Using Pinterest to Market your Business

Pinterest is another great bookmarking tool available on the Internet. It is a fun way to upload, save, and sort images, known as pins, onto your virtual pin-boards. Users can browse their friends pins and then choose to save the ones they like, or they have the ability to go to a specific category and browse other people’s pins from around the country.

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Since we are working with Andrea Whaley from Wardrobe Interventions, I feel like Pinterest would be a great way to grow her business and market herself even more. The majority of users on Pinterest are women and since Wardrobe Interventions focuses on image consulting and personal shopping, Pinterest would be a great way to market her business to a specific target audience.

By creating different boards, users are easily able to organize their pinned images and name their boards according to what pins they contain. This makes it easy for people to go to different users sites and view specific boards they pinned. This picture is an example of what someone’s “fashion” board might look like on Pinterest.
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Businesses, such as Wardrobe Interventions, can create a Pinterest page and then post pictures of products or accessories they like and even pin other people’s fashion ideas to show people what they suggest and what they see as “in-style.” In order for someone to trust you enough to change their wardrobe, it is important that they like your styling choices and feel comfortable enough to work with you. If you connect your Pinterest site to your business website, it gives potential customers an opportunity to view your work and see if they like what you do.

Pinning and commenting on other people’s pins is a great way to gain new followers if you are just starting up and it is also a good way to market your business. Styling and fashion is a huge part of Pinterest  so I think it would be a great social networking tool for Andrea and her business. Posting her own models and styling ideas would be a great way to really show off her style and connect her to her followers even more.

Pinterest is a great website to really let your creativity really shine through. This bookmarking website is a fun and fresh way to share your ideas or products with literally thousands of people. I definitely think Pinterest is one of the top marketing and networking sites on the Internet today!

Using Social Bookmarking Tools

Last week I talked about HootSuite and how it can be a great tool for small business owners to use in order to interact with their followers. This website provides a great feature that allows its users to schedule when they want to send out tweets or posts without having to actually click a button or even have Internet access. I have been using HootSuite for the past couple weeks now and it is one of my favorite websites because it has all of your social media sites in one location and it makes it easy to check out your Facebook newsfeed or even your mentions on your Twitter page.

Today I am going to talk a little about the social bookmarking website, Diigo. This website allows users to bookmark and tag web-pages on the Internet. In order to easily bookmark a page you can install a little icon in your web browser that makes it easy for the user to click on it and it provides a drop down menu with actions you can take.

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The drop down menu allows the user to share, annotate, screenshot, and save to their Diigo library

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Your Diigo library keeps track of what websites you save and the annotations you can make in them. My library is mostly focused on social media, marketing, communications and blogging because our client, Wardrobe Interventions, is an up-and-coming small business that focuses on style and fashion.

It is also easy to find Diigo users with similar interests as you because Diigo has a search engine feature that allows users to type in a specific keyword and it then generates a list of Diigo users with similar tags.Screen Shot 2014-04-03 at 5.41.17 PM

When you type in a keyword such as “marketing” a list of users pops up who all used the tag “marketing” for at least one of their saved websites. This is a great tool because it makes it easy for the user to find similar websites that talk about marketing without having to spend hours on the Internet searching through irrelevant information. Many of the websites users tag in their library are extremely helpful and provide great research and information on a variety of topics.

This website can benefit business owners because it can be a huge time saver. People are constantly busy and don’t always have endless hours to spend on the Internet searching for new ways to improve their marketing, blogging, or any other type of skill. Diigo allows you to save all of your websites in one area while also being able to search through other people’s tags and websites.