You may not have heard of Pinterest if you are not an avid fan of arts and crafts. Pinterest is a hub of quirk and interest, an online visual search engine that allows its users to discover, pin (aka collect on a page/profile) and share pictures and videos relating to their interests. They pin these items on “Boards” – different pages they label as subcategories like Fashion, Craft, House Inspo and so on.

Pinterest is a huge hit amongst the public as a personal tool, but what benefits can it provide to your business? Like all social networks, it can be used carefully and cleverly as a marketing tool to do 5 key things.

Grow Your Audience

The more frequently you use the site, the more likely your content is to be pinned. When this happens, your content and services are exposed to new groups of people, with massive global potential.

Grow Brand Awareness

With all these potential people seeing your content, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your brand values and personality by selecting content that fits. As you are more active and engaging, the audience learn more about you and this helps to build brand awareness and loyalty.

Improve your SEO

Using the correct keywords across Pinterest can help to improve not just Pinterest Search Rankings, but also Google Search Rankings for your business.

Increase Website Traffic

Creating content to pin allows you to include a direct link to your website, product or service! This means that every single piece of content you are sharing can have a direct call-to-action with potentially great results.

Place Ads

Like other platforms, Pinterest even allows you to turn your content into ads and will place them across the network. These appear to a person looking like normal pins – almost. They have a small text indication that the piece of content is an advertisement. They have an easy to use ad manager that allows you to define audience characteristics including Age, Gender, Interests, Location, Language and Device. You can even use business analytics so you can see how your ad is doing.

This is all great! But how do you know if Pinterest is for you? Have a look at what your business is promoting and compare it carefully to the type of content and consumers on Pinterest. If you are a finance business, then it might not be the right move. However, if you are a fashion, beauty, furnishings or even craft brand then Pinterest could be a roaring success for you. All you need then is content that can make you stand out from the crowd.

Having done a lot of reflecting on our beliefs and our ethos at Social Gamma, we are embarking on a new chapter in our company story: Social Good.

Social Good is a mission, a way for us to apply our individual and collective beliefs to our work every single day. The most fulfilling projects and clients we have taken on are the ones trying to make a positive change in the world, and we want to build them up to something greater than ever before. We’ve made the decision to make a change and a difference.

We’re focusing in on just a few key industries:

• Health, Wellness and Nutrition
• Non-Profit
• Sustainability
• Education

Having worked with many clients in these industries so far, we’ve come to love not just what they do, but what we can do for them. For our health, wellness and nutrition clients we have carried out a variety of web and app development services, as well as investor and lead generation digital ads. We have helped our clients gain key investors, find leads and even maintain and develop their online presence to ensure their continued success. Our non-profit and sustainability clients have benefitted form our social media expertise. We’re proud of the achievements we have made on their channels, both in engagement and follower retention. We have also helped them to achieve fundraising goals and launch successful events and projects. Our education clients found new leads and an increased following through paid lead generation and social media ads.

And this is not just a side project. The team has always had a passion for giving back, from their university days to now. One of our Account Managers, Ana, has volunteered at a special school, helping children from the ages of 8-14 with learning difficulties and autism. She also worked with toddlers in foster care. Our Lead Creative, Rebecca, was a Team Leader for breast cancer awareness charity “CoppaFeel!”, promoting the cause, educating young people on campus and raising funds. The team won a fundraising award and ranked 3^rd on the UK CoppaFeel! University Fundraising Leader board the year she graduated. Our Managing Director and Founder, Ria, led a group called Remedy Through Music, who visited children’s hospitals every week to sing to the patients. We are inspired to this day by the people we worked with and the plans we helped carry out.

So now, our mission is clear. We will use our skills and know-how to spread the positive waves out into the world! If you are in the health, wellness and nutrition, sustainability, non-profit or education industries and you’re looking for a Digital Marketing Team who share an affinity with your values and passions, then give Social Gamma a call. We look forward to doing Social Good with you!

When you’re marketing a new product or service it’s tough to keep up with the ever-evolving online social space. Keeping pace with the millennial mindset, algorithms, demographics and new techniques can be near impossible! That’s why we’ve put together your new ABC’s, to help guide you in your decision making on Social Media.

Authenticity

If there’s one thing we know about millennials, it’s that they can’t stand things that seem fake. A recent campaign from Fanta showed a series of prank clips based around their new flavours. These videos were staged to look like common viral videos that quickly gain popularity – but these didn’t. Many of the Facebook comments were simply about how “clearly staged” and “cringy” these clips were.

This just goes to show that non-authentic content is an immediate no for millennials. Authenticity creates trust between you and your followers, something that is key for customer retention. This is one of the reasons that influencer marketing is overtaking celebrity endorsements on social media: it feels far more authentic.

Balance

It’s important to consider the main purpose of social media: to be social. If a brand’s account is all product pushing all the time, then followers can get bored quickly. They come to social media to be amused, to find fun content they want to share around, and occasionally for recommendations and shopping. A balance between personal posts that remind your followers there is a face/team behind the brand, and posts discussing the product/service can help with retaining followers and long-term brand awareness. However, make sure these personal posts are authentic and in keeping with the brand’s tone of voice.

Clarity

Make it clear who you are as a brand from day one. If you are a serious company then take your social media seriously by posting industry knowledge, important events and milestones within the company and present your product/service as a clear-cut solution to something. Memes have no place on a serious company’s feed and can cause confusion amongst followers. If you are a quirky, friendly brand then make it clear with a conversational tone of voice and humorous, highly personal content.

Having a social media marketing team behind your brand is paramount to hitting these key points regularly with your content, whilst keeping up with the finer details of the online world. Even great content needs expert knowledge on the best times of day to post, the best channels for a brand, and optimisation of hashtags. These things ensure your content is not just being seen, but being seen by the right people, in the right light. With all this behind you, there should be no trouble with increasing the number one thing that matters on social media: engagement.

With these simple rules in mind, you should have the components necessary for a flourishing social feed. All you need now is an excellent product or service to show people!

Contact us for further information on how Social Gamma can help you present your brand online.

Facebook and Instagram are major players in the modern social media marketing game. Any business worth their salt invest time and even money into excellently curated feeds, so that they can have that unique connection with customers that just didn’t exist before the age of social media. But what are the benefits of these sites, and is one better than the other?

Let’s look at Facebook first.

Benefits:

Facebook has a massive impact on how the public interact with each other and has been around far longer than Instagram. It’s a great place for businesses to update their consumers on upcoming events and happenings, as well as sharing articles they are interested in. Facebook’s algorithm supports video content beyond all else, so video ads or updates are a great way to get a bigger reach.

Negatives:

Most Facebook users primarily use it for social purposes. That is, they connect with friends and family while businesses are less of a priority. Even the name itself doesn’t promote “faceless corporations”. It also has an overall older audience than Instagram, which can be bad depending on your target market.

What about Instagram?

Benefits:

Instagram is a highly visual form of media, allowing businesses to showcase some design and aesthetic skill, and reinforce their visual identity. The more a company’s brand identity is seen, the more associations a customer builds with the brand, making it more memorable and more likely to be used. Instagram also has a more current feel to it, not just because it is a younger site, but because of the “instant” share element of stories. Companies can show themselves as more relatable by sharing day-to-day happenings through stories. While Facebook has this option too, it is used much less.

Negatives:

Instagram has a lot of content restrictions, for example you cannot share hyperlinks in posts. This means that businesses cannot make use of article and blog sharing as easily, something that is beneficial to the tech and finance industries. Another issue is that many companies use bots to increase their following, and Instagram is catching on. The anti-bot algorithms make it difficult to keep up with what is acceptable and what isn’t. Optimising hashtags is a constant job, discovering what is relevant but also unique enough that you won’t get buried. Having a social media team to keep on top of all the changes is the best way to get the best of both worlds.

There are plenty of positives and negatives to both sites, and which site you should focus on also depends on your intentions. If you have a younger audience, Instagram is the way, whereas if you’re more business focused, the lack of link sharing on Instagram might be detrimental. The best approach to social media is to make use of all the available platforms, and a combination of both Facebook and Instagram used in the correct way can be a powerful strategy.

Get in touch through the Contact page to find out how our Social Media Services can help your business bloom.