User friendly experience is becoming an extension of the customer experience on a website

How long do users stay on websites? According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, “not very  long.” In an age of information overflow,   making sure a user friendly experience can be the  key factor that determines whether visitors get the information they need from  your website. (source)

User friendly experience is becoming an extension of the customer experience on a website—and, undoubtedly, experience matters. Small businesses who can stay  ahead with making the most of their customer experience on their sites are constantly refining their content,  asking their customers  what they want and how they want it delivered.

So, how does the user friendly experience on your website measure up? Here is a  three-secrets to analyzing the usability of your website, along with a  plan for improving its usability.

1. Analyze the content

• Does your content pass the “common knowledge or KISS principle” test? You may  be familiar with your processes and product or service offerings, but visitors  to your site may not be.  Your content should be short concise , abbreviations should be avoid.
• Don’t be long-winded. Product description that are five paragraphs in length will turn your reader off.   Break up your content and text using  illustrations or  photographs when possible.
• Not all at once. People can’t handle information in large  chunks. Try using small chunks of information first—enough for the  user to get a good understanding of what you’re saying. Then, give users  the  ability to drill down and obtain more detailed information.

2. Look at the layout

• Beware of “the fold.” Many users interact  with what they see first. Website visitors will decide  in less then 2 seconds whether to click further through your site, scroll down below the fold for more information or move on. To keep users engaged  information above the  fold is an imperative, especially if your website’s goal is  build an email list, covert a sale or drive memberships.

3. Usability testing for glitches

A very common mistake by small business owners is they guess about how their visitors use their website. However guessing and actually knowing knowing how they use it is two different cans of worms.

Here are a two tests that will act as a good starting point to stop the guessing on how users are using your site:

• Google Analytics Statistics. Look at the statistics; what pages are your  users spending the most time on? Least time on? Where are people leaving your  site? That information will give you quick insights into the effectiveness of  various pages on your site, so you can change your content to make each page sticky.
• User Feedback:  Ask users how they feel about using your  site (and always take responses with a grain of salt). Do they feel comfortable  using your site? Are they satisfied with their ability to complete a task?

Designing  a more user friendly website, is key for any small business to stay ahead of the competition. By using  these  few secrets will help make your site more user friendly.

Small business owners can always use a a leg up with their marketing efforts and staying on top of the latest trends. Here is our weekly digest of latest social media tools.

Yahoo Woos Small Business With Marketing Dashboard

Yahoo Small Business hopes to grow by offering small businesses an integrated marketing dashboard to manage and expand their digital marketing efforts. The Yahoo Marketing Dashboard, generally available today, provides a consolidated view of a business’s marketing results and reputation. Read more

Small Business Marketing Update – 5 Facebook Changes You Need To Know

Small business marketing efforts on Facebook has changed the playing field. Here are the five changes your need to know to bring your snall business up todate. Read more

Beyond Facebook: How Small Businesses Can Use Visual Marketing

When many small businesses think “social media marketing,” only two or three sites  immediately come to mind. Facebook, the most popular, Twitter,  the second most popular, and LinkedIn, which ranks third. Added to the mix, Pinterest is the hottest new marketing tool that any small  business can leverage. Read more  

Top 5 Free Online Marketing Tools  for Small Business (that are simple and effective, too!)

As a small business owner, everyone knows that marketing matters.  Sometimes however, we do not know the right tools, and experimenting with marketing is expensive, time consuming, and it times difficult. That’s great news for small business owners strapped on cash and time. Here are well tested, and free online tools that help manage small business marketing. Read more

Small Business Marketing using Pinterest

How well do you know your customers? Exercises in market research and social listening are ways to get to know your customers and stay on top of how their interests change over time. This key data can come in handy when putting together marketing strategies or developing new products for your small business. With Pinterest you can  monitor and listen to what’s top of mind with your customers today… Read more

Have you used Pinterest for market research, or any of the tools highlighted in this week’s digest? Tell us in the comments below and share your experience.

Finding creative content for Pinterest can sometimes be challenging especially when  one of the biggest problems is avoiding copyright violations.

To ease the problem, Pinterest has partnered up with photo management and sharing site Flickr to make it easier to pin photos from Flickr. This new partnership allows images found on Flickr to be used as content for Pinterest to be credited to the content’s creator and attribution statements (statements giving credit to the original source) included with each pin. Content found from sites like Behance, Vimeo and YouTube will also feature these attributions statements.

Photos enabled by a Flickr user for sharing on Pinterest will feature a Pinterest button in its share menu. For those who pin images from Flickr frequently, a Pin It button will appear as one of the two shortcuts on the photo’s main page.

Here is how it appears:

If a photo is pinned from a third-party site where a Flickr image has been embedded, the image will appear on your pinboard like this:

You can learn more about how to give credit to the original source work visit the Pinterest’s website.

Copywrite free images that will not break the bank

As a side note, when looking for creative content for Pinterest, one of the ways to avoid copyright legal issues is to purchase images from a photo site. Our personal favourite site is Istockphoto.com.    Istockphoto has free weekly images, videos, and illustrations you can use for your content on Pinterest. In addition, their dollar bin section is a cheap way to source out content for Pinterest.

Do you have any great sources of that you use to curate creative content for Pinterest? If so, please share them with us and we will be happy to post them here and backlink to your site.

Pinterest Weekly Digest is Out

Pinterest continues to be the hottest topic in social media for the   first week of May 2012. So what does this translate for you as a small business owner trying to learn the inside and outs of this power tool for your business? Here are our top picks of the week to help you become successful on Pinterest. 

The truth about Pinterest for your small business

The new social media site Pinterest has some definite benefits for small business, but be aware there are some negative aspects too. Like many other tools, it has pros and cons you should understand before getting started. Read more

Affiliate links on Pinterest: Are blocked

PinDollars, aims to help Pinterest users make money off their pins directly.  PinDollars lets you pin items to your Pinterest boards as you normally do, but if you use the PinDollars button it inserts an affiliate link. If you are a small business using Pinterest you will want to Read more

Don’t worry, everyone is learning Pinterest together

As small business attempt to fit Pinterest into their long list on social media and online engagement strategies, it might be comforting to know that everyone in small business is learning Pinterest together. Read more

Here is the best time to pin on Pinterest

If you’re doing most of your sharing on Pinterest from the office, you’re doing it wrong. The best time to share things on Pinterest is Saturday morning, according to data from Bitly, the URL shortening service.

Hilary Mason, Bitly’s chief scientist, revealed the nugget during a talk at Mashable Connect in Orlando, Fla. Bitly keeps track of clicks on the links created by its users, and where they’re coming from, aggregating the data to create actionable information.  Read more

If you want to find out more how to  get the most out of your Pinterest account for your small business, our blog post Top Tools to Manage Your Pinterest Marketing Efforts will help any small business on Pinterest become a pro.

Here is our summary of the top Pinterest news  stories hitting the social media streets  for the week of April 30, 2012.

Pinterest Outperforms Twitter, Facebook For Purchase Power [INFOGRAPHIC]

Perhaps. Certainly, the evidence is mounting that the pinboarding network of choice is making a big dent in the social space. Studies have shown that users spend more time on Pinterest than on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ combined, and new data reveals that the (ahem) interest in Pinterest is now so strong that the platform is outperforming both Twitter and Facebook for click-through revenue. Read more

 Source: Tamba.com

Pinterest interests more men; daily visits double in three months

Pinterest has doubled its daily unique pageviews between January 2012 and March 2012. In January, the number of daily unique visits to the social network was 2 million. In March, it was 4 million. Pinterest exists on iOS but not Android yet, and has been downloaded 2,50,000 times on the Apple mobile OS. Furthermore, 56 percent of Pinterest users are between the ages of 25 and 44. 28 percent of users in both January and March, were between the ages of 25 and 35, and another 28 percent between the ages of 35-44. The majority chunk (42 percent) of Pinterest users exist in the income bracket between $25,000 and $50,000 per year… Read more

Using Pinterest to market my hotel, inn or rental property?

For hotels, Pinterest is a fantastic visual branding and marketing tool. Hotels can share images of their property, amenities, views, etc. and then others will be able to “repin”, “like” or “comment” on them. (Read More).

A ‘Pinteresting’ new business tool

You’ve likely heard the loud (and growing) buzz about Pinterest, a hot new social media site. People are wondering whether it’s just another online toy or a useful business tool. Increasingly, experts are saying the latter. (Read More).

Is your small business using Pinterest to outperform last years followers, and or sales? Let us know and we will feature your story on our blog.

Starting April 26, 2012 Pinterests has added new imporvements to it group boards; invitations and enhanced board setting. Each pinner will be asked to join a group board before it is added to their profile. When someone adds you to a group board, you will be sent an invitation to contribute. If you accept the invitation, you will be added as a collaborator and the board will appear on your profile. Invitations will be sent by email, and pending invitations will be visible to only you at the top of your profile.

The new enhaced group board roll out  features  ensures the  creator of the board is clearly labeled, and each collaborator is listed below along with the name of the pinner that invited them. Creators of the group board may remove any collaborator at any time by clicking the “x” next to their name. Collaborators are able to remove anyone they invited, and they can also leave the group at any time. 

If you are  using Pinterest for business, then consider using of group boards is an excellent way to engage futher with your potential and existing clients.  Drop us a line and we will show you how to leverage groups as a part of you Pinterest marketing strategy

With all the buzz surrounding Pinterest, new web with sites that measure one’s  influence on Pinterest are popping up quickly. With so many sites out there to choose from finding the right ones can be difficult. Here are our top three websites to help manage your time and influence on Pinterest:

Pinerly.com  The easiest way to follow/unfollow pinners, view popular pins, schedule pins, and get statistics to know how to reach a larger audience.  The site helps optimize your Pinterest marketing strategies using a dashboard format similar to HubSpot.   This site is currently in beta testing and access to the Pinerely dashboard is by invitation only.

PinPuff.com  If you are looking to size up your competition size, try suing PinPuff. It wil allow you to check out their ‘pinfluence’ scores as well as your own. With PinPuff, you don’t need to grant the services access to your Pinterest account.  All you need is their user name, and go to the following URL, http://pinpuff.com/user/user name – and replace user name with your competitor’s Pinterest user name.  The best part of PinPuff is it is FREE and you can’t complain about that.

PinReach.com is a recently launched analytics tool that gauges activity, measure impact, and basic return on activity.  Its premise is based on how much influence  each Pinterest user has, and  trending in pinning.

Wise stamp is a Pinterest email stamp app that allows you  to grow your Pinterest profile & boards followers.  WiseStamp was declared best Social Media Gadget 2009 in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.

Time Saving Tools for Pinterest

Getting to Pinterest Faster – Browser Extensions

There are some basic Google Chrome extensions which help speed up the ‘pinning’ process.

1. If you want to pin images using a keyboard shortcut, install Pin It!
2. Want to add Pinterest to your context menu? Install Quick Pinterest. FireFox users can install Pinterest Right Click to get the same functionality.
3. If you want an even quicker way to pin images, install Easypinner for Pinterest, and a small Pinterest button will appear on pinnable images.
4. Want to enlarge the thumbnails in your Recent Activity tab without having to open the link? Install Pinterest Recent Activity Expander.

Apple App

If you want to pin and re-pin while on the go, here’s a simple and great iPhone/iPad app that lets you do that:

• Like and re-pin your friends’ pins;
• Pin from your camera (!)

By using Apps, Pinerly, PinReach and other time saying tools you can get the most out of Pinterest time.

If you are interested in gaining influence with your customers, leveraging Pinterest for SEO,  and do not know where to start,  contact us. We offer Marketing Services for Pinterest for small businesses.

In order to create your own Pinterst pin-boards and start getting traffic to your site, you need to receive a Pinterest invite. You can request one on the site, but it is faster to just ask a friend to send you one.  (At press time for this blog there was more than a ten day wait to receive an invitation.)

Once you receive your invitation you can then create board titles (categories) for your pins based on what you will be sharing. Choosing the right category is very important as you will want people to find you in areas of interest to Pinterest followers.

When you add an image to Pinterest, the link back to the original source is maintained. People who like your images can “re-pin” them to their own boards, add a comment, share them on other social media sites, and visit your site.

Leveraging Your Niche Power on Pinterest

Many niches markets are a perfect match for Pinterest.  If you run a cheesecake recipe blog, it would be easy to pin photos of each dessert with a link back to your site. These types of pins gain in popularity fairly quickly and you will probably gain some followers just waiting for the newest recipe to appear.

You can establish yourself as a Pinterest expert in less obvious niches as well. Let’s say you run an travel company affiliate  website. You will not get far by blatant self-promotion. Don’t just make a pin-board full of travel destinations with your affiliate links. You can attract and obtain new  followers and traffic by creating a board of things travellers would love. This could include photos of famous golf courses, quotations with pictures of top restaurants and videos to help pinners improve how to pack their luggage better.

Visitors can also help you promote your site on Pinterest. Just visit the goodies page to grab buttons that will allow people to follow your pins. You can also place a “pin-it” button near each of your blog posts so readers can post your blog images and links with just a click.

Visitors can also help you promote your site on Pinterest. Just visit the goodies page to grab buttons that will allow people to follow your pins. You can also place a “pin-it” button near each of your blog posts so readers can post your blog images and links with just a click.

If you have any questions or other Pinterest marketing tips or need an invite, just let me know! We would be happy to share our expertise on Pinterest for marketing to business.

If you have any other Pinterest marketing tips or need an invite, just let me know!

Keeping Engaged and Interesting:  Like any other social networking site, don’t just put up a Pinterest  page and walk away. You need to be able to curate it and put interesting  pins on your page that will entice your followers. In addition, the more interesting the pin the more likely it will be re-pinned, which helps with  search engine optimization (SEO).

Update  Your Websites Every Week – Update them at least weekly, if not daily.   Otherwise people loose interest and stop coming back. The same holds true with keeping your Pinterest boards current the more current and active you are the more engagement you will receive with your flowers.

Create  Links Back to Your Web or Other Sites – Make it as simple as possible so that people   can click on links easily and purchase or view products or services in      other places.

Link Your Pinterest  Account With Other Social Networking Sites:  By doing this, your  followers on other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook will know your activity on Pinterest and will be able to make more personal connections with you.

Have a Daily or Weekly Theme: Themes  help entice your followers to keep coming back and keep piquing their interest. For instance, have a “green” day where everything you post on that day is the color green. Also include #hash-tags so your images can be easily searched.

Don’t  Only Promote Your Product or Service:  Be sure to promote other brands that you like. By just promoting your product or      service, you are being too commercial and considered a really faux-pas on Pinterest.

Follow  Early Adopters:  They often have an interesting perspective on new sites. Pinterest early  adopters will also have influence on other Pinterest users and direct traffic to your pin boards.

Use Back Links to Take Followers to Your Web Site:  Backlinks with help  increase your SEO and also draw attention to your website site.This is really important to help convert lookers into buyers on your website

Need a Focus Group? If  you are interested in a particular demographic—say, for example, females  who like to cook or are foodies —check out their boards on Pinterest and see what interests them. This will help you target them better and help  curate your pin boards that will have meaning to them.

So my question to you is when are you going to start pinning for your business? Please post a comment and share your Pinterest success story. Our Pinterest story can be found here

RIM places its future on super hero cartoons

2011 is a year Research in Motion (RIM) would like to forget. It was the year of their failed Playbook launch with mediocre sales, RIM’s enterprise server crashed twice leaving BlackBerry users out of touch with the world and causing havoc to businesses globally. Not to mention a 75% decrease is RIM’s stock prices.

On New Year’s eve, RIM launched its Be Bold 2012 marketing campaign in an attempt to revive interest in RIM devices, particularly its flagship touch screen BlackBerry Bold, in the United States.

On Monday, as a part of the Be Bold marketing campaign, RIM introduced four cartoon super heroes to be the face of its brand. Gogo Girl can save the day with her “brilliant strategy, a smile or a spatula,” Max Stone is “tough, proud and a little wild,” Justin Steele is “always ready to  stick up for his friends and Trudy Foreal is “not afraid to call it as she sees  it.”

RIM has really lost sight of who their true users are and why they use of their products.  Looking for super heroes to  to act as their spokespeople is not the way to maintain their market share or brand image. RIM’s core business has been on the business market, not the consumer market which is Apple’s focus. Their new cartoon super heroes are more suited for the Apple brand.

RIM needs to get back to basics and focus on its strengths, providing excellent business products for the business market. Using cartoons as the face of  RIM’s  brand does not instill confidence in business consumers that RIM can deliver on its brand promise; providing technology for businesses that they can rely on and trust.

RIM needs to ask itself as a business owner; ”would I really want to place my trust into a company who relies on cartoons or fiction to help me with my business needs? ” For this business owner, the answer is no.

For RIM to remain with this marketing plan using super heroes  to come and save the day will help set RIM on course for a disastrous 2012.