Social Media New Year’s Resolutions [Infographic]

With the New Year come the New Year’s Resolutions. Maybe yours is going to the gym, learning a new language or even just relaxing more. Whatever your personal resolutions might be, there’s also a good chance that your social media accounts could use a new start in the New Year, too. That’s why we put together this list of 10 social media resolutions to keep your brand on track.

1. Use More Visuals

Guess what? They visual age of marketing isn’t going anywhere. With Pinterest’s valuation at $5 billion, Instagram’s at $35 billion and Tumblr’s $1.1 billion acquisition, these visual sharing platforms proved themselves to be business giants. With visual platforms being a multi-billion dollar industry, it’s incredibly important for your business to be making a show of itself with visual, sharable content.

If your business is less-than visually inclined, never fear. There are many simple image creator apps, like Canva and Share As Image with Tailwind integration, that can make anyone into a graphic designer.

2. Create Content

Like visual marketing, content marketing is here to stay. By creating sharable blogs, infographics, white papers, webinars, etc. you’re not just pushing your product in people faces – you’re teaching them about your industry and how your company can help. Plus, content marketing provides the opportunity to use different keywords to help boost your site’s SEO power.

3. Engage Users

Talk to your fans! Now, this might sound simple, but you would be amazed at how few businesses actually do it. By building a relationship with your users on social media, you’re building a lasting customer. They’ll see you as a confidant rather than a hollow business. It can be as simple as thanking a fan for sharing your content, or sending them a congratulatory tweet on their new engagement. Whatever it is, get your fans talking.

4. Find Your Perfect Timing

Similarly to a tree falling in an empty forest, a social media post going out when no one is online might as well not exist. Catching users when they’re online will increase the chance of your messages being seen. Social media scheduling makes it super simple to automatically post at the right times. Even if you’re not sure when the perfect time is, apps like Tailwind and HootSuite will figure that out for you.

5. Test Using Social Advertisements

Social media allows for inexpensive advertising tests. Try targeting a new audience, or tweaking your copy, or even try a whole new advertising network, like Pinterest’s. Although there is still a waitlist to try their new advertising product, the consumer-driven nature of Pinterest will pack a serious punch for paid media in 2015.

6. Make Your Posts Move

Instagram videos, autoplay Facebook videos and the popularity of hilarious .gif’s have proven the power of motion pictures in social media. Whether you’re making explainer videos or just pinning amazing cat .gif’s, it’s time to get your brand moving.

7. Use Hashtags Right

Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and now even Facebook all support the use of hashtags. While they can be a great way to find information and people with similar interests, or even to rally behind social movements, you must understand how to use hashtags correctly. Most importantly: #don’t #use #them #excessively.

8. Optimize Posts for Different Platforms

Not all social media is created equal. What works on Facebook won’t necessarily work on Pinterest. Each platform has different requirements for image size and description length, as well as different styles of posts that will work best. Sprout Social’s “Always Up To Date” Social Media Image Size Guide can help set you straight.

9. Post Less About Yourself

Sure, someone will follow you on social media because they’re interested in your brand. However, they do not want to see tons of posts boasting about how wonderful you are – they already know that! Instead of constantly posting about yourself, try only using 20% of your posts to talk about yourself and the other 80% to talk about things your audience would be interested in. Fans will also be more likely to share useful or interesting information on their social pages, letting your name go further.

10. Master Mobile Marketing

Whether your loyal to Apple, or a fan of Android, it’s safe to say that most American’s are carrying around a computer in their pocket. In fact, mobile usage surpassed PC usage for the first time in 2014. Because the likelihood of someone hitting your site from a mobile device, rather than on a PC, it’s more important than ever to have a responsive website. If your site’s hard to navigate on a phone, you could be loosing sales.

What other social media resolutions are you making in 2015? Let us know in the comments!

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Pinterest Interests: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you need an easy way to find new content to pin?

Would you like to see pins from people other than those you follow?

Finding good content to repin has always been crucial for Pinterest success. The solution is to follow interests on Pinterest.

In this article I’ll explain how to find and use Pinterest interests to improve visibility and engagement.

Why Explore Interests?

One drawback for many businesses on Pinterest is that there are only 32 specific and 6 broad categories available to search for pins.

Businesses whose products or services don’t neatly fit into one of these categories have to do additional searching on Pinterest to find relevant pins to share with their followers and new boards to follow.

The answer is to follow interests, and the pins come to you.

Interests are collections of pins about a specific niche topic from a bunch of people who aren’t necessarily following each other. Interests can be followed just like boards and accounts, and once you follow an interest, you begin to see pins related to that specific topic in your own feed.

#1: Find and Follow Interests

The option to Explore interests used to be included in the menu by the search bar, but is now gone. Here’s how you can locate interests today.

Explore Interests on a Desktop

At the time of writing this article, it’s not possible to search for Pinterest interests on your computer. The only way to discover interests is to find someone who’s already following them. To do that, go to any Pinterest account. Under their profile information (toward the right), locate and click the Following number.

When you click Following, a new page will appear. If the profile is following any interests, you will see them here. If not, the page will be blank. From this page you will also be able to see the boards and the accounts that user is following by clicking the tabs.

After you find an account that’s following interests, click one of them and a new screen will appear. Here you will see hundreds of pins related to that interest: some pins will be from accounts you follow, others will be from profiles you don’t follow. You’ll also see how many followers that interest has, as well as the profile images of eight accounts that follow that interest.

Below you can see some of the interests Social Media Examiner follows on Pinterest. Notice that they are much more specific than the Pinterest categories and are much more relevant to a social media–based business.

When you find an interest board you’d like to follow, just click on the Follow button underneath the title. Now you’ll see pins from this interest in your Pinterest feed.

To help you find even more interests to follow, Pinterest recommends seven others related to the current interest topic.

As previously mentioned, it’s not possible to search for interests on the desktop version of Pinterest. You need to find pinners in your field who already follow interests. To get you started, here are interests followed by Social Media Examiner(as previously mentioned), Neal Schaffer and Tailwind.

Explore Interests on Mobile

The recently updated iOS Pinterest mobile app added a way to search for interests, but you have to know where to look.

Both Android and iOS interests searches start similarly to the desktop process. First,find a pinner. Next, check their followers, and if they explore interests, look around. (Android users, select About then Following to get to Interests.)

While Android users are limited to finding interests through trial and error, iOS users can do a proper search once they locate any pinner who follows at least one interest.

If you’re on iOS and don’t find an interest you like under a pinner’s profile, just select the plus sign to do a search.

Follow the interest you like, and those pins will appear in your feed.

#2: Create a New Interest

The ability to create your own interests, especially at this early stage in the functionality, is particularly helpful for people in niche industries.

If you search for an interest using your iOS app and it doesn’t yet exist, here’s how you can create it with the push of a button!

Once you create an interest, it will populate with pins related to the keyword or phraseyou use in the title or description.

Uses for Interests

Not many people are aware of interests, which gives businesses exploring this tactic an advantage.

While pins in the feed from interest groups are a great additional source of repinnable content, there are many other benefits to incorporating interests into your Pinterest marketing:

• Increase visibility. If you use the proper keywords in your pins’ descriptions, they could become part of multiple interest groups. Your content will be seen by more users who are likely to follow you.
• Discover new people to follow. The profile images shown on an interest page constantly change. Click on, research and follow other interest followers to discover a great up-and-coming resource or connect with a new potential client who’s followed an interest related to your business.

• Engage easier. Once you start following appropriate interests, relevant content will come to you in your home feed. By commenting on, repinning and liking those pins, you have an easy way to engage with people you don’t follow on Pinterest.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a better way to find and pin content more regularly, discovering interests is a bit challenging, but certainly worth it.

What do you think? Do you use Pinterest interests? What cool discoveries have you made? Do you have any recommendations for Pinterest profiles that are following great interests? Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments.

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