Beyond the Big 35 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest

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Beyond the Big 3:5 Killer Strategies to DominateLinkedIn and Pinterest

JUNE 2012

STRATEGIESKILLER

LEAD GEN

SOCIAL REACH INFLUENCERS

ENGAGEMENT METRICS

FOLLOW UP

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Introduction

Strategy One: Increase Social Reach

Strategy Two: Increase Content Engagement

Strategy Three: Identify and Engage Influencers

Conclusion

Additional Resources

About Awareness Inc.

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Strategy Four: Increase Lead Generation 12

Strategy Five: Apply Analytics to Know What Works 15

Beyond the Big 35 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest

Beyond the Big 35 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest

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LinkedIn and Pinterest have joined the top social media ranks, alongside Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (the Big 3), as effective marketing tools offering brands creative opportunities to connect with customers and prospects. We’ve previously covered 5 strategies for success on the Big 3. We can also apply these same strategies to LinkedIn and Pinterest.

LinkedIn boasts 147 million users and Pinterest recently hit 10 million unique active users, as reported in January 2012. Brands that effectively use LinkedIn and Pinterest have experienced higher referral traffic, better quality leads, and ultimately, increased sales. How does a brand effectively use these networks for business traction? In this paper, we share killer strategies that brands can use to increase their social presence, create quality engagement through content, and measure their marketing successes on LinkedIn and Pinterest.

We’ll bring each strategy to life using real-world examples of brands successfully executing each. Specific tips and important tactics for each strategy will be shared to shape your company’s success with these platforms.

INTRODUCTION

Increase social reach on each platform

Boost fan engagement with quality content

Engage influencers, both internal and external to a brand

Increase lead generation

Analyze efforts and adapt your social marketing approaches based on meaningful insights gained from social media analytics

In Beyond the Big 3: Five Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest, we will cover how to use these platforms to:

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147MILLION USERS

TENMILLIONACTIVEUSERS IN LESS THANONE YEAR!

Beyond the Big 35 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest

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As explained in Five Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, social reach is all about expanding how many customers your brand can tap into across social platforms. Increase social reach by finding your ideal prospective targets and making an impact through connections and interactions with them. Pinterest and LinkedIn hold untapped potential customers that are just waiting for your brand to reach out.

On Pinterest, users can choose to follow other’s specific, relevant, and compelling pinboards, or they can follow your main profile to see all of your updates. Your brand’s goal on Pinterest is to recruit customers and prospects to follow your brand’s profile, rather than specific pinboards.

Increasing Social Reach on Pinterest

Strategy One: Increase Social Reach

Universal Tips for Growing Social Reach:Complete your profiles & update them regularly

Use target keywords (developed in SEO) in your profiles and posts

Promote your profiles via non-social channels, such as your websites, emails, and press releases

Add sharing buttons and cross-promote your profiles - Encourage people to share your content

Grow your network and make friends in your industry – Identify influencers and promote their content when applicable

Be human! When people reach out to you, interact with them

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A small retail company, the Daily Grommet, built a following and called on customers to create pins and repin items from their website that were on the users’ wish lists. To keep track of the campaign, the brand encouraged users to include the phrase “I’ve pinned it to win it from @DailyGrommet.” The phrase was shown to customers’ followers, showed where the pinned items originated, and encouraged the new Pinterest users to check out the Daily Grommet’s Pinterest profile.

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Strategy One: Increase Social Reach

Create pinboards and populate the boards with your own pins and by repinning from other users. • Create topic-specific boards that resonate with your target audience to encourage following of your brand’s profile. Focus board topics on the lifestyle, history, causes, and interests related to your customers. • When creating boards, use keywords developed for SEO to refine your boards and integrate your Pinterest brand profile with your marketing initiatives.

Publicize your Pinterest account on all other social platforms.

Embed Pinterest buttons or widgets on your company website.

Register your profile in Pinterest directories to grow your followership: • WePin.org is a directory based on specific interests. • Repinly lists stats about Pinterest users and the most popular pinners / boards based on topic.

Consider connecting your Pinterest account with your brand’s Twitter profile to effectively use hashtags. Note: Carefully consider connecting with Facebook - the hashtags on Pinterest are only appropriate for Twitter and may clutter your Facebook timeline.

Once you’ve built a following, encourage users to create their own pins and repin items from your boards and your website. This will ensure that your boards are shared with your followers’ followers, increasing your brand reach on the platform.

Post consistently to retain and grow your social reach.

Tips to Grow Social Reach on Pinterest:

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Increasing Social Reach on Pinterest [cont.]

Beyond the Big 35 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest

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Strategy One: Increase Social Reach

TIMELINE

Civic Ventures, a nonprofit think tank on boomers, work and social purpose, started a LinkedIn group, “Encore Careers,” that gives 50+ year-old adults a place to discuss issues of concern to them in a safe and spam-free environment. In a recent Mashable article, Dave Kerpen, the CEO of Likeable Media, said the small non-profit has managed to attract over 1,500 people to the group in a short period of time.

Increasing Social Reach on LinkedInGrowing your social reach on LinkedIn requires a company group effort using a combination of your company page, groups, and individual employee profiles. A successful corporate LinkedIn presence uses all three, with groups and the company page carrying most of the weight.

Tips to Grow Social Reach on LinkedIn:Embed the “Follow Company” and “Recommend Company” buttons for your LinkedIn company page on your brand’s homepage. Encourage your employees to promote the company page and groups within their individual profiles. Employees should create quality introductions for your brand in order to find prospects and help build a following on your page.

Start a LinkedIn group, if appropriate, focused on your target audience. Cultivate stimulating discussions with group members, enticing them to follow your company page. Position your company as an expert in your industry through holding group question-and-answer sessions.

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Strategy Two: Increase Content Engagement

Visual content tools such as photo editing applications, screen grabbing tools, and visual quote tools can push your pins from boring and elementary to visually stunning. Here are some tools to help you create and manage pins:

Instagram: Easily edit and transform photos taken on your mobile device.

Pinstamatic: Pin an entire website, sticky notes, Spotify tracks, and calendar dates.

Snapito: Screengrabs for creating content.

Share As Image: Transform text to a visual quote to use as a pin.

Url2Pin.it: Pin an entire website screenshot.

Pinerly: A dashboard for scheduling pins, getting stats, and engaging with other users.

Pinterest Tools

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As with any social channel, content reigns as one of the most critical components of a successful social marketing strategy. Content for Pinterest and LinkedIn comes in different shapes and forms. Content for Pinterest is recommended to “avoid self-promotion” (see Pinterest’s terms and conditions), while content on LinkedIn focuses heavily on company and product updates. Both social channels convey a sense of company culture to customers and prospects.

Pinterest Content TipsShowcase your best visual assets – photos, white paper covers, product packaging, products in actions, etc.

Use hashtags in your pin descriptions to effectively integrate the posts with Twitter. Create a dedicated hashtag for fan-generated pin contests and encourage users to actively participate in your brand’s boards by creating a public pinboard.

Involve your customers in board-making to encourage ownership of your brand.

Interact with other users by commenting on pins, following their profiles and pinboards, and repinning content related to your brand or a specific product. Similar to other social platforms, you must promote other users in order to grow a quality following of your own.

Avoid self-promotion overload by adding pins that showcase your brand’s lifestyle, company culture, history, and personality. Show employees, the company headquarters, manufacturing, and development of products.

Aim to become the top pinboard on one or a few topics, encouraging users to promote your specialized, compelling pins.

Engaging Fans on Pinterest

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Engaging Fans on Pinterest [cont.]

Strategy Two: Engage Fans Through Effective Content

If you’re in need of content ideas, show executive headshots, images from blog articles, simple data charts from Excel, eBook covers, and customer photos. Infographics do extremely well on Pinterest; post them often to help your board become popular for a category.

Create pins with videos produced by your brand. On Pinterest, videos are a separate category on the homepage, so use them as another way to increase your following and grow your social reach. For example, post videos of company speakers at czonerences and events. Be sure to include a clear call-to-action in your brand’s videos.

Whole Foods stands out as a brand with compelling Pinterest content. The brand has used its pinboards to become a thought leader for recipes, reused and recycled items, and green living. The brand understands their customers’ passions, and they amp that up to catch their attention. Their board ‘Whole Planet Foundation’ showcases the international work of the brand’s foundation and some of the products associated with this cause.1

Infographics do extremely wellon Pinterest

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On the overview page, use a video and different appropriate profile modules to showcase your company.

Use the “news module” to show all press mentions - another credibility builder.

Integrate your RSS feed and Twitter stream on the overview page to easily populate and update your profile. (If your Twitter profile is not connected to your overview page, send a post to LinkedIn by including the hashtag #in when tweeting.)

If appropriate for your brand, add the headquarter location and stock prices to the overview page, too.

Updates from your groups and company page should combine blog posts, company and industry updates, testimonials, press coverage, and content from other companies. Showcase stats and data, and be sure to use images and videos in status updates. A great aspect of LinkedIn is the ability to target your status updates based on your audience. Targeted status updates allow company page administrators to only send posts only to a specific audience that they wish to target and can be narrowed by company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, and internal employees. Refine your audience to make your posts relevant to specific users.

For example, LinkedIn’s very own overview page includes modules for affiliations, company information, location, news, stock prices, and blog posts.

LinkedIn Content Tips1

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Strategy Two: Engage Fans Through Effective Content

Engaging Fans on LinkedIn

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Compared to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, there are fewer available tools that help brands identify influencers on Pinterest and LinkedIn (for tips on how to identify and engage influencers on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, download Five Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). However, many of the same principles apply for influencer engagement, such as the importance of relationship building and creating compelling outreach and campaigns built specifically for them.

Finding and Engaging PinfluencersTo identify influencers on Pinterest, browse relevant topics for top pinners with the most followers and engagement. Use tools, such as PinReach and PinPuff, which rank users by their impact and engagement. These tools also measure the reach and virality of individual pins and pinners. PinPuff assigns a “pinfluence” score for pinners and assesses the monetary value of their pins.

Once you have identified your pinfluential users, study their boards for insights. A user’s pinboard and the comments on it are a quick and easy way to get to know a person’s lifestyle, interests, and personality. Start and develop a relationship with your top pinners, offering them custom packages based on their pinterests. Engage influencers by creating a user-generated board shared only with them. This promotes their pins and boards, too, as the shared pins will show up on both profiles.

Honda and Kotex ran excellent pinfluencer campaigns. Honda held a “Pintermission” where the company gave top pinners the items that they pinned.

Kotex combed thousands of pinboards in search of the top 50 women on Pinterest, based on the number of engaged followers and the most popular pins. Kotex studied the boards to get to know the women and their interests. Then, they created and sent custom gift boxes to each woman based on her preferences.

Consider the importance of relationship building and create

compelling outreach and campaigns built specifically for them.

Strategy Three: Identify and Engage Influencers

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Strategy Three: Identify and Engage Influencers

Finding and Engaging LinkedIn InfluencersTo identify influencers on LinkedIn, run targeted searches based on industry, position, and company. Pinpoint which types of users are most important to connect with by using the demographic targeting features embedded in LinkedIn, allowing you to build a highly customized influencer list for your brand. Scour groups to identify influencers who are vocal in group discussions.

Engage with influencers by creating an invite-only group and holding expert discussions around industry news, issues, and trends.

Depending on your audience, LinkedIn can be the perfect location for an influencer campaign. For example, American Express (AmEx) wanted to promote their new Membership Rewards® for their flagship corporate card to a difficult-to-reach audience: CFOs and C-suite leaders of small and mid-sized businesses. In this campaign, AmEx combined display ads, Home Page Takeovers, and cost per lead campaigns all focused around a white paper download. Using LinkedIn influencer targeting and lead generation methods, AmEx was able to reach this audience through an award-winning campaign.

The most effective way to find influencers on LinkedIn is by using the new Skills and Expertise section. For example, if you are looking to connect with the top social media experts, you can run a targeted search on the platform.

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Strategy Four: Increase Lead Generation

Effective lead generation is quite different on Pinterest and LinkedIn. Because of Pinterest’s reputation as a referral traffic booster, your goal is to bring your Pinterest followers back to your website. With LinkedIn, brands can instead keep their followers on the platform and direct them to their “Products and Services” tab located on the company’s LinkedIn profile pages.

Increase follower interest in your products on Pinterest by creating catalogs of pinboards and pins based on product or thought leadership collections. For retail brands, add the prices to attract quality leads to your website who are interested in your product at its specific price point. Be careful not to only pin catalogs, though, because users will start to tune you out. Give your followers a mix of lifestyle pins and catalog or product pins. For technology companies, use Pinterest to showcase your educational resources – here’s how we have tackled that at Awareness:

Lead Generation Tips for Pinterest

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Strategy Four: Increase Lead Generation

Lead Generation Tips for Pinterest [cont]: Ideeli, a retail daily deal site, mixes product images from their site with softer lifestyle images from their blog to drive traffic and increase sales. As reported by our friends at Mindjumpers, the site’s web traffic increased by 446% and sales increased five-fold.

Always include links back to your site for the image location in the pin description to drive more traffic from the pins you create. If there isn’t a specific page for the image location, choose the product page or location on your site that is most relevant to the pin. Add the Pin-it button to your homepage and each product page on your site to make it easy for users to engage with your brand.

Lead Generation Tips for LinkedIn

Customize your products tab to list your top products and services, showcasing your best or featured products in the “Product and Service Spotlight.” The “Spotlight” section of the company page features three scrolling banner images.

Encourage key customers and influencers to give feedback through brand and product recommendations. Embed the “Recommend on LinkedIn” widget on your brand’s homepage to encourage users to both follow your company page and recommend your brand. Encourage recommendations for your brand and for specific products. Recommendations build third-party credibility, helping to move your prospective buyers down the sales funnel.

Integrate a “shop now” feature on your company page to make it easy for customers to click through product listings right to your site.

According to a marketing study conducted by HubSpot, LinkedIn is viewed as the most effective social media channel for lead generation, ranking 277% more effective than other platforms. Marketers cited the user-friendly “Products and Services” tab and customer-generated recommendations on company pages as key reasons for its effectiveness.

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Marketers consider

LinkedIn 277%

more effectivein generating leads than other platforms!

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Strategy Four: Increase Lead Generation

For an example of a great products tab, check out Dell’s company page. Dell currently lists over 40 products with over 300 customer recommendations. The “Product and Service Spotlight” has compelling graphics and a mix of the Dell’s leading products and services. When a user drills down into a specific product, it’s easy to find the “visit our website” link to learn more or make a purchase.

Consider LinkedIn ads for sending targeted prospects to your site or to your Facebook page for cross-platform promotion.

Create effective ads with a clear, attractive message

Include images and a strong call-to-action

Refresh your ads at least once a month to keep your click-through rates high

Create multiple ads for your campaigns to test most effective copy and images

Target your ads based on geography, industry, job function, job title, and/or within the LinkedIn groups

Set an appropriate daily budget and adjust your bids daily or weekly

More tips can be found here: Best Practices for Advertising on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Ad Creation Best Practices

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Strategy Five: Tie Social Activity to Web Analytics

Study Google Analytics referral traffic, conversions, and visitor demographics to understand your customers and learn what makes them returning visitors.

Pinterest Analytics TipsWhile Pinterest analytics are still in development, there are some tools to test and tactics to track referral traffic and leads. Measure overall profile metrics and those of individual pins for the most insights.

Repinly: A directory that provides statistics and insights about pins and profiles. Also used for industry tracking, competitive analysis, and identifying influencers, as it helps find the top pinners and boards.

Pintics: Manage and optimize traffic generated from pins, boards, and your overall account. It shows traffic generated, sales, and activity for pins by integrating data with Google Analytics.

Curalate: Measure, monitor, and grow the social presence of your brand on Pinterest. The tool finds all conversations about your brand and shows them in one place.

PinReach & PinPuff: Best used for influencer identification. Also used to monitor your own influence and engagement levels.

Built-in LinkedIn analytics include impressions and engagement. LinkedIn defines impressions as the number of times an update has been viewed organically, and engagement as the percentage of times that members clicked, liked, commented, or shared the update organically. Both of these metrics can be viewed in LinkedIn insights approximately 24 hours after posting.

Additionally, the analytics tab on the company page shows the industry, company, and position of the visitors to the LinkedIn profile. It also tracks visitors broken down by tabs, ads, and by whether or not they reached out to the company’s employees.

LinkedIn Analytics Tips

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The analytics tab on the company page shows the industry, company, and position of the visitors to the LinkedIn profile

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With the continuous emergence of new social platforms and tools, it’s important to utilize those that fit your brand and your target audience. For example, if your company is more focused on business-to-business, then LinkedIn is probably among the top options. For business-to-consumer brands, Pinterest can be the ideal engagement platform. Knowing which tools are appropriate for your brand will ultimately drive better results. To learn more about the top three social networks for business, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, check out “Five Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.”

Conclusion

Additional ResourcesFive Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Even with the increasing number of social networks, most experts still recognize that successful social marketing revolves around the Big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

How to Audit Your Social Marketing EffortsLearn how to evaluate the effectiveness of your current social marketing strategy. Identify new ways to improve the return on your social marketing investment.

Social Engagement: How to Crack the Code of Social InteractionEngagement is the enduring effect of content to motivate an audience to do something; motivate your audience with data proven best practices.

Social Commerce Lessons: The 6 Social Principles that Increase SalesLearn more about content strategies and driving sales.

Actionable Social AnalyticsA detailed guide on how to approach your social analytics process.

2102 Social Media and New Media PredictionsThis free e-book is full of insights on Big Data and other trending topics in social media. Hear from 32social media experts, including David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis, and Erik Qualman.

The Social Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social MarketingFor a detailed discussion on how to effectively measure your social marketing initiatives, download our free e-book.

The State of Social Media Marketing: Top Areas For Social Marketing Investment and Biggest Social Marketing Challenges in 2012Learn how leaders allocate resources, discover the top social platforms and social media management tools they use, social marketing investment priorities, and the practices com¬panies will adopt in 2012.

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Awareness Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise-class, on-demand social marketing management software (SMMS) for marketers to publish and manage social content, engage with their audience and measure the effectiveness of their social media activities across multiple social media channels. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is built upon Awareness’ expertise with some of the world’s leading brands and marketing agencies including MLB, Sony Pictures, Comcast, Likeable Media, Associated Press, Cox Communications, Mindjumpers and American Cancer Society.

The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is built to address the challenges marketers face managing multiple social channels. The Social Marketing Hub is the first enterprise-class application for serious marketers who want to plan, implement and measure meaningful social media strategies across the organization.

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