A couple of weeks ago, I urged you not to post links to other people’s content on your own Facebook brand page. (Read the full post here.)
This time, I’m going to urge you to post links to other people’s content on your Pinterest and Twitter brand profiles. What gives?
I’ll start with the reasons I said not to post other people’s content to your own Facebook brand page.
- Facebook is the ideal social media platform to drive traffic from to a website. It drove 25 percent of ALL internet traffic last year.
- When you post to your Facebook brand page, most of your fans won’t see it. In fact, brand pages can reach as little as 2 or 3 percent of their number of fans each time they post.
Neither of these two factors affect Pinterest or Twitter.
Pinterest does drive a lot of traffic. But it doesn’t drive 25% of all internet traffic. In addition, when you share other people’s content on Pinterest strategically, your audience is more likely to find your content as well.
Ah, yes, sharing content strategically is the key. This method is also known as content curation.
In fact, though Pinterest and Twitter seem quite different, they share a major similarity: their features lend themselves to content curation in a way that Facebook’s just don’t.
Pinterest offers boards to help users curate content; Twitter offers hashtags. But each platform offers you, the user, the chance to establish your authority and raise your profile within your industry by curating Pinterest boards or Twitter feeds full of useful information on a particular topic.
Let me break it down by platform.
Pinterest is as much a search engine as it is a social media platform.
Translation: Users search on Pinterest for the topics they’re interested in. They don’t just browse their newsfeed to see what friends have posted. Pinterest makes suggestions to those users based on the keywords they’re searching for. That means, if you’ve created a board on a particular topic, and users are searching for that topic, it’s likely you’re board will make its way into their search results.
If you create a themed board with pins to your site as well as pins to other similar products, and title the board with a keyword related to your business, you have a good chance of popping up in search results. You can read more about this method in the Brilliant Business Moms’ post all about Pinterest, about 2/3 of the way down.
In this section, Beth Anne describes creating “the biggest and baddest Valentine’s board around” in an attempt to reach her ideal customer, who she knew was probably on Pinterest but probably not searching for keywords directly related to her business.
Here’s Beth Anne:
You might be wondering, “what’s the point of pinning all that Valentine’s stuff if your blog is about growing a business? Aren’t you wasting your time?” In a nutshell, the answer is, “No, we’re not wasting our time.” By creating the biggest and best boards on Pinterest, we get many new visits to our profile and clicks over to our site via Pinterest.
Of our 4X increase in traffic via Pinterest, over 33% of that traffic came just from clicks via our profile.
The takeaway: curate Pinterest content that your audience is likely to be searching for, even if the content is not directly related to your blog or business.
If you can pin links to your own site, great. But if not, know that if you curate content around a topic that your ideal customer is searching for, you are likely to make connections.
Beth Anne’s strategy was especially savvy since Pinterest often favors sharing seasonal content in search, and users flock to Pinterest for seasonal ideas, like ideas for Valentine’s Day.
You can approach Twitter in much the same way. The hashtag (#) allows you to curate on Twitter. The strategy is the same: think about what your ideal client cares about, and share information about that on Twitter.
Use hashtag-tracking tools like Keyhole.co and Ritetag.com to determine which hashtags to add to your tweets.
Then share only the most interesting, engaging content within the topic you’ve chosen.
