into a standard Pinterest category

.

Spend time thinking about how to organize boards both for users and the site’s internal search engine. Users of the site will use words to search for specific pins. Unlike Google, on Pinterest the search facility is fairly simple.

**This will undoubtedly change as the site grows, but for now long or complex search phrases do not produce results.

**Posts also have descriptions and these too are important. Placing keywords in pin descriptions will make the pin searchable in the Pinterest search facility.

**Because Pinterest has a built-in share facility with both Twitter and Facebook using keywords gives posts greater exposure on these sites as well.

1. Using Keywords on Pinterest

Keywords are extremely important for categorizing pins in the Pinterest search engine.

**Words are used to categorize boards and posts.

**They are also how users search for pins.

**All sections should be filled out thoughtfully to secure the best sharing among users.

**From a viewer’s perspective  keywords help them quickly search boards so they can find the most appealing pins.

**Users are also able to like or follow particular words or topics making the use of keywords extremely valuable.

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/JdRTsL]

WP Pinner is a plug-in built for WordPress users to track Pinterest sharing. It mounts a dashboard in the WordPress admin area for stats.

The dashboard displays the board name, date posts, clicks, likes and number of repins. From here, WordPress publishers can also schedule pins and automatically follow users interacting with their pinboards.

The team hopes to go live in a few weeks with more features, including detailed statistics, pinning and tracking non-WordPress posts and multiple account support. For now, the plug-in will only work on self-hosted WordPress websites on WordPress.org.

Interested in getting WP Pinner? Enter an email address on their main page to receive an invite once the product is ready: http://bit.ly/K1zKxK 

This infographic is from Jeff Bullas and there are some very interesting findings.

The 5 Insights on Facebook vs Pinterest

**Boticca traced the sales , average sales, conversions and engagement of 50,000 visitors from Pinterest and 50,000 from Facebook.

Here are 5 things Boticca learned about marketing on Facebook compared to Pinterest

**Pinterest users spend more when shopping at $180 vs $85 by Facebook users

**Pinterest users spent 65% less time on the site than Facebook

**Pinterest influenced more sales (10%) than Facebook (7%)

**Pinterest has a 51% lower conversion rate compared to Facebook

**Pinterest acquired 86% new users vs Facebook at 57%

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch'

See article and infographic here [http://bit.ly/KRTzu6]

Many were proclaiming trouble for Pinterest when the site started to show a drop in users.

Well, it has been quite a week for them which shows the insanity of making long term predictions about the end of the site at the first sign of a dip. It was inevitable that a dip would occur at some point given their staggering growth and market penetration.

If you were starting to doubt Pinterest, check out everything that’s come out of their HQ in the past few days.

This piece was written by Melonie Gallegos for iMediaconnection

In this piece, there are 8 tips to help marketers can get in on the social curation boom in a meaningful way - that means Pinterest and beyond!

Here's an excerpt:

"Curation is a long-standing tradition of collecting, saving & organizing objects. Today it takes on a different meaning. Organizataions have evolved from collecting artifacts to digital curation of media and content"

When human behavior shifts and it certainly has, (more about that in the article), brands are quick to follow suit.

Here are some highlights:

There are a lot of websites offfering curation-type services

To get a clear sense of how a brand might leverage curation in this article, they have broken them down into categories.

**social bookmarking and news

**sharing

**Aggregation and syndication networks

**There are 8 ways your brand can get in on the action

Here are a few that caught my attention:

Become a curator creator

**Create your own Pinterest board and it's more than just slapping images, it takes thought, strategy, being part of the community and continually showing up

**appreciating other people's content and having two-way conversations

Create an Interest-based content strategy

**Focus on the interests of your audience, not your products and services!

**Allign their real-life interests with your brand position

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/IXNQQB]

Pinterest for the A/E/C Industry

[Architectural, Engineering, and Construction]

When you consider all of this, it certainly makes Pinterest an appealing place to be for businesses.

It’s undisputable that B2C companies, which tend to be more visually based, have the advantage here, but there are a number of ways that B2B companies can leverage Pinterest as well.

This is especially true for companies in the A/E/C industry whose product is more visually based than other B2B firms. For many firms in the A/E/C industry, sharing visual portfolios of previous jobs, ideas, and designs is essential for their business.

Would you hire an architect without first reviewing his portfolio of previous work? If you were looking to hire a building or construction firm, you’d most likely head to their Web site to see if they have a gallery of past work.

Because A/E/C firms typically have a robust portfolio of images to share and prospects that are eager to see them, this makes Pinterest a well-suited place for A/E/C firms to showcase their work.

Interested in getting your firm set up on Pinterest, but not sure where to start?

Take a look at the following ideas for creating compelling Pinterest content: http://bit.ly/ICPs1S 

This piece is from socialmediatoday and I selected it because it has some valuable information for anyone who is using Pinterest to market their products and services.

Here are some highlights:

Marketers, businesses and brands alike are striving to understand what engagement strategies work best with Pinterest, while figuring out how to measure these strategies as they go.

**Many would assume that taking note of followers of your overall Pinterest account is the best way to determine your audience size, however

**it’s truly the followers of your individual boards that your team should really be paying attention to

What does it mean for your Pinterest efforts?

In terms of increasing your audience overall, treat each of your boards as a destination where the images reflect a consistent and valuable theme.

**For instance, this board titled Healthy Eating has a concise written description, a telling board cover and a plethora of quality images from different websites that all reflect the title of the board.

**Staying consistent is a key way to attract interested pinners to follow your board for future pins of a similar subject.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/J2ouwe]