Hardcore Social Tactics: Advanced Strategies for Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit — SMX Advanced 2012

Good morning SMX Advanced attendees and readers! Last night’s Meet & Greet gave a fun, warm welcome to the conference. Can’t say the same of this Seattle weather, which is living up to its reputation. There’s also no warming up to the sessions, as we’re jumping right in to hard core social marketing tactics.

Monique Pouget @moniquethegeek starts with Pinterest. There’s been a lot of talk, the numbers are there. Posts talk about building brand, driving traffic. Today we’l talk about it as a data source. Where you can mine data. Also, a persona building tool. The examples will be coming rom a DIY beauty account.

What’s being Pinned from my or a competitor’s website. http://bit.ly/pinterest-bookmarklet is added to the browser and export to a CSV anything pinned from a site. Easily downloadable and sortable so you can see patterns. Sort by user name to find who’s pinning the most. A lot of times people use their same name across networks.

PinReach is a tool to see the most far reaching pins, influential followers. Gives a score.

Pinpuff is another way to compare profiles across each other.

Pinterest – Sleuthing

What does this person care about > What does the person care about > What are their need states > How can we add value to their interests

Look at their Pinterest profile to learn more about where individuals interact online. Read users’ caption, see how they talk and what they love. How do you fit into the scenario?

Pull their website into a tag cloud to see how they speak, what they’re sharing. Develop a persona that speaks to these emotions.

When you create personas use photos, of the persona as well as their favorite content.

Twitter

All twitterers need to be spoken to differently. Identify influencers by searching Twitter bios for indsutry topics, keywords… Hoosaid and Follower Wonk for searching user bios. You can see trends around that with tools Amplicate, Topsy and Social Mention. Advanced search operators on Twitter and Google give you more options for identifying influencers.

twtrland and Twitalyzer let you see the most famous words, most retweeted tweets – insight into people he influences the most. You can see network demographic data.

You can see relationships with Friend or Follow. One sided relationships vs. mutual following – find industry leaders that way.

Next you divide and conquer. How you talk to a bar employee is different than how you talk to a homebrewer or a craft beer drinker. Tweet relevant things that reaches out to that group before you follow. That way you look relevant when they check you out.

Follow up with Twitter prospects that don’t convert after the first touch. Add value by answering questions, introducing them to another expert.

Facebook Timeline has new features which you can read about http://bit.ly/timelineforFBpages
Take advantage of Open Graph.

FB:Admin + Search Referrers = Keyword-Level Demographics (see post on SEOmoz).

Marty @aimclear is next. Facebook.com/aimclear has a lot of the deck he had to cut for time. We have aimclear to thank for the coffee. Can’t say thank you enough, Marty!

He’s sped through time, from 2007 to 2012. Today there’s (gasp) cookies that associate keywords with shopping records. The “Paid Organification” of Facebook article by Greg Finn in Marketing Land boils down to Facebook being a glorified mailing list with nothing getting past the wall without paying.

Facebook, at base, is a subscription list. The brand pushes to users and convos happen among users. Subscribers see a brand’s post in their feed. They might engage. Convos break out between friends in the wall. It’s mostly multidirectional. It’s large to community members who see it play out on their news feed. But friends of friends see light visibility. Content used to jump the wall but FB has ratcheted it down. The Ticker neuters visibility, limiting its ability to jump the wall.

What you can do to break the barrier is Sponsored Stories. They’re now in the feed and get 5-6% click through rate.

Page Post Facebook Ad:
1. Start content on a site you own with proper Open Graph.
2. When it goes on your brand page it will look right on the FB wall.

Page Post Ad: FB at large (first degree) expensive, site and wall traffic, likes
Page Post Like Story: (second degree) inexpensive, traffic to site, few likes
Page Like Story: (second degree) expensive, traffic to wall, many likes

Pay what you need to start the seed group that can grow into a network and amplify slowly for a right sized, focused community. Then you can ask what to do with your subscription list to channel them off the site.

Brent Csutoras @brentcsutoras is talking social tactics. Content marketing still works. It works better today than ever before. It’s harder, takes more focus and work, but when done right its effects are astounding. Here are some examples of campaigns he’s done in the next few months.

Chinese gangster loses cell phone: 15-20 million views, links from all over the place.

On SEJournal they do weekly humor posts: 80K visits from SU, 170 pins on Pinterest, and that’s on a marketing blog that often gets resistance for sharing

Checkmate Atheists meme: over 600 comments on Topix.com. Good feedback on the content.

Tip 1: Be prepared to succeed

The majority of people, whether new to the industry or advanced, tend to look at SM as a bandaid solution. I want to get links, traffic, conversion – it’s narrow rather than a nimble, integrated strategy. To do that you need a dedicated team or person or contractor. Needs to be able to respond quickly and understand the target community. You need established accounts and network. You need to be nimble because you never know what’s going to work. Plan for what happens after success so you can push content to other channels like Facebook when you find it successful on Reddit, for instance.

Tip 2: Monitor your site in social

Tip 3: Reddit… For Realz

Reddit is one of the hardest sites to succeed in right now. It’s layer upon layer of code bandaids and fixes to keep spammers out.

Don’t worry about accounts: In reddit, accounts make you a target. When you get a lot of karma, you get targeted and downvoted. Your account will get silent banned.

Silent bans and filters:

• new to Reddit
• new to SubReddit
• account filtered
• domain filtered
• manual approval

Checks (while logged out)

• view profile for page not found
• check new section

Understand where to submit

• Redditlist.com
• biggest is not always the best

Know the SubReddit rules

• TIL has to be two months old
• BestOf is only for Reddit links
• NSFW needs to be nude
• WorldNews excludes US

Tip 4: Pinteresting

• Focus on your network, it works on a tree system
• Pinterest cares about the ACCOUNT (this is a black hat tip – if you can figure out what that means, good luck to you…)
• #tags for search
• Weekends and evenings

Tip 5: Success with StumbleUpon

Network tree / popular algorithm

• build network appropriately
• When you have a network, it’s important that sharing is strategic. If you get enough votes Initially it goes out to your queue.

Stay very active: show up on /content/

Tip 6: What I’m not saying

There’s a lot he won’t say in public about a lot of these sites, but he’ll say a lot in private. Connect with him for more.

Finally Vince Blackham @vinceblackham sticks with the content marketing topic. He’s going to share case studies of what’s working for Pinterest. Why you should be on Pinterest video talks about referring traffic with the service is making up to 3.5% to a website. VISUAL content is king.

He’s been doing infographics forever and they thought Pinterest would be awesome. Turns out the infographics didn’t go anywhere. People on Pinterest don’t like data.

Meanwhile, instructographics do work.

Should be big enough that they can get the gist, but small enough that they need to click through to your website. 5,000 pixels long is generally good. Really big title that they can see and easy-to-read steps they can see.

The kind of traffic you’ve seen from social has often had see high bounce rate and maybe 30 seconds of time on site. Good resource content can be more like 2:30 time on site. You could actually get traffic that converts. They did a campaign for a mason jar company and saw revenue generating traffic.

Make it about your product but not overtly. DIY and how tos are by far the most successful. Top 12 lists do the best – 15 is too much and 10 is not enough.

Use ubersuggest to find how-to topics. Create them with multiple categories, like craft, photography and weddings. Cross streams for optimal popularity. Push 2-3 times a day. Shoot for peak hours, including 6 pm. Start thinking “resourcebait” rather than linkbait.

Greg Finn also recommends looking at LinkedIn Today if you’re marketing to a more corporate set. He wrote a post on MarketingLand.com on it – check it out.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.