Social Media Archive

When we think about using social media for personal branding, most of us would immediately think of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, right?

Well, what about Pinterest?

At first glance, you may think of Pinterest as an extremely visual-oriented digital book marketing tool that doesn’t fit in your personal branding strategy unless you are in areas such as retail, fashion, arts, design, etc. But Pinterest can be a terrifically complementary to your digital presence and personal brand no matter what niche you are in.

Gemma Craven, Executive Director of Strategic Markets at Spredfast explained in a webinar with Adweek recently that Pinterest has reached significant scale and maturity with more than 70 million users and 1 billion boards.

Moreover, according to a study from Shareaholic, Pinterest drives more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. We recently uploaded all of our personal branding articles and blog posts on Pinterest, and it has already become the 3^rd biggest social referral source to Delightful’s website!

So, are you ready to know how to use Pinterest for personal branding? Let’s get started.

Treat Pinterest differently

Pinterest is a unique social platform in many ways:

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Social marketing is increasingly raising companies’ attention as an integrated marketing channel to the business. According to the CMO survey in 2014, Social media spending of marketing budgets is expected to increase 128% to 21.4% in the next five years.

However, many social marketers are still struggling to demonstrate the value of social marketing. Although tons of new social marketing analytics tools are emerging, measuring ROI is still the number one challenge for marketers, according to the 2015 Social Media Marketing Trends Survey by Simply Measured and TrustRadius.

A webinar with Kevin Shively, Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Simply Measured, and Megan Headley, Research Director at TrustRadius, discussed the challenges social markers are facing and provided some insightful tips on what they can do about the challenges.

Here are our top learnings from the webinar on how to make the most out of social marketing and demonstrate its value:

Set Right Goals and Metrics

Why are you using social media? This should be the very first question you ask before setting up the social marketing strategy as it’s crucial for defining the value of any social programs.

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Twitter is a must-have for brands who want to build an engaging community, raise brand awareness, drive web traffic and generate leads. Most marketers are aware of it, but how many of them are utilizing Twitter properly?

A few weeks ago, Mel Carson, Founder of Delightful Communications, was asked by Momentology to provide some thoughts on how brands should effectively use Twitter for marketing.

Their comprehensive Twitter Marketing Guide covers every aspects of Twitter marketing including the characteristics of Twitter, how Twitter Advertising works, successful brand stories, and tips from industry experts, etc.

It is a perfect how-to guide to Twitter Marketing for newbies , but also provides interesting insights that will titillate experienced marketers as well:

• Among all online adults in the United States, 19% use Twitter. Men tend to use Twitter more than women.
• 90% of people consume content; 9% of people occasionally create content; 1% of people are power users and create the majority of content consumed by others on the network.
• More than 78% of Twitter users access the site using a mobile device.
• People who follow businesses online are influenced to take action on company information shared on Twitter more than on any other online channel.

For more insights and tips, see the full guide from Momentology.

And don’t forget to:

Subscribe to The Delightful Times

Follow @Delightful on Twitter

Like the Delightful Facebook Page

Join us on LinkedIn

Thanks for reading,

Bianca Hu – Digital Marketing Specialist

Keith Reinhard, the chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, reminded us on Adweek a couple of weeks ago that marketing and advertising have always been about connecting brands with people, and we need to remember that human nature stays pretty constant.

Although the technology landscape is constantly changing, it’s useful to understand and utilize the constants in our lives (and marketing plans) as well.

Twitter Analytics is one tool that can provide valuable data for marketers to understand people, connect with them, and tell stories they love.

Although we’ve been using Twitter Analytics since it was open to the public, the webinar hosted by Twitter last month gave me some deeper insights, especially on how to use the tool for content marketing.

Know Your Audience

Understanding who you are talking to is an essential step before you start talking. Twitter Analytics can help you with this by providing visualized and easy-understanding data about your followers.

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A while back I wrote about my loathing of the word “excited” in press releases and the post still gets discovered by people searching for alternatives via the search engines.

Imagine how excited thrilled I was to learn that our friends at LinkedIn had published the latest overused buzzwords of 2014 in a post by their esteemed career expert Catherine Fisher.

Here are the lists:

2014 Global List – Top 10 Most Overused LinkedIn Buzzwords

1. Motivated
2. Passionate
3. Creative
4. Driven
5. Extensive experience
6. Responsible
7. Strategic
8. Track record
9. Organizational
10. Expert

2014 US List – Top 10 Most Overused LinkedIn Buzzwords

1. Motivated
2. Creative
3. Passionate
4. Driven
5. Extensive experience
6. Organizational
7. Strategic
8. Track record
9. Responsible
10. Problem-solving

Funny how “expert” doesn’t make the US Top 10 right?

The one I see most often is where people say they’re an “experienced marketer” or an “experienced manager”. We’re all experienced in some way or another, it’s how much experience and what the results you garnered were that counts so make sure you tell me that too.

My advice is for you to go back through your LinkedIn profile and see if any of these words are omnipresent. If they are, change them up a little in an attempt to stand out from the crowd and prevent eye-rolls and “oh yeahs?” from people peeking at your summary and experience.

There’s a reason LinkedIn share these lists. It’s because they want you to be successful via their platform and success comes from being disciplined, taking your personal brand seriously and spending some quality time crafting a profile that does you justice and doesn’t smack of everyone else’s.

Don’t hesitate to contact us about our personal branding services and good luck!

Cheers,

Mel Carson – Founder of Delightful Communications

Do you spend tons of hours searching for media coverage about your brand?

Well, judging from a 30 minute webinar we watched recently, CisionPoint might be able to help you out!

CisionPoint has been a popular tool for PR professionals since it launched at 2007. From identifying key influencers and connecting with audiences, to monitoring traditional and social media and analyzing outcomes, CisionPoint covers a PR project from beginning to end.

During the webinar, CisionPoint’s product manager, Sharifa Abubaker, and product specialist, Sonal Moraes, demonstrated several tips and tricks of monitoring media coverage with CisionPoint.

Below are some highlights of the product in terms of media monitoring that I found very helpful and wanted to share with you:

Solid Database

CisionPoint monitors over 300,000 outlets and has the information of more than 1,000,000 contacts. You can get relevant information from millions of social media sites and other websites, as well as traditional broadcast and print media in a matter minutes. Moreover, you don’t need to worry about getting overwhelmed by the huge amount of information. CisionPoint has detailed filter functions to sort all the coverage as you need.

Ready to Share

One of the solid functions of CisionPoint is that it can automatically generate a nice formatted report for you. By clicking “create press report,” you can customize what you want to include in the report, such as media type, outlet, publication date, full text, etc. A cover page with your company logo is also available. For PR agencies, it’s obviously important to keep your clients updated. CisionPoint allows you to set up and customize email alerts for external recipients, which makes keeping your client “in the know” a lot easier.

Fully Integrated

Besides reporting needs, monitoring coverage can also help you with media research and competitive analysis for a PR campaign.   Using CisionPoint, you can directly transport the coverage information you gather into a media list saving you a lot of time by killing two birds with one stone.

We don’t use CisionPoint yet, but we like to keep up with Cision’s useful webinars which include a lot of helpful hints on how to stay relevant as a digital PR consultancy.

If you have used CisionPoint in the past or are using it right now, please do share your experience with us!

We’re always on the look out for new tools that do the job of monitoring social media well (and that are cost-effective), so let us know what you use and why!

Thanks for reading,

Bianca

P.S. Check out our thoughts on Digital PR and what companies need to be thinking about in an increasingly digital world.

Every marketer knows that “people are powerful distribution channels for your brand message”, said Jon Dick a couple of weeks ago during a wonderful webinar we watched here at Delightful.

However, the question this poses, he went on to say, is: How can you get people to talk about your brand?

The webinar organized by Klout and Simply Measured answered this question for us by introducing how to successfully manage an influencer program for your brand. Featuring Jon Dick from Klout, Uri Bar Joseph from Simply Measured and blogger and digital marketing influencer Jess Estrada, the webinar showed how to identify, engage, and measure the success of relationships with influencers.

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Picked this up here.

Genius.

Reminds me of some of the people I’ve interviewed over the years.

Cheers,

Mel

Some of you might know that one of my many Delightful hats is actually more of a crown.

A Majestic SEO crown.

For over a year now, I’ve been lucky enough to act as Brand Ambassador for Majestic here in the USA, and speak at conferences about their incredible “big data” toolset.

My remit is to help broaden the audience for the brand and get other digital marketers enthused about getting smart with link data and using it for more than just SEO (search engine optimization).

I’ve done a couple of presentations this year and a couple of blog posts too about how best to use what Majestic has to offer, and on Friday 6th December at 9.30am PST (5.30pm GMT) I’ll be delivering a webinar on how businesses can use their tools for influencer discovery, digital PR and competitive analysis.

If you’re interested in hearing some top tips, feel free to register for FREE below:

Beyond SEO – Loving Link Data for Social Media Digital PR and More

If you know anyone in PR or social media that you think might benefit from a talk like this, please share this post!

Starbucks have launched a cool new way to gift a friend a skinny latte via Tweet a Coffee.

This morning, I’d just sparked up my laptop and logged on Twitter to find a very clever surprise from my friend Kelley Myers.

Kelley, who is a friend and former colleague from Microsoft who now works in digital marketing at Starbucks, is jolly generous (as well as smart), so I clicked on the link and kaboom:

To set it up and Tweet a Coffee, you have to connect your Starbucks account with your Twitter account and Tweet.

That’s it! Genius?

Love how more people are getting creative with Twitter.

What will we see next? Tweet a Pizza? Tweet a Hug? Tweet a Beer?

Might have to put a bigger order in for some of those Twitter shares!

Oh…..and thanks Kelley!