December 2012 Social Media Updates
Get yer' social media yas-yas on. Here are three zip-didly-doo updates from the ever-changing, exploding world of social media. December 2012 updates include Pinterest business accounts, Groupon updates and improved tracking for Facebook marketers.
Pinterest Introduces Business Accounts
If you follow social media at all you know that Pinterest is hot, hot, hot! When comparing traffic of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, the upstart photo-sharing social site (that being the aforementioned Pinterest) showed the most growth by far year-over-year for social desktop usage, social web usage and social app usage.
Marketing Land recently reported a 1,047% year-over-year increase in traffic. That's a pretty impressive number. [I told you Pinterest was hot!]
If you want to reach females, Pinterest is a social media channel you just can't ignore. Now Pinterest is looking to get more into the business market. Their newly released business interface gives businesses new tools to help optimize engagement levels with users. And you can now convert your personal account to a business account very quickly. Signing up for a businesses site allows you to add your business name and get access to tools and resources including:
- Verification of your business website with Pinterest. Their new verification badge helps people source high-quality content and find businesses in search results more easily.
- Access to new buttons and widgets like the PinIt button. Other plug-ins include a Follow button, Profile Widget, and Board widget. These should go a long way to driving more engagement from pinners and traffic back to your website.
- Access to upcoming features plus updates on future Pinterest products and services.
Groupon Makes It Easier to Find Local Deals
Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that features discounted products and services in the form of gift certificates usable at local or national companies. But Groupon is morphing for being from a supplier of online coupons to become a "local marketplace".
Presently, you sign up for Groupon and wait for deals to get to your email inbox. The "new" Groupon allows you to search their site for local deals. This new local marketplace approach is being rolled out in New York and Chicago with more cities to be added to the program soon.
There are many in the business community that were declaring the Groupon business model dead. We suspect that the lads and lasses at Groupon are looking for success with their new approach.
Facebook Adds Conversion Tracking
So you're using Facebook Marketing? If you are you know that you can track clicks on your Facebook campaigns. But you didn't necessarily have the ability to track a click on your Facebook ad through to a conversion on your website. The ability to track a visitor from site entrance to purchase, lead generation, email subscription, etc has long been available with other advertising platforms such as Google AdWords.
Not to be outdone, Facebook now provides a code snippet that you can paste into the code of your 'success page(s)' on your website. The bottom line is that you can add this snippet to any page you wish to track a conversion on your website. If you are selling stuff, this snippet goes on the "thank you for your purchase" page on your site. If your website is about lead generation these snippets can be installed on your "thank you for contacting us" or even your "thank you for subscribing to our email" pages. You can define whatever conversion you want track. When it comes to tracking the success of your Facebook ad campaigns this is a very good thing!
Questions, Comments or Suggestions?
We're always looking for feedback from our blog posts. We're always looking for questions to answer. And we're always looking for suggestions for upcoming material to write about on our blog. If any of these apply to you just use the friendly little comment field below. ;)