I'm becoming a fan of Pinterest, as are many marketers, judging from the proliferation of posts, articles, white papers, etc., on how to market via this social platform. One post that resonated with me was Jordan Kasteler's "Why Pinterest Is NOT Your SEO Miracle Worker" on Search Engine Land. Kasteler gets to the essence of using any social platform for marketing, which is that you must participate in a social way, engaging and contributing to the social community, to make the most of the platform. Old school marketers merely see another channel to broadcast their message to a waiting audience. That simply won't work.
Key takeaway advice from an early Facebook F8 developer conference was that Facebook apps should at their core, be social. It makes sense, though a lot of people were developing apps that were merely showing up on the Facebook platform, but not engaging the social graph at the heart of Facebook. It's the people-to-people-to-information connection that makes a social platform so compelling.
Enter Pinterest, which among the many startups in the social space, hit that all-important critical mass by providing value, experience and a user base that has crossed that tipping point dictated by Metcalfe's Law. And with social startups that succeed to the next level, people and companies get to start the experiments all over again, innovating, being creative, learning. And most of all, succeeding by being social.
We created AP42's Pinterest page with community in mind, starting with our first three boards. The first board is AP42 Clients. As a service agency, we are part of a community that includes our clients and their customers, and offering a social nexus where we can all get together makes sense to us. It also shows that you can step outside of your website and use a community platform to share information that has traditionally been limited to your site's architecture.
The second board, our most recent, is the AP42 Reading List. It's just been started, so follow it and keep checking back on some of the ideas that inspire us here at AP42.
Finally, we've created the 42 Reasons board that follows that most interesting of numbers that keeps popping up (especially after you start looking for it!). We took the inspiration of Douglas Adams's answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" as we moved from Alejandrino Partners to AP42. So, in a small way, it's about us, but curating this set of fun facts about the number 42 gives back to a community of likewise strangely fascinated numerologists!
And a final note on SEO and Pinterest - pinned sites don't follow through for search engine link credits, but you can embed links in the descriptions that do count. We're using them to link through to our site's page about the number 42, our website's clients page, and any blog post related to our reading list.
[Get a good start on social media marketing. Download AP42's free Social Media Workbook.]
