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You finally did it. You jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon, and you made yourself a profile. Good for you. It feels good to get out there and spread your wings a little bit. Hopefully you followed our 5 tips to optimize your Pinterest profile for SEO, if you didn’t I would strongly suggest you take a look. Pinterest can be an EXTREMELY valuable tool for SEO if used correctly. Now you are sitting by your computer endlessly scrolling through different healthy recipes, wedding décor, and fashionistas pinning the latest designs, and you thinking hey this is great, but how am I going to build an audience on this site? I’m so far behind everyone else. Fear not. We have 5 tips plus an extra special BONUS 6th tip to help get you started Pinterest.

1.) Let your current users know you are on Pinterest. It sounds obvious, but spread the word on your site and your other social media accounts. Add Pinterest follow buttons and feed widgets to your website. If you have a blog make sure your readers have the opportunity to pin what you are posting.

2.) Find your existing social audience, and follow them. We love notifications. We love to feel popular. Throw your fans a bone and give them a follow. It doesn’t hurt you and it might mean the world to them. At the very least it will let them know that you are on Pinterest! You can connect your Twitter to your Pinterest to see which of your followers are on Pinterest. Unfortunately you cannot connect your Pinterest to a Facebook business or fan page so you can’t harness those likes. You can however invite people to follow your new Pinterest page via email if you have a master list of users who have provided that info to you.

3.) Follow, Comment, and Repin from Influential Users Find the influencers. They are everywhere, in every niche, in every nook and cranny. Figure out who are the people in your sphere that are utilizing Pinterest to it’s full potential and follow them, comment on their pins. Add value to the conversation. People will be seeing these pins, which means they will be seeing your comments, and if you have a properly optimized profile they may recognize you and your brand and give you a follow.

4.) Post Useful and Attractive Pins. Pinterest is very much an image reliant website and things that are striking are much more likely to catch the eye, get repinned, and go viral.

5.) Engage by sharing boards with customers You can really get interactive with Pinterest. Get your fans involved by creating shared boards that they can post to as well!

BONUS TIP: You installed the PinIt button on your site and you have been promoting your Pinterest so hopefully your customers are noticing and they are sharing images on your site to Pinterest. If someone pins something from your website, you can easily find it by going to the following URL: http://pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com If someone chooses to pin something from your website they are basically becoming a brand ambassador. Interact with them! Create a relationship with this person. They will be more likely to pin more things from you in the future. There you have it. 5 tips to get you started on Pinterest, with a special bonus tip because I was feeling extra generous today. 

When your friends ask what you do, what do you tell them? I make people show up higher on Google. If I could go back in time for one decade it would be 60’s. Mad Men looks like fun and it would probably be my only opportunity to see the Jets win a Super Bowl and the Mets win a World Series in my lifetime. The fictional character I’d be best friends with in real life is Jim from the office. We make similar faces. As a teenager, I was totally into Cue the ‘What do you mean when Nate WAS a teenager jokes’ The last thing I purchased online was One of those horse head masks. The thing basically paid for itself in hilarious selfies. The last song I listened to was No Scrubs – TLC. My cocktail of choice is When I’m with out the guys scotch on the rocks, but between us, any frozen alcoholic drink. I mean it’s an alcoholic Slurpee… What was your AOL screen name? expomt7 in honor of my seventh grade teacher with the initials MT who had a penchant for launching Expo markers at us when we were bad. Mac or PC? I’m a major Apple groupie. What’s your favorite part of your job? My team. I’m fortunate enough to work with a really great group of people who make it a pleasure coming into the office every day. What’s one thing no one in the office knows about you? Ketchup is not in my list of top 5 condiments. (WHAT?)

Leverage Your Pinterest profile for SEO in 5 Easy Steps. Excerpt from free e-book. Below are the Top 5 things you can do right now to improve your Pinterest profile for SEO Purposes:

1.) Choose A Pinterest-friendly Profile Picture: Your Pinterest profile picture dimensions are 160×160 pixels. Your image should be square and at least that size. If not, your profile picture may be distorted or blurry. Large images may fail to upload, so resize large pictures before you upload them. When choosing your profile image remember, it should be legible on small screens as well as recognizable from a brand perspective.

2.) About Description: Make It Keyword-Rich 160 character limit for a simple, succinct keyword-rich overview of your brand.

3.) Title Your Boards: Short and Sweet Keep board titles under 28 characters so they are fully visible. If you find you need more space to title your board, you should use that as your board description and think of something simple that your followers will understand and search Pinterest for.

4.) Add Board Descriptions: Don’t forget to add a description of your board! Pinterest allows 500 characters, but aim for 200-300. Pinterest users search for inspiration on Pinterest (or ‘pinspiration’ as they say) by typing keywords into their search bars. To get your Pinterest page, boards, or pins from your site to show up, use specific branded keywords + Pinterest category names whenever possible. Search bar – Pinterest profile for SEO masoninteractive.com

5.) Rearrange Your Boards: What’s an easy way to keep your profile looking fresh and up-to-date? Rearrange your boards! Below you can see how Skinnytaste.com, the recipe blog, puts the most relevant boards on the top. This practice is also essential for generating and increasing engagement on Pinterest. Boards are the first thing users see on your page so you want the most topical above the fold (top 2 rows on profile). 

Heartbleed Gets Worse, Google Goes All Minority Report-y On Consumers, The Fins Pro-Hall&Oates, and Finally Social Media Marketers Get A Theme Song… What You Missed On the Internet from MasonInteractive.com:

You Haven’t Heard of Heartbleed? No, it’s not Kanye’s follow-up to 808s & Heartbreak. It’s the morbid but not entirely as scary a name as it should be for the massive security breach going on right now. Apparently because the problem is (very) technical, it’s difficult for regular users to understand why this vulnerability is a big deal, besides the fact that every news outlet tells you that it is. Trying to understand it all? Get the full Geeksplanation. [Mashable]

PLATFORM WATCH – Platform News Alert: Google is attempting the impossible…again. Getting very Minority Report-y. They reportedly just launched a pilot program with six advertisers to try and connect online marketing to offline sales with an ‘in-store attribution transaction reporting’ mechanism in AdWords. [SearchEngineWatch] Design Firms Realize Tumblr’s A Thing Tumblr Adds Curalate Visual Analytics To Platform [SocialTimes]

We should all be more like Finland. They put Hall & Oates on their stamps to celebrate homoerotic art… not really H2O but Tom of Finland, a global icon of contemporary gay culture. [TheVerge] What do nerds think of Mike Judge’s new HBO spoof Silicon Valley? They love it, or at least, we do. Some are dubbing it (not us, of course) the Nerdy Entourage. [Mashable] We are just in it for the sardonic take on the new it thing…Mike Judge always gets it just right (think Idiocracy). What do you think? Will you be watching? GONE VIRAL (for the the wrong reasons) viral videos from Mason Interactive boutique digital marketing firm NYC Let’s Get Social?

Finally, a theme song for all us social media marketers to rally around. [youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itvvFfeLh84” ] This “song” from the first Social Media Marketing Week in Vegas is well…something. And if by something, we mean horrific and completely cringe-worthy. Can we be Simon Cowell for a moment? Mason Interactive – Let’s Get Social Thanks. Also, we apologize for not posting this when we were first given this gem of an ear-sore last week but we didn’t think it warranted it’s own post (which it clearly did).

Lead Sources: At Mason, we’re lucky enough to work with our education marketing clients. It’s an exciting mix of for-profit, not-for-profit, graduate schools, pre-schools, undergrad and certificate schools. As a result, we’re able to try new things and see how they work for the entire .edu marketing field. Three new(ish) sources we’ve been trying are working very well for our education marketing campaigns. The platforms driving low-cost, .edu leads for us are iAds, Yahoo Gemini, and LinkedIn’s new offerings.

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is well known to attract two types of users. The first type is someone who is looking for a job. The second type is, drumroll please, also someone looking for a job! So what is the difference between the types, you ask? The difference is – intent to improve skills. The first type is someone who is browsing and will make a move when the right opportunity comes along. The second type is someone who is not ready to hop jobs. This user is preparing for something bigger – a career shift. This person knows that shifting careers means acquiring new skills. This audience is perfectly positioned for almost any education marketing campaign. In our experience, CPCs vary from $2-$5, a low range compared to Google for the education marketer. Targeting options include age, location, skill set, group affiliation, and other interesting segmentation. Ad copy features a small graphic and allows multiple exclamation points!! The only downside is phone numbers are not allowed in ad copy.

2. Apple iAd Workbench

Recently open for small and medium sized advertisers, this ad network features CPC and CPM display campaigns on Apple mobile devices – iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Banner ad sizes are odd to say the least, but CPC range is still very affordable! You can pretty much get away with spending under a dollar per click, which is rare to come by these days. There is a wide variety of targeting options. Age and geo is a must. The cool part is that Apple knows what you’re doing on your device, which allows advertisers to segment by types of apps, types of music, movies, and even user’s book categories!

3. Yahoo Gemini

We’ve heard from official Bing/Yahoo channels that the entire Bing mobile ad inventory will be shifted to Yahoo Gemini network in just a few months. Oh Microsoft, thanks for thinking up more ways to keep us busy! Being a recent addition to the Bing marketing mix, CPCs are low as advertisers are slow to jump on. There are two ways to advertise on Gemini: search ads and native ads (display) on Yahoo’s prime networks. Some of the great Bing AdCenter features were carried over to this platform. This includes the bulk upload feature via excel making it easy to manage large campaigns. These are the three relatively new ad channels – ideal for education marketers. Jump in, before they get saturated with advertisers!