John Cade

Pinterest.

It’s what everyone is talking about. Growing at a staggering rate (4000% increase in page views in six months), many businesses are asking the question: how can we use this new tool to drive traffic and sales to our website?

The rhetoric reminds me of the earliest social media discussions held within LifeWay (my current employer). Everyone caught the bug, but there were more questions than answers. “How should we use it? Why should we use it? How do we measure it? What can I do to be better at it?”

In my quest to answer some of these questions about Pinterest over the last few weeks, I have learned a few valuable lessons. Mostly about why your business won’t be successful using it. 

1. Your photography is awful or you don’t use images on your website - Pinterest is a visual social bookmarking service. If you don’t have beautiful images on your website, your content or products probably won’t spread on Pinterest. 
   
   
2. Your products just aren’t that good - Marketing doesn’t sell products. Products sell products. If your products aren’t great, don’t expect people to share them.
   
   
3. Your demographic isn’t women - Shoes. Nurseries. Cupcakes. These are things you will see on Pinterest almost every day. Recent studies report that 80% of Pinterest users are women. If your main demographic is men, don’t expect much of a return if you choose to invest your time with Pinterest.

Marketers and e-commerce websites using top-notch photography to sell products that are useful and beautiful, whose products are also appealing to women, will ultimately win on Pinterest (possibly without lifting a finger). Without these ingredients, marketers are destined to fail.

What other reason will businesses fail at Pinterest?

What happens after you post a link in a tweet?

A few people might click on it, retweet you if it’s interesting, and then it disappears in the deluge of information that is shared every second on the internet.

Right? Well, sorta.

I was recently checking LifeWay’s December tracking code report in our analytics suite and noticed that one of the tracking codes was created on October 31 (as a habit, I always add the date to the end of my tracking codes). It was showing up, not only because someone clicked it, but because someone made a $180 purchase using the link during the month of December. 

The tweet that contained the link was posted by our CEO just a few days before an online event. It read:

Be one of the 40,000+ people who will participate in David Platt’s Secret Church this weekend. bit.ly/secretchurch11

— Thom Rainer (@ThomRainer) October 31, 2011

This whole scenario made me very curious. What was purchased and where did the person find this link?

As it turns out, the purchased was unrelated to the content of the tweet, which mentioned an event that LifeWay streamed online. A Bible Study leader kit and member book were purchased in the order.

So where did they find this link? Fist of all, they didn’t click on the bit.ly link to make this purchase. Bit.ly shows no activity on this link since November 8, 2011.

After digging a little deeper, I found that someone had bookmarked this link, tracking code included. Which is still interesting - why did they revisit this bookmark nearly two months after the original link was posted? The information on the page is time sensitive.

I think it’s pretty clear that some links, no matter when or why they are created, are used out of convenience - not because they take someone to their final destination.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a link take this type of journey.

There are two valuable lessons in this story:

1. Share links to your site. It works. Eventually.
2. Analytics help you tell the story. Without Bit.ly and our web analytics tool, I would have never known that this link generated revenue. Though Social Media ROI is overhyped and often misunderstood, it is important to know what type of revenue you are generating.

Do you use any social media analytics tools?

Internet Retailer published an article today featuring Target, who according to a recent survey, has the best social media presence among retailers.

One paragraph in particular stuck out to me:

The most socially adept retailers do share a few basic ideas about how their social media operations should work, L.E.K. says. For instance, those retailers feature large amounts of user content, such as reviews and product images; offer exclusive deals; and quickly respond to users’ comments and needs. “Those three things ensure that what a retailer is doing is interesting to users,” says Lewis.

Seems pretty basic, right? While he doesn’t say it explicitly, clearly if these are the things that users find interesting, they are the things that retailers should be doing.

What would you add to his list?

On November 26, my wife delivered our first child. We welcomed a baby boy into the world.

For that reason, not only did I not have time to blog last week, but I promised myself I wouldn’t.

Here’s to the end of life as I know it… or actually, the beginning.

In nearly every post I write, there’s one keyword I never leave out. It has nothing to do with social media, social commerce, or Twitter. Or myself.

It’s LifeWay. My employer.

Though I use this as a personal blog, I’ve found several reasons to blog about my employer. Here are three:

1. It gives me credibility
   I could write blog posts all day long about how your business should use social media. I could do it under the guise of my expertise and try to make myself sound awesome (and probably fail). The truth is that LifeWay carries a lot more weight that I do. Blogging about LifeWay strengthens my message.
2. Transparency is valuable
   When I’m looking for information that will help our business, I don’t want to hear it from someone who is vague about their sources. I’d much rather hear it from someone who is clearly in the thick of my industry.  I assume that most people feel the same way. Understanding how another organization operates is beneficial to many people. Be transparent and let readers know how you know what you blog about.
3. It’s mutually beneficial
   When you make your employer look good, you look good. And vice versa.

Do you blog about your employer?

50 million tweets are shared per day. That’s almost 600 per second. Holy smokes, Batman. That’s a lot of tweets. Especially if you need to search for something.

Last week at LifeWay, someone asked a simple question: “Is there a way I can filter my Twitter search results so I see tweets that are only relevant to me?”

Let me introduce you to Twitter’s advanced search operators. Though their advanced search tool offers similar functionality, you can actually do an even more advanced search in Twitter’s native search box if you know the operators yourself.

I’ve created the Twitter Search Cheat Sheet as a free download to help you learn these operators and as a reference to keep handy. Post it on your wall, pass it along to your friends, and please - tell them where you found it! 

It wasn’t too long ago that the phrase “social commerce” made me cringe.

Yet in October of this year, I became a full-time social commerce strategist for LifeWay. The title was not one that I was excited about. After accepting the position, I planned to keep using social media the way I always had on behalf of the organization. Listening. Connecting. Solving customer problems. Everything a good social media professional should do (especially when you’re the only full-time social media team member).

Selling through social media? Not my cup of tea, I thought. That’s contradictory to the root of the medium. Isn’t it?

Not exactly. As a social commerce strategist, I still do the things I did before the word “commerce” was in my job title. But as our social media team grows, I have learned that social commerce is an important piece of the puzzle. It’s not simply “selling”. Social commerce solves a customer problem.

The problem is that people can’t buy, explore, or share the things that they want from wherever they want.

My favorite definition of social commerce so far is:

Helping people connect where they buy and buy where they connect.

Social commerce is not like cold-calling. It’s not begging users on Twitter to check out the latest and greatest product from your company.

It’s giving customers the access they want, where they want it.

Remember a long, long time ago on Twitter when you had to click on a link and go to an external site to see a picture that someone posted? Me neither. But there was a time when this was the case. Now you can view all kinds of media in the sidebar.

What if you could buy in the sidebar?

We know that social media is driving traffic to our website. But what if social media was driving direct sales instead? What if the customer had a better experience because they didn’t have to open a new browser tab or leave a site that they prefer to stay on?

That’s how social commerce works. Not by broadcasting at customers. But by joining them.

Social commerce is not a dirty phrase.

Do you agree?

I see it every day. Twitter users mention a username to start a tweet. It looks something like this:

@martyduren is LifeWay’s new Social Media Strategist.

It makes logical sense. Why not mention the user’s profile when talking about them on a platform they use?

But there’s a problem with the structure of this tweet.

Who will see it?

• @martyduren
• Your followers who also follow @martyduren
• Anyone who visits your profile page

So who won’t see this tweet?

• Your followers that do not follow @martyduren that do not visit your profile

This tweet will not show up in anyone’s timeline that isn’t following you both. Twitter treats tweets that start with the @ symbol as a reply. By default, Twitter does not show your @replies to users who don’t follow your account and the mentioned one. This functionality makes sense. Who wants a Twitter timeline full of tweets directed at people they don’t know?

The good news is that there are a few ways you can structure your tweet to extend your reach. Some common solutions are:

• Placing a period before the @ symbol

. @martyduren is LifeWay’s new Social Media Strategist.

• Placing messaging before the username

Congrats to @martyduren who is LifeWay’s new Social Media Strategist.

The one caveat is retweets that start with the @ symbol will show up in the timeline of the people who follow you, even if they don’t follow the account in the beginning of the tweet.

Did you know this secret? Do you have any others?