pins

The bird and the board: when to sing it and when to pin it

Between maintaining a page on Facebook, running PPC ads, blogging, and always keeping a focus on website design and SEO, we find clients often end up with  lots of channels  to manage and not enough resources to really grow their brand further on Twitter and Pinterest.

Sure you might be on Twitter, as you should be (and maybe you’re also on Pinterest) but are you engaging your audience? And is your participation on these channels in line with the rest of your online marketing strategy? We’ll look at how you can make these two channels work for your brand.

The easiest way to optimize your content is to understand the basic user demographics of these channels. Pinterest has long been known as having a predominately female user base — upwards of 80% female. Twitter, on the other hand, has a nice balance of males and females. Understand how this can benefit you by considering exactly who you’re trying to reach and knowing where to deliver the right messages. Twitter’s appeal is largely universal — its content is generally timely and easy to digest, share and interact with. Pinterest has a much smaller user base and may lack some of these other aspects, but can make up for it with the kind of rich visual representation that is so naturally engaging for users.

More specifically: If your brand is involved with products like clothing, jewellery, accessories or food, Pinterest should make your eyes light up. Especially that last one — food. Companies that consider their customers to be foodies need to take advantage of Pinterest — statistics suggest that posts related to food in one way or another (recipes, dining etc.) make up two-thirds of Pinterest content.

Food Network Pinterest

So what works best for each? We’re always redefining what it means exactly to write engaging tweets, but the basic formula remains the same. Your Twitter feed should read like a natural conversation and encourage your followers to interact with your content because it is funny, helpful, current etc. Avoid tweets that read like traditional PPC ads, even if you are promoting them through Twitter as such.

Pinterest on the other hand offers a number of unique advantages. The visual nature means that you can run promotions with rich content, and have your offers be liked, pined and repined. You can also run conditional offers, such as a Pinterest-exclusive discount which only becomes available once a post has been repined a certain number of times (this is essentially guaranteed engagement for a promotion). Pinterest also forces you to see what else is out there in your industry as you build your boards and gain followers.

I hope this is helpful to anyone starting out or expanding their social channels. Please do get in touch if you have any questions about these channels or any other dimensions of growing your brand through social media.