Pinterest and FUFISM

 FUFISM back ground info

#FUFISM or Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media has many facets and covers a large spectrum of different strategies. Each social media platform has its own traits and needs to have its own set of in-house rules that need to be made available to all people working on your marketing team.

This means that your marketing management team need to determine a platform specific policy for each social media platform which your marketing team should have access to.  Each Member of your marketing team actually needs to have a copy of  each separate social media platform's policies and procedures after being work-shopped on the main purpose of using that platform within your total marketing strategy.

To some this may sound like a bit of over kill from managements directives, but if not done,  the results will not be any where near what they should be.  One must remember that the purpose of using social media as a marketing tool is to get the end user or your intended target market to specific pages within your website, where he / she will be expected to follow your call to action statement.

So how does PINTEREST fit into this picture?

Pinterest is a picture / image sharing social media platform that has many unique characteristics and we will focus primarily on the ability to have themed pin boards for pictures in selected categories. If you are not familiar with pinterest then you should take a short detour to www.pinterest.com and have a peep see what all the fuss is about before reading further.

The first step in this process of using pinterest as a marketing tool is to write up the purpose of using pinterest along with a set of aims and objectives as well as an in-house policy document on how the rest of your marketing team should interact with your pinterest profile and boards.  Each specific marketing campaign should have its own separate documentation for your pinterest profile, and share the pin boards that you have in place.

To be able to write up the purpose of using pinterest as a marketing tool one needs to understand what pinterest does and how this is done.  see http://business.pinterest.com/whats-pinterest/ for details

PINTEREST purpose related issues

From a FUFISM perspective pinterest is an image sharing platform that allows your marketing team to use a single  image reference in ALL other social media platforms in a way that it will funnel your intended target market back to the page where that specific image with its associated call to action live, in anticipation, waiting for your intended target audience to be enticed into clicking on your call to action statement.  This means that the original image MUST be enticing,  and clearly depict something that your target audience will relate to, such as your product or a very descriptive image that reflects your service or the idea that you are trying to convey to your intended target audience. see http://www.pinterest.com/pin/100275529177237087/  Remember that once an end user clicks on your pin he / she will be taken back to the original page where the image was first pinned.

Use a URL shortening service and generate a user friendly URL that will help you entice an end user to click on the link to your pin. example http://bit.ly/hashtag-marketing   this link  opens a page discussing hash tag marketing (#hashtagmarketing) in this blog.

Pinterest is a powerful social media platform that is growing into a must have marketing tool, as it adds very large volumes of SEOVI (Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators) to your online work. Pinterest has a large domain authority that spreads an awful lot of SEO value and is instrumental in elevating many web sites higher into the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)  If you can get others to re-pin your pins and share them, then the social signals associated with your pin will add further SEOVI to your pinterest profile, which in turn will boost your other SEO efforts. Pinterest adds true value to your semantic profile within all search engines, and this is of extreme importance within Google with the advent of Google Humming Bird Algorithm which has a very large focus on semantic issues.

IMAGE NAMING and descriptions

Referencing your pinterest pins in posts within other social media platforms adds extra value to your pinterest profile as a whole and the specific pin in particular.  You need to make use of this through using an integrated approach, and ensuring that you mention your pinterest pins in the correct context within your social media posts on all other social media platforms.  This is not such a difficult thing to accomplish when your marketing campaign  is put together from a FUFISM perspective, where the big picture is properly in the central marketing focal area, and your pages where your call to action statements are properly constructed using the image which you will pin within your pinterest profile as a visual hook with the in page assembly, using well thought through

• image file names
• Image descriptions
• image titles
• image alt text
• image key words

PIN BOARD NAMES within pinterest.

This set of target market orientated image expansion tactics needs to be well thought through and be  well documented so that your copy writers who construct your other social media posts can use the same set of key words during their efforts to entice your intended target market to click on the link back to your page. The description of your pin within your pinterest profile should also contain as many of these words in well constructed sentences or partial sentences as you can so that they make clear and meaningful impacts on your intended target market should they read them.  This is also very critical from a semantic perspective as these efforts will add tremendous semantic value to both your pin and the original web page where your image and related call to action statements reside.

You will need to take some time and effort in evaluating the naming process of your different boards within your pinterest profile, and ensure that each individual board is named  and described with your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics in mind. These pin board names and descriptions must fit into the rest of your marketing plan, as they will be associated with your web site, blog and other online marketing avenues.

For more help in setting up your pinterest profile and related in-page SEO issues  contact our friendly staff at pinterst.help@info4u.co.za,  visit our Google plus page or ask your question in a comment on this post.

What is the value of social signals?

The value of social signals in terms of SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is a growing concern amongst many webmasters and web site owners. The number of social media websites has grown exponential over the last year or 2 and is still growing rapidly.

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest G+ and Linked in all add value to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts. Using all these platforms is hard work that is extremely time consuming, but is really worth the effort.

These social media efforts are all long term efforts that should not be rushed, the choice of usernames is a big issue, and when ever possible should be brand names and names associated with your web site. These social media platforms should not be seen as competition for your web site, but looked upon as complementary efforts that send visitors to your online call to action pages.

This article called "your guide to social media signals for SEO" is a must read for any web site owner / webmaster / SEO specialist

The value of social media signals in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is not truly understood, and is growing rapidly as more and more companies are using the social media to promote their brands, products and services.

How we as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) professionals treat these social signals amongst our selves will be evaluated by the SE (search Engine) operators, and we will  need to be aware of their reactions to our efforts. The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) crews and the Search Engine engineers need to have a common platform, but this is just wishfull thinking, as there are far too many cheats and BH (Black Hat) SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) crew members.

When the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) professionals start behaving rationally and work within the system without trying to gain unfair advantage through some form of skulduggery or trickery then we may be able to truly understand the value of  social media and the value that social media actually adds to our efforts.

The current trend to buy social signals from vendors to push the effects of the SEO value of these social signals through to higher SERP's (Search Engine Results positions) should be avoided as Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, ask and many others will soon be writing changes to their algorithms to punish these cheats and BH ( Black Hat) vendors and all their clients in ways that will surprise many and catch many others unawares when their pages just simply drop out of the organic listings.

So we as SEO professionals need to harness the value of social signals as organically as is possible, or face the prospect of being dropped from the organic listings of all search engines. The SEO value of good social signals should not be under estimated, as it is a growing force that needs to be harnessed and nurtured to ensure it's impact is not short lived or negative to the SERP's (Search Engine Results Positions) of our collective client bases.