#1 for Social Marketing Media

Karen Leland provides a Pinterest roadmap that will help you drive website traffic, boost your brand and build business. In this edited excerpt, the author reveals how to write pin descriptions that draw viewers to your account.

One surefire way to optimize your pins for search and attract more traffic is by giving each one a spot-on description that includes your relevant keywords. There is a 500-character limit for descriptions, so be deliberate in what you write — and follow these guidelines for making your descriptions count:

Provide a context. Images without descriptions leave it to the user’s imagination as to why you pinned that particular item or what point you were trying to make. Granted, some images are so breathtaking that they need no explanation. However, in most cases, a clear, concise, and specific description of a pin can help pique a user’s interest. Items to consider when writing a description include:

What you specifically liked about the image
Why you pinned the image
What idea the image represents
What tips you have that go along with the image
What opinions you have about the image
Additional information related to the image
Spell out the specifics. Images that have vague descriptions are less useful for the viewer than those that spell out the specifics. For example, let’s say you have a pin showing a selection of great office gifts to give clients. A description that reads, “These are really great to give as client gifts,” is less impactful than one that says, “These five gifts, all under $30, can be used by a man or a woman and are something every small-business person needs. For this reason, they make great holiday client gifts. Here’s a link to where you can buy them.” Now that’s a useful description.

Link to your website. You can add live links to the captions below your pins simply by adding a URL to a pin’s description and clicking the red “Save Pin” button. Adding a link to the description encourages people to click through and drives traffic to your website and/or blog.

Include a call to action. According to a study by Reachli.com, descriptions that contain a call to action see an 80 percent increase in engagement.

For example, let’s say you’ve pinned an image for tax season that shows a small-business owner pulling out his hair in despair. The description explains that there are five ways a small business can avoid stress at tax time and provides a link to an article on the topic. That’s a good start, but you take it one step further by encouraging viewers with a specific call to action with a simple sentence or two. Here are some suggested call-to-action phrases you can incorporate into your pin descriptions as appropriate:

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Please submit ideas and questions to…
Call for a complimentary consultation.
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Tell us what you think.
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Add testimonials. A good strategy for both product and service businesses is to include testimonials in your pin descriptions. For example, if you have a pin showcasing a garden your landscaping company overhauled, you might want to place a short quote from the happy homeowner in the description.

Use keywords. One important aspect of search engine optimization is the inclusion of keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. By using these sparingly and strategically in your pin descriptions, you can increase your Google rankings but also be more discoverable by users searching Pinterest for a particular topic.

Be mindful of description etiquette. Bear in mind that the description etiquette changes depending on whether the pin is yours, a repin, or sourced from somewhere on the web. Whenever you repin an image, Pinterest automatically brings the description over as well. If that description fits, fine — you can leave it as it is or even just add a few words of your own to personalize it. However, in some cases, you may find it more advantageous to write a new description.

When pinning from a specific blog post, permalink URL, or website, avoid copying and pasting the given description verbatim to avoid copyright infringement. For example, some pinners have violated food bloggers’ intellectual property by copying and pasting the blogger’s recipes into the comment box. Be original and write your own descriptions, while being sure to credit and link back to the original source.

Read more: http://socialkik.com/

One surefire way to optimize your pins for search and attract more traffic is by giving each one a spot-on description that includes your relevant keywords. There is a 500-character limit for descriptions, so be deliberate in what you write — and follow these guidelines for making your descriptions count:

Provide a context. Images without descriptions leave it to the user’s imagination as to why you pinned that particular item or what point you were trying to make. Granted, some images are so breathtaking that they need no explanation. However, in most cases, a clear, concise, and specific description of a pin can help pique a user’s interest. Items to consider when writing a description include:

What you specifically liked about the image
Why you pinned the image
What idea the image represents
What tips you have that go along with the image
What opinions you have about the image
Additional information related to the image
Spell out the specifics. Images that have vague descriptions are less useful for the viewer than those that spell out the specifics. For example, let’s say you have a pin showing a selection of great office gifts to give clients. A description that reads, “These are really great to give as client gifts,” is less impactful than one that says, “These five gifts, all under $30, can be used by a man or a woman and are something every small-business person needs. For this reason, they make great holiday client gifts. Here’s a link to where you can buy them.” Now that’s a useful description.

Link to your website. You can add live links to the captions below your pins simply by adding a URL to a pin’s description and clicking the red “Save Pin” button. Adding a link to the description encourages people to click through and drives traffic to your website and/or blog.

Include a call to action. According to a study by Reachli.com, descriptions that contain a call to action see an 80 percent increase in engagement.

For example, let’s say you’ve pinned an image for tax season that shows a small-business owner pulling out his hair in despair. The description explains that there are five ways a small business can avoid stress at tax time and provides a link to an article on the topic. That’s a good start, but you take it one step further by encouraging viewers with a specific call to action with a simple sentence or two. Here are some suggested call-to-action phrases you can incorporate into your pin descriptions as appropriate:

Download the free ebook.
Read more ways to…
To learn more…
Sign up online.
For more details…
Please submit ideas and questions to…
Call for a complimentary consultation.
Get a free quote.
Tell us what you think.
Watch a video of…
Add testimonials. A good strategy for both product and service businesses is to include testimonials in your pin descriptions. For example, if you have a pin showcasing a garden your landscaping company overhauled, you might want to place a short quote from the happy homeowner in the description.

Use keywords. One important aspect of search engine optimization is the inclusion of keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. By using these sparingly and strategically in your pin descriptions, you can increase your Google rankings but also be more discoverable by users searching Pinterest for a particular topic.

Be mindful of description etiquette. Bear in mind that the description etiquette changes depending on whether the pin is yours, a repin, or sourced from somewhere on the web. Whenever you repin an image, Pinterest automatically brings the description over as well. If that description fits, fine — you can leave it as it is or even just add a few words of your own to personalize it. However, in some cases, you may find it more advantageous to write a new description.

When pinning from a specific blog post, permalink URL, or website, avoid copying and pasting the given description verbatim to avoid copyright infringement. For example, some pinners have violated food bloggers’ intellectual property by copying and pasting the blogger’s recipes into the comment box. Be original and write your own descriptions, while being sure to credit and link back to the original source.

Read more: socialkik.com/

f you’ve been frustrated by the lack of actionable reporting data that’s available for Facebook ads, the social-media company says improvements are on the way. Facebook is rolling out updates to its reporting capabilities found in Ads Manager, the interface that allows you to view, manage and optimize your advertising campaigns.

The updates are aimed at helping advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaign in real-time, Facebook says in a blog post announcing the changes and offers more flexibility and customization of the available data. Among the changes, we’ll now be able to measure reach and frequency across any date range for an ad, campaign, or ad account. The performance of an ad, campaign and account can now also be broken out by such factors as age, gender, country and where the ad actually ran on Facebook.

Much of this data was already available in Ads Manager but with these updates, marketers will have an easier time accessing and customizing the metrics that are most important to their campaigns. The opportunity to see real-time data is the big win with this announcement. This on-the-fly insight is something that’s long been overdue and should help advertisers see better returns as they’ll now be able to more fluidly optimize their campaigns.

For instance, discount travel site Priceline.com has been testing the new features and has reportedly already been able to reduce the number of reports they have to pull by 50 percent and are now able to quickly interpret campaign results and develop ad-hoc reports with the metrics and dimensions most relevant to them.

The wait for these updates will continue a little while longer as Facebook said they’d be rolled out globally over the next few weeks. Earlier this month, Facebook said it was dramatically scaling back the number of advertising options it offers to marketers in an attempt to simplify the ad-buying process.

Read more: http://socialkik.com/

You can make the most informative and entertaining video on YouTube, but that alone won’t guarantee you an audience of potential customers. You’ll still need to promote your video in as many ways as possible to help spread the word about your startup.

Here are some of the most successful tactics for promoting a new YouTube video:

1. Promote it on your company blog.
Your company blog is the perfect place to promote your video to your loyal customer base. Talk up each new video in its own blog post, linking to it or even embedding it in the post.

2. Tell your email list.
When you upload a new video to YouTube, send a message and link to your entire email list. If you send out a periodic email newsletter, mention your new videos in it, too.

3. Connect to social media.
Mention your new videos in your tweets and status updates, and link to or embed them in the messages. Facebook, for instance, lets you embed YouTube videos in your status updates. Just paste the URL into the status update and Facebook will put the video in your News feed. Twitter doesn’t let you embed videos, but you can link to them from your tweets. And on Pinterest, you can “pin” YouTube videos to your virtual pinboards.

You also can promote your videos on social bookmarking and news sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon. When you post a link to your video on these sites, you can broaden the viewership beyond your existing customers and social media followers. Note, however, that self-promotion is often frowned upon on many of these sites, so do so as sparingly and subtly as you can.

4. Do some old-fashioned public relations.
While most companies focus their promotional efforts on the web, you shouldn’t neglect traditional public relations. This means issuing a press release when you’ve uploaded a new or particularly important video, and also picking up the phone or sending emails to target specific news outlets, such as your industry’s trade groups, publications and blogs. Make sure you include a video link in your press release to help online news sources link directly from their coverage to your video on YouTube.

5. Advertise on YouTube.
If you can afford it, you can advertise your videos on YouTube, using parent company Google’s AdWords for Video program. Called TrueView ads, they appear on the YouTube site, targeting potential viewers and linking back to the selected video or your YouTube channel page. TrueView ads are pay-per-click (PPC) ads, just like traditional AdWords text ads. So, you pay only when someone clicks your ad.

Start by logging into your Google AdWords account and linking it to your YouTube account. Set a daily budget for the maximum you’re willing to spend. Then, select a video to display in your ad and choose the type of ad you want to run.

Google offers four types of TrueView ads. In-search ads appear at the top of the search results page when users search for the keywords you select. In-display ads appear in the related videos section on the viewing pages for similar videos. In-stream ads are short video messages that play at the beginning or end of other videos. And in-slate ads are commercials that play before or in the middle of longer videos.

In-search ads are the best choice for many companies because most YouTube videos are found through searches. So, just like your website, you want your video showing up on search results pages.

The next step requires you to set a maximum cost per view (CPV). This is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click. You can start with just $1 per day but what you spend is really dependent on your budget. You then choose how to target your ad — through demographics and interests or via keywords. Keyword targeting is often best for in-search ads.

Once your campaign is up and running, you can use the AdWords Dashboard to measure the performance of your ads — including but not limited to number of views. Depending on the results, you may need to tweak your strategy and possibly create new ads.

Read more: http://socialkik.com/

Brands that use YouTube to promote their products or services will welcome the latest update to the video service’s mobile apps: video overlays that suggest what users should watch next. Google calls it “InVideo Programming,” which means that YouTube creators can cross-promote their channel’s videos — linking one video to the next so, ideally, a user will play all of them. While this feature is new on mobile, it has been available on the desktop version of YouTube since last fall, and is already used by more than one million channels, Google says.

The update also includes call-to-action overlays. You can share additional information about your videos with these overlays or use them as a space for brand promotion. As of now, the overlays are available only to advertisers who use AdWords for video, but Google plans to bring them to all channels before the end of the year. — TheNextWeb

Twitter buys a startup: Spindle.
Twitter has purchased Spindle, an app that allows users to discover Twitter content created near to them. Spindle will shut down and its team of about 10 employees will move to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. “By joining forces with Twitter, we can do so much more to help you find interesting, timely, and useful information about what’s happening around you,” the company wrote in a blog post. — SocialTimes

Facebook lets users comment with photos.
A new Facebook feature lets users comment on status updates with photos rather than just text. The feature came out of one of Facebook’s employee hackathons. Photo comments are becoming available on the web to all users, but the feature is not yet available on the mobile apps, though photo comments are viewable in the apps. — Mashable

Vine co-founders tease upcoming features.
Not to be outdone by Instagram’s new video feature, the co-founders of the Twitter-owned Vine video app released have teased some upcoming features. It appears that full-screen videos and comments will be among the new features, though no one is saying for sure yet. “Over the next few weeks, we’ll be introducing some exciting new parts of Vine,” the company said in a blog post. “As always, we’ll share details on updates as we release them.” — AllThingsD

Use social media a lot? You might be a narcissist.
A new study found that frequent tweets and Facebook status updates were highly correlated with narcissistic traits in both college students and adults. “Facebook is a mirror and Twitter is a megaphone,” researchers from the University of Michigan wrote. People use social media “to boost their egos and control others’ perceptions of them,” they said. Narcissistic young people favored Twitter, while their older counterparts tended to rely on Facebook to garner approval. At this point, it’s unclear whether Twitter and other social-media platforms lead to narcissism, or whether they simply provide an outlet for existing narcissism in some users. But you’re free to ponder this question next time you see someone tweeting multiple times an hour. — AllTwitter

Read more: http://socialkik.com/