How to grow your social media accounts when all you hear is crickets - Jeremy Jones
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How to grow your social media accounts when all you hear is crickets - Jeremy Jones
- 1. How to Grow Your Social Media Accounts When All You Hear is Crickets Jeremy Jones
- 2. My Social Media is Going Nowhere!
- 3. Session Takeaways • Adopting best practices on Twitter, Facebook, & Pinterest • Taking a pro-active approach to community building • Leveraging engaging content ideas to get users talking and coming back for more
- 4. Only You Can Define Your Success • Do you want to… – be influential? – convert sales? – work with brands? – be an authority? • Or how about having… – great conversations? – popular images shares? – unique media? – or all of the above?
- 5. A Word of Caution “Best practices” can be a relative term! What works for others may not work for you. The only way you can find out is if you try them yourself.
- 6. Twitter Whizzing by at 140 characters per update. ...5 Minutes Later
- 7. Finding Data About Best Practices Twitonomy.com tracks the most recent 3,200 tweets from any account.
- 8. How Do You Compare? 26 Tweets Per Day #’s in 2 out of 3 Tweets Links in 1 out of 2 Tweets 5% RT Rate @’s in 2 out of 3 Tweets 29% Reply Rate
- 9. Gaining New Followers Twitter’s publicized follow limits: Following < 2,000 Go to 2,000! Following > 2,000 Restricted to +10% of Your Followers Up to 30% (or more) will follow back!
- 10. Gaining New Followers Where to find potential followers: “Who to Follow” Feature Followers of Other Users
- 11. Building a Community Separate users on Hootsuite or Tweetdeck
- 12. Building a Community Reach travelers with hash-tags and twitter chats. Hash-Tags #travel #lp #photography #RTW #rtwsoon #rtwnow #traveltuesday Twitter Chats #RTTC: Wednesdays at 6PM GMT #TNI: Thursday at 3:30PM EST #TTOT: Tuesday at 9:30AM/PM GMT
- 13. Automating Your Account Reshare Old Content With No Extra Work Popular Services Revive Old Posts: $0/$25 AutoTweeter: $29
- 14. Twitter Takeaways • Use targeted followings • Increase tweet frequency • Talk to other users, join chats, and use hash-tags • Automate to reduce work
- 15. Facebook Combating decreasing organic reach.
- 16. Finding Data About Best Practices Utilize Facebook’s “Pages to Watch” Feature
- 17. How Do You Compare? 1-2 Link Shares Per Day 0-1 Status Updates Per Day 1-4 Image Shares Per Day 0-1 3rd Party Shares Per Day Maintain a Posting Schedule
- 18. Gaining New Followers Target followers of other Pages by commenting as your brand.
- 19. Building a Community • Page Insights tell you: – When your fans are online – Your most engaging updates • Establish a posting schedule and stick to it.
- 20. Engaging Content that Works Asking a Question • 6,586 Page Likes • 64 Image Likes • 16 Shares • 80 Comments • 3,280 Organic Reach Via A Dangerous Business
- 21. Engaging Content that Works Facebook Updates that Work • Sharing a viral image • Asking a question • Inspirational quotes • Reaching milestones • Detailed stories • Professional photography Via TravelFREAK
- 22. Facebook Takeaways • Interact on 3rd party pages • Develop a posting schedule • Schedule posts in advance • Use engaging content to spark comments
- 23. Pinterest Standing out in a sea of amazing photos.
- 24. Finding Data About Best Practices • Pinterest makes it difficult to track data from 3rd party users. • Hundreds of studies have been performed to find best practices. – Most of these have little beneficial data. • A few common themes are present.
- 25. How Do You Compare? 15-40 Unique Boards Have a Database of 2,000+ pins Repin 10-50+ Images Per Day Pin Multiple Times Per Day Limit Own Shares Utilize Group Boards
- 26. Gaining New Followers Reach pinners to get your images seen and shared! Screenshot from pingroupie.com
- 27. Building a Community Travel is not the most popular topic on Pinterest! 1. Food & Drink 2. DIY Crafts 3. Home Décor 4. Women’s Fashion 5. Other 6. Weddings 7. Design 8. Hair & Beauty 9. Art 10. Kids 11. Photography 12. Humor 13. Holidays & Events 14. Education 15. Travel Source: “Specialization, Homophily, and Gender in a Social Curation Site: Findings from Pinterest” - Uni. of Minnesota
- 28. Engaging Content that Works
- 29. Engaging Content that Works Which Would You Pin? • Taller images get attention. • The description is personal. • The colors stand out. • Image screams “You need to be here!”
- 30. Engaging Content that Works Pin Styles that Work • Taller images • Personal descriptions • Limited points of focus • Inspirational Quotes • Professional edits – Bright – No flaws – Colorful
- 31. Pinterest Takeaways • Join group boards to boost your following and shares • Curate a database of unique boards and pins • Pin multiple times each day • Customize pins to stand out
- 32. Being Seen Is The Hardest Part It is never too late to try something new.
- 33. Blogger Facebook Groups Blogger groups are a great place to stay up-to-date. • Travel Bloggers • The Business of Travel Blogging • Travel Advice By Travel Bloggers • We Travel We Blog • Global Bloggers Network • Travel Blog Success (Paid) Tip! – Search the archives before posting questions!
- 34. Resources List Twitter: •Twitonomy •Hootsuite and Tweetdeck •AutoTweeter Desktop App ($) •Revive Old Posts Plug-In •ManageFlitter •TweetReach Pinterest: •PinGroupie •PicMonkey •Ahalogy General: •Buffer Facebook: •IFTTT •FB’s Pages to Watch •FB’s Page Insights
- 35. Questions? Feel free to contact Jeremy at: jeremy@livingthedreamrtw.com @livingdreamrtw on Twitter
Notas do Editor
- Welcome to TBEX everyone! I’m really excited to be speaking here in the first session with the topic “How to Grow Your Social Media Accounts When All You Hear is Crickets” Just to introduce myself for those who don’t know me, my name is Jeremy Jones from the travel blog Living the Dream, and for the last few years I’ve been spending a good portion of my time researching best practices on how to run my social media profiles. In this session, I am pleased to be able to share a few of the best practices that top travel bloggers use on their Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts that you can incorporate into your social media plans right away no matter your size or experience. As this is a beginners level session, everyone here probably has many thoughts and questions when it comes to social media, but odds are one common theme is true…
- …you have no idea what you are doing. But what do you do when you have no plan, no goals, and no feedback telling you what is working and what is not? Let’s look into a few things you can do to help fix this.
- In today’s session we’re going to cover three main topics: How you can find and adopt best practices that top travel bloggers use on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. How to take a pro-active approach to building your community of engaged followers on each social network. What content ideas you can use to get users interacting on your profiles, becoming bigger fans, and coming back for more. But before we jump into those, we have to take a step back and highlight the first thing everyone must do before beginning work on their social media profiles, and that is having a plan for success.
- One of the reasons new users struggle on social media is that they have no goals laid out for their accounts. This session is going to cover many action items you can use today to get started on your goals, but what you want out of your account in particular is entirely up to you. Unfortunately no one else can define that for you as this is all about the direction you want your blog to take. I can’t tell you what that is, nor can other bloggers, your fans, friends, or family- only you can decide what your success will be measured by. Knowing this is important because it will directly impact how you manage your accounts. Do you want to be influential, convert sales, work with brands, or be considered an authority on a topic? Or how about being known for having great conversations, popular image shares, unique media, or a combination of all of these? Having an idea on how you want to run your account, where you want to be, and knowing ways to monitor its performance are key to keeping on track with building your profiles as you establish what best practices work and which ones do not. So before you decide to use any of the best practices featured in this talk, sit down and think about this one for a while. Once you do, the direction you need to take will become much clearer.
- As we’re getting started, I need to make a brief warning. This talk focuses on the best practices top travel bloggers have used to run their accounts and how you can use them in your own profiles. But depending on the goal you have laid out for yourself, some of them may not make sense. A tip about targeting followers on Twitter may work for Audience Member #1, but does not for Audience Member #2. Uploading general content to Facebook that encourages conversation may not work for Audience Member #3, but does wonders for Audience Member #4. This is a double edged sword on social media that comes from the fact that we all run our accounts differently, have different goals, and have different fans. Luckily for you, by the end of this talk we’ll have covered over a dozen different ideas you can try to jumpstart your new accounts, so everyone should have a few takeaways they can try out no matter what your ultimate goal is. Let’s get started talking about Twitter.
- Twitter is one of the most complex social networks out there, which is kind of funny considering its simplicity. You get 140 characters per update and are out there in sea of tweets that is increasing by over 500 million per day. This network has an impressive blink-and-you-miss-it setup because, as those who follow more than a few hundred users can tell you, tweets fly by hundreds at a time and by the time you’re done looking through those, you’ll already have missed hundreds more. How can you stand out and get yourself seen in this sea of shorthand? Let’s look at some best practices that leaders in our industry use.
- When it comes to talking about best practices in this session, it would be pretty easy for me to throw out information on a slide, say ‘this is the best,’ and go on without any reason as to why. I do not think this provides any value because, as we’ve already established, best practices are relative to the goals you have laid out for your account. For each section in this talk I wanted to give you one way you can find information about how other users run their accounts in case your ideal view of best practices do not line up with what is featured here such that you want to research more on your own. One site I absolutely love for researching data about Twitter users is Twitonomy.com because not only is it comprehensive, it lets you see other user’s stats for free as well. After logging into the service, their crawler will return data from the last 3,200 tweets from any account and will tell you items like: # of updates/day # of links/update # of mentions/update # of RTs # of hash-tags per update And even how much their own tweets have been shared by other users. This is very valuable when researching best practices as you can quite literally target any account you like and learn how they run their profile in just a few minutes. I did this for a few big named travel bloggers who run their Twitter profiles quite well and came up with some pretty consistent data.
- Top travel bloggers on Twitter had the following facts about their accounts: -They have 26 tweets per day on average with the range being anywhere from 13-50. -Included links in 1 out of 2 Tweets -Mentions in 2 out of 3 tweets -Hash-tags in 2 out of 3 tweets (or any combination thereof) -a 5%-30% RT rate of others -and a 29% Reply rate to others. As with all data, you need to take a moment to reflect on what it all really means. What this data tells me is that top users in our industry tweet frequently throughout the day, share content often, and engage in a high conversation rate with other users. But what is the return for all of this work? Users that I targeted for this talk had over 50% of their tweets reshared and favorite several times each. New accounts that don’t engage as much? Well, drop of shares to just a few percent of their updates. Unfortunately, this data by itself isn’t very valuable. Sure, it does tell you what others are doing, but you need to take a look at how you compare to get the full benefit. Pop your profile into Twitonomy and see how your stats compare. Low on Tweets? You’ll want to start tweeting more, that’s an easy one. Low on Mentions or Replies? You’ll want to make it a practice to engage in more conversation with others. This is a pretty straight forward way to see how you compare and get ideas for a few fast improvements that will help your account grow in the future. But what this does not tell you is ways to get people to follow you, how to engage in conversation with others, and ways to make using twitter easier and less labor intensive. So let’s look into options on how to fix these issues.
- Let’s look into the aspect of gaining followers first, as this is a common question everyone has. There is organic growth through having follow buttons on your site, but that is slow moving and growth is limited by the number of pageviews you have. Luckily Twitter has some pretty good rules that actually helps those who want to take a pro-active approach to gaining followers. You probably know by now of the follow-back principle on Twitter. If you don’t it is pretty simple. Many users consider it polite to follow back those who follow them. People can get pretty crazy about it, and a good population of users think this is the way to operate. Well, you know what? Most people taking a pro-active approach to building followers don’t do that. Unless you’re interested in what that user is talking about, following everyone back takes up valuable space you can otherwise be using to grow your account. How can you do that? We need to take a look at Twitter’s following limits, as they’re quite interesting when keeping the follow back phenomena in mind: First- You can follow up to 2,000 accounts without a single restriction. If you’re following under that amount, you should start following users who are interested in your niche, as many will follow you back solely because you followed them in the first place. Easy growth! Second- If you are following more than 2,000 accounts, you are limited to only follow 10% more than the number of people that follow you. That is, if you have 2,000 followers, you can only follow up to 2,200. If you have 3,000 followers, 3,300, and so on. The great thing about these rules is that if you take the time to find accounts that are interested in your niche, the follow back rate can be 30% or more. So not only are you curating a list of people you want to talk to, you’re getting most of them to follow you back with no added work.
- So where can you find these accounts? You may first want to look into Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature as it gives you suggestions of brands and users based on the accounts you already follow. As popular businesses and big named users tend to appear first, you may also want to expand your scope and look at the Followers of accounts similar to yours while checking out their profile descriptions to see if they are interested in your niche. The best part is you can do this all from a mobile device and in a 5 minute session end up following 30, 50, or even 100 users. Do that every day for a few weeks and you’ll quickly see your account grow thanks to the follow back phenomenon. But there is one other category beginners may fall into when it comes to building followers on Twitter. What if you’re following 2,000 users and do not have 2,000 followers in return? You cannot continue growth based on the follow back phenomenon until you hit the magical number of 2,000 followers, so you will have to look elsewhere to get your profile to that 2,000 follower target. To achieve this, it is time to start building your community by putting yourself out there.
- Show of hands, who here uses Twitter only via the tweet button on your blog, logging into Twitter.com, or from your smartphone? [Response accordingly]. For those in the audience who do not use a 3rd party service to monitor your Twitter stream, you’re missing out as free services like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are great ways to pull in a number of different streams on a single page. These can include your mentions, direct messages, shares of links to your website, or hash-tags depending on your interests. When it comes to building a community, this service doesn’t help just by using it. Sure, you do have access to seeing numerous channels and saving a lot of time, but it doesn’t do anything to increase your interaction. You actually have to talk to people for that! The nice thing about these services is that the options for channels aren’t limited to the topics I mentioned a moment ago. You can also segment users into lists on Twitter and give them their own channel to monitor them much closer. Whether you’re interested in talking to brands, other bloggers, power users, or your most engaged fans, you can make a list for just about anything and see the included user’s tweets more frequently in a channel of their own. Doing this helps you target users for interaction and helps you get your name out there for future shares.
- Unfortunately, targeting your own followers is not always enough to push your account forward. Although you will likely find other users starting to RT your shares more frequently, you must do more. To reach accounts that are not already following your own you must start sending your tweets out to channels that users you’re not connected to use. Two of these outlets include adding hash-tags into your tweets and participating in Twitter chats. When it comes to sending out hash-tags, a few of the popular ones for travel include travel, lp for lonely planet, photography, RTW for round-the-world, rtw soon, rtw now, traveltuesday, and more. Twitter chats are also a great place to get your name out there and participate in conversations with other travelers, bloggers, and brands. A few of the more popular ones include the Responsible Tourism Twitter Chat on Wednesdays at 6pm GMT, Traveler’s Night In on Thursdays at 3:30PM EST, and Travel Talk on Twitter on Tuesdays at 9:30AM and PM GMT. Like in the earlier topics, throwing your favorites into channels on Hootsuite or Tweetdeck is a great way to start connecting with other users who participate as well! So if this is beginning to sound like a lot of work, you’re right. But luckily there are a few things you can do to limit the amount of time you spend on your profiles. One of which is automating.
- At the beginning of this section, I noted that users who engage in best practices tweet on average around 26 times per day and spread their tweets out throughout the day to reach users who may be online only at certain periods. As you can imagine, this gets very time consuming if you do it all by hand. The great thing I’m happy to share with you today is that not everyone does it that way! Programs exist where you can automate your Twitter profile to send out your best blog posts continually with no additional work on your part past the initial setup. Two of the most popular programs are Revive Old Post, a free Wordpress plug-in that lets you choose old posts to continually send out to Twitter at set intervals, or AutoTweeter, a paid desktop app that lets you craft a custom tweet list that sends out updates at random intervals whenever your computer is on. These services offer a lot of perks as you can continually send out your best and most relevant content to reach users who may have missed it the first, second, fifth, or tenth time around. Unlike the other items mentioned in this talk, there are unfortunately a few precautions you must take prior to automating your account. A few issues include: -the fact that Twitter does not like identical tweets going out once every 48 hours or so. -you may have to filter out blog posts which are no longer relevant or sponsored. -constantly sharing articles with hash-tags may lead to a buildup of your own shares in those streams (use them wisely). -and new users who do not have as many posts may not want to run automation as frequently to avoid sharing the same articles over and over or overwhelming your normal conversations. If you only have 25 articles worth sharing maybe you will only want to start with 1 tweet per day to not avoid sharing the same article more than once per month. The good news here is that you can start out slow and ramp up your shares per day as you publish more articles to fill up your database. Although automation does not help you with the conversational aspect of Twitter, which using services like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck help streamline, they do reduce the time you need to put in to promote yourself, which is a step in the right direction for all users regardless of skill level.
- So let’s recap what you can do on Twitter as a beginner moving forward: -To gain followers you can use targeted followings of those interested in your niche to achieve high follow back rates. -To get your name out there more you’ll have to engage in a high tweet frequency every single day (at a minimum of around 20 tweets) -Use streamlining services like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck to have conversations with followers and other users via hash-tags and weekly chats. -Employ free or cheap automation software to get people to your blog without constantly building the tweets every single day.
- Onwards to Facebook, the largest social network in the world that gives you the opportunity to share whatever you wish without restriction. This network doesn’t have the blink-and-you-miss-it setup of Twitter, but instead is algorithm based such that even those with thousands of followers may only reach a few dozen of their fans! How can you get this algorithm to pick up your account as a valuable one and get yourself seen? Let’s look at some best practices that leaders in our industry have used.
- Like Twitter, I only wanted to feature one resource for you to use to research best practices of other users in order to keep things simple and straightforward. There are many options out there, but my preferred choice is using Facebook’s “Pages to Watch” feature. This service is great because you can make a list of Facebook pages you like and get a behind the scenes report on how they operate. Data included on the page includes total number of page likes, weekly growth, number of posts per week, and a sum of the total engagement an account has received. This service also makes it easy for you to look at these pages directly and see what these users are posting and how it is working for them first hand.
- I went through many of the largest travel bloggers on Facebook like I did on Twitter to come up with some of the best practices they all use, and, like on Twitter, a common theme were present. The top travel bloggers on Facebook all: -Shared 1-2 links to their own blog posts per day -Shared 1-4 of their own images per day -Made 0-1 status updates per day -Shared 0-1 3rd party links or images per day -and, most important of all, they all maintained a predicable posting schedule. Now this is where looking at these numbers compared to yourself is important. Do you share an article from your blog every day? How about an image or status? Is your posting schedule predictable? These are all very important topics to keep in mind when growing your account that we’re going to look at in more detail on the next few slides. So let’s jump into it and first answer everybody’s favorite question: “How can I get more followers without paying for ads?”
- When it comes down to it on Facebook, targeting users to follow you back is just not as easy as it is on Twitter. There are; however, ways to get around that but you’ll have to put yourself out there into the community just like you do on Twitter. In this instance you can get your name out there for followers by switching to your blog’s Page (not your personal account) and commenting on other brand’s pages as your blog. This gets your name out there and gives an easy follow back mechanism for people to jump on your updates if they like what you’re saying. The image I chose for this slide is a great example of this, even though it was designed to be a comedy piece first. Say your page is Dumbledore and you want to get some of Gandolf’s followers to like you in return. By commenting as your page as Dumbledore and not your personal profile, you’ll start to get people to see what you’re about and leading some to click throughs to learn more. On the surface you may be doing this to interact with other blogs you like, but the more important goal in many cases is picking up other fans who may or may not be bloggers themselves. On a more practical note on how this works, I heard a really great story from another blogger just a few weeks ago whose sister created a Fan Page for her dog. Yeah, really. She joined a bunch of other dog pages, began commenting as her dog’s page, and within a week had over 1,000 followers without paying for a single ad or knowing the first thing about how Facebook works. Unfortunately I cannot guarantee those same kind of results for everyone here, since those users are a bit, well, odd, but it does illustrate the point on what can be done with the right style of participation. When engaging in this method, you need to keep in mind that you need to participate as a fan and not self-promote in any capacity, as it is painfully obvious when accounts do this and you will experience no community growth in return. Do it subtly while having a posting schedule in place to entice people who click over to stick around, and you’ll experience great reward.
- Getting users to click over to your page and Like you is only one half of the battle on Facebook. Getting them to stick around and interact is the second half. There are numerous issues users on Facebook have to deal with in getting others to see their updates. Ignoring the fact that Facebook’s algorithm seems to decrease everyone’s reach on their own with each passing update, there is the simple fact that most users do not know anything about how their fans use the service to begin with! A great feature to research this more is through the Page Insights feature on your fan page. If you want some of the most in-depth statistics about your updates and fans, many more than most beginners even need, head here before you do anything. Two of my favorite features of Page Insights are that they tell you when your fans are online by hour (illustrated in the image at the top) and also tell you what kind of posts get the most engagement both with advertising boosts and without. Couple these two pieces of data together and you can start to piece together a posting schedule that speaks to your fan’s interests straight away. How detailed does your post schedule need to be? Well, going off of the data I presented at the beginning of this section, you may be surprised to hear that the top bloggers on Facebook have a set schedule that they follow every single day. It isn’t that they share 1-2 links or 1-4 images, but that for whatever number they chose, they stick to it. That is 1 image per day, at roughly the same time, every single day. 2 links per day, at roughly the same time, every single day. For many users you can look at how they run their accounts and take a mental note of the time they post and like clockwork the same post type will be there the next day. How you do it will tie into your business goals and Page Insights the most, but scheduling your posts to a set timetable will give your fans a predictable experience that they can come to expect and, when most engaged, seek out what they missed from earlier updates. So now you may have new users coming to your page and Liking you, and are giving a predictable schedule for your fans to come to expect, what do you do to work Facebook’s algorithm over in your favor to increase your organic reach? You need to make sure that you put up some engaging content to get users liking, commenting, and sharing so they will see more updates in the future. Let’s take a look at a few options
- How about this image? Asking a question is a popular tactic people use on Facebook to get users engaged and participating. I really like this one that Amanda from A Dangerous Business did because it combines beautiful images with an overlayed question in addition to the text above it. It is appealing to the eyes and the images really drive you to your answer without having to think about it. In her case she had 64 image likes, 16 shares, 80 responses, and reached just about 50% of her followers organically without paying to boost the post. Although this reach is much lower than Jeremy’s from the previous slide, 50% is an impressive figure for anyone to achieve.
- I’m sure many of you have seen this image float around Facebook in the last few weeks. It went viral very fast and those who shared it on their pages first got huge gains because it is a relatable image to many travelers. A friend of mine, Jeremy from TravelFREAK, shared this image and had some of the most impressive statistics of all. From this one share he received over 400 Image likes, 1,200 Shares, 56 comments, and 100+ new page likes. As if this wasn’t impressive enough, his organic reach was well over 50 times more than the number of likes his page had in the first place. You can be certain that Facebook’s algorithm saw this boost in interaction and started to show his posts to those who engaged in this update in the coming days. These are just a few examples of what works when trying to craft updates to get users to engage, and other successful topics include personal updates, detailed stories, celebrating milestones that would get users to say “Congrats,” and more. The key in these updates is to not make them your primary content, but instead share them periodically to encourage your followers to comment. The more you get them to engage, the more likely it is they’ll see the updates you actually care about.
- Let’s look back on a few of the important takeaways we just covered on Facebook. They include: -The necessity to interact on 3rd party pages as your brand to increase recognition and gain followers. -The need to develop a posting schedule to give your users a consistent experience they can come to predict. -The importance of scheduling posts in advance to cover possible down times when you’re away. -…and the types of engaging content you may want to try to spark conversation to boost your page’s organic reach. Does everyone here have a few ideas they can try moving forward? I hope so!
- Now we’re going to shift focus to our final social media site discussed in this talk, the visual powerhouse that is Pinterest. When looking at this social network, a lot of similarities are present between it and Twitter. While Twitter is all focused on 140 characters of text flying by faster than you can follow, Pinterest is the image based response. Luckily for you Pinterest has a few unique nuances that can help you really jumpstart your brand that should not be overlooked. But before we get to those, lets go into an overview of the best practices travel bloggers have used to succeed.
- In the previous two social networks, I gave you ways where you can track your own performance and compare it to top users in travel or other blogging niches. Unfortunately on Pinterest you’re not so lucky. They simply do not make it easy for businesses to track data from 3rd party users. There have been hundreds of loose studies published around the web on the topic of best practices, and if you read as many as I have you’ll learn that most of them are too focused for brands, making sales, or other topics that a beginner travel blogger may not find worthwhile. But after looking at so many of them, and researching top Pinterest users myself, a few common trends have stuck out that we can call “best practices” for the purpose of this presentation.
- Top travel bloggers on Pinterest, like the other social media profiles, have a few common activities: -They have anywhere from 15-40 unique boards in the theme of travel. -They repin anywhere from 10-50 images or more per day -They limit their own shares such that most of their pins are from other users -They have a database built of at least 2,000 pins. -They pin multiple times per day to not overload their shares to any board at any given time. -and finally, they utilize group boards to reach new followers. Are you starting to see a bit of a trend here when compared to the best practices from Twitter? You should. Let’s go to everyone’s favorite question first and dive into how you can use group boards to reach new followers.
- For those who may not be the most familiar with Pinterest, group boards exist to let other users pin images into a popular board topic to reach more users and get new shares. For a beginner account that may only have a few dozen or few hundred followers, this is the ideal platform to use to jumpstart your account as popular group boards could have thousands or tens of thousands of fans you can access without any extra work on your part. It is really a great setup that is hard to say no to when given the option. So how does a new pinner go about finding group boards? You can look at big named users directly and see which group boards they run or are a part of, naturally, but there are other ways to do this. One of my favorite websites for this topic is pingroupie.com as it lets you search any title or description term and will come up with a long list of group boards that you can sort by things like number of followers, recent repin count, recent like count, number of pins, and more. This site does not take into account whether the group boards are accepting new members, and many do close off applications after they reach a large number of members, but it is a good place to start. When you do get on a group board you can then take a look at the type of images that do well, upload your own matching pins, and enjoy being seen from a large community right off the bat. Now that you are reaching new users, it is time to focus on your profile to build a database of pins people actually want to explore.
- Many studies have been performed to look into the top performing topics on Pinterest, and unfortunately travel ranges anywhere from 9-15 in most of these studies. My favorite study is one published from the University of Minnesota as it takes a scientific approach to the topic and researched millions of pins throughout the duration of their study. What did they find? Travel was the 15th more popular, just under Holidays and Education. Yep, we really don’t do so well as a whole! Rather than considering this as a negative, you should look at it with a positive spin because there are 14 categories that do better than travel in which you can combine topics to make unique boards to attract users. There should be no surprise why international food photos do so well on Pinterest, because it is crossing over over to the most popular category. Travel inspired home décor branches over into the #3 category. Destination weddings hit #6. The list goes on and on for the possible combinations you can come up with for unique boards types to stand out and attract fans. Now that you may have ideas for some engaging boards, you need to consider the type of pins that will perform the best when filling out your database.
- Let’s look back at the image I shared at the beginning of this section. This is a cross-section of some pins that I had recently shared on my account. I’m sure your eyes are already being drawn to a few, so let’s highlight the ones that performed the best. The image on the left was one of the most popular and received over 600 shares in just a few days. It is not surprising as it is a beautifully composed photo, likely had some touching up on photoshop, and is very appealing to the eyes. The beach image also received over 300 shares for similar reasons. Unfortunately, neither of these were my own and were ones that popped up on my homepage during a pinnning sesión. Now compare those to the images I shared from my own page. These images worked great in my blog posts to illustrate the theme of my article, but on Pinterest none of them got picked up for shares. When you compare them side by side to the other images, you can see why they were passed over for others that were much more appealing, ****and there are some common trends as to what performs the best.
- Let’s take a look at these three images. These popped up in my feed when I was working on this presentation and my eyes were drawn over as they were all beautiful images. Which one would you pin? Is it the vertical one? If it is, your eyes got attracted to it for a reason. Tall images take up more space in the Pinterest feed and get more view time than ones that are in landscape format. What else do we see? The description on this pin is personal and written to target the viewer, the colors stand out much more than the subdued blues in the lower left photo, and the image itself screams “you need to be here!” All of these traits are designed to get your attention, keep it, and as a result will benefit from more repins.
- How about with these? Another three images that were found in my feed on a random scroll. Like the last share the image on the left stands out because it is tall and has a personal description, but this one also overlays a quote that is relevant to the image to take up some space that may otherwise not be as eyecatching. This makes it unfortunate for that photo of the Vietnamese person walking down the street because it would have otherwise received more attention from us if it wasn’t next to such a more stunning photo. I could go on with examples like these, because there are many trends for popular pins you can adopt when editing your own images. To list a few, they are: -Taller and narrower images (2:3 to 4:5) -Limited points of focus -Overlay quotes or inspirational phrases -Increase brightness and fix flaws in Photoshop or other editing software -Instagram-like filters from PicMonkey give an added pop When all else fails, remember that your personal pins are competing for attention with the high quality images you repin, and if you want your own to stand out they have to be at this level or else they will get lost in the shuffle.
- Now that we’ve finished our discussion of Pinterest, let’s recap what you can do going forward. -You can join group boards to boost your following and get your shares out to thousands of users right away. -You must curate a database of 1,000-4,000 high quality pins on unique boards to entice users to follow and stick around. -You must pin multiple times per day to build up your shares and not overwhelm your followers. -and finally, you must touch up and customize your own images to make sure they stand out against the database you have built.
- Now that we’re coming towards the end of my presentation, there is one key takeaway I want everyone to leave here that is independent of platform. It is simply this: Being seen is the hardest part. Many beginners are often discouraged by social media because it seems like nothing is ever happening. You may gain some followers here or there, but at the end of the day you see no interaction, no return in pageviews, and are given no hint that your followers are actually seeing what you’re up to. Many of the tips featured within this session were designed to get your users seeing your account and engaging, and being seen in any capacity, good or bad, can be categorized as a win. Although most of the feedback you will receive going forward will be positive, it is important to realize that not all negative feedback can be bad, either. If you are automating your Twitter account and are receiving tons of shares, followers, and engagement but have one random user who has never engaged before give a complaint, you may not want to worry about it. But if you are sharing too much on Twitter and your biggest fan tells you that you’re being overwhelming, perhaps it is time to reconsider. This is one of the key reasons why some best practices may not be for everyone, but the key is that you have ideas on where to go from here, and give them a try for your brand’s goals moving forward in the future.
- For the last few slides of this session, I wanted to share a few resources that did not make its way into the presentation that are too important not to mention. First, I wanted to share a few Facebook groups that new bloggers should be aware of when it comes to keeping up with best practices in social media. As the social media platforms featured in this talk can change the rules tomorrow and make most the tips redundant, the world of social media is never a static experience. Joining groups like Travel Bloggers, We Travel We Blog, or the numerous others that are out there will help keep you in the loop of what is going on in social media and tips that you may want to give a try yourself. As you are already being pro-active about your blogging by attending TBEX, join some of these groups to keep that momentum as you go forward.
- Finally, I know that this presentation covered a lot of topics, ideas, and resources in a relatively fast pace. I had a lot to squeeze in to this hour long session but still couldn’t touch on everything I would have liked. So I just wanted to take the last few moments to recap some of the items featured in this talk and outline a few more 3rd party services you may want to consider using when working on your social media. For Twitter we talked about Twitonomy, a great researching tool where you can see how yours and other user’s accounts are being run. There is Hootsuite and Tweetdeck whose free services allow you to create a dashboard full of many unique streams that you can track based on your interests. AutoTweeter and Revive Old Post are two great options for automating that require minimal setup time and can be let to run with very little input on your part. A new one I did not get to mention in this presentation was ManageFlitter, a great tool that lets you get an in-depth look at users who may be spam accounts, have not posted in a while, or haven’t tweeted at all and remove them in a click. The free account lets you remove up to 100 accounts per day, and is not a bad option to look at periodically to get rid of accounts that may no longer be active. TweetReach is another one I couldn’t fit into my first few slides, and is also a great thing to try. This one is pretty simple and tells you how many accounts you reached in your last 50 tweets- basic, but powerful. For Facebook we talked about using Facebook’s own internal tools on Pages to Watch and Page Insights. These let you look at other accounts, see how their doing, and have an in-depth report of your own fan’s behavior and interests. On Pinterest we talked about PinGroupe, a simple website that lists group boards that you can use to find possible boards to join and start promoting your pins to thousands of users. We also talked briefly about PicMonkey, a photo editing software that can be used to edit your images from boring and common to pinnable. A new one worth mentioning here is Ahalogy, a unique tool that lets you schedule your pin posts in advance and tries to optimize the shares to when your fans are online and engaging the most. There are many services out there like this one, but I selected this one just to give an example. Finally, there are a few general resources you can use to get started on your social media. The first is simply using the social media apps on your phone to take the whole social media experience mobile. My personal favorite techniques here are Pinning using the Pinterest app, and finding users to follow on Twitter via a browser search of other Twitter’s followers. There are also a few other great services like Buffer, where you can create a posting schedule and send out updates to multiple networks at set intervals, and IFTTT which literally translates to If this then that, and is a pretty unique tool that you can create “recipes” to connect and update social networks in tandem with each other. I could probably go on with even more, but I think this list is a pretty good cross-section to get you started! Now that we have about 10 minutes left, I’d like thank everyone for coming and want to open the floor up to questions you may have about running your social media.