 Hi, welcome to Introduction to Social Media for Business. My name is Sandra Batekis and I am here to take you through a course that's going to hit a number of social media platforms that you might be able to use in order to market your business. Now my background in this course actually is twofold. I've been in the IT business now for well over 20 years teaching everything from DOS, yes that's where I date myself going way, way back, all the way up through the Microsoft Systems Engineering platforms. In between you'll find everything Microsoft Office has produced and I'm sure we'll find a number of other interesting courses. Well when you take that technology and you bring it into the classroom, it's how to teach you how to use certain tools for your business. Well the other part of the credentials, the other part of the background that makes this course so much fun for me to teach is I own a business. It's considered a small business, it's an IT consulting business that goes in and performs IT support for companies. Well what do I have to do as a role as a business owner? I have to get out there and I have to make sure that people can find me. So in order to have people find me you can see that I have to be posted on Pinterest and Facebook and Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, you name it I'm out there because my role is to make sure that not only is my name out there but in this case now I get to teach it. So the background is twofold and so is the interest and I really look forward to taking a lot of my experience, a lot of the studies and a lot of the technicalities of these social media platforms, bringing it together and sending you on your way with a really good plan on how to market your business. The first thing people think of when they think of Pinterest is the do-it- yourself or the cooking. And I say that over and over because that's what I used it for for years before I ever considered it a marketing platform for my business. So you could find everything from newly painted bookshelves and how to do that to stones for jewelry. The recipes you'll never get a chance to cook. Outfits that you put together. Oh, there's tons of outfit boards where I say, gee, should I wear that in a second and I pin it is a great idea. Not to say I have any of the articles of clothing in that or that I'll ever have that outfit but for some reason we still pin it. We also have little glass cutting projects. I now am collecting wine bottles to cut down and make into drinking glasses. Why? Because it looked like a good idea on Pinterest. So we're not really here to talk about all of that. We're here to talk about it on a business platform. But what I'd like to say is the fact that it is such an effective marketing tool that all of these ideas are on my personal account and pinned. And that the click-through doesn't just bring me to someone's do-it-yourself. I wrote something up in word. But it actually brings me to other websites that teach me how to do this. That in itself is what should tell you it's a great marketing platform. I am being marketed every time I sign in and it doesn't feel like it and it's actually fun. So for that, that's gonna change your perspective on Pinterest and what you might be able to do. And I always say it's Pinterest fault that my garage is now too full of stuff in order for me to park my car but there are a lot of great intentions out there. So what is Pinterest? Well, it started off as an idea board. I still remember my cousin. Yes, Katie, we will now mention you on a course. She called me and she said, you've got to try Pinterest. It's the greatest thing. I keep finding all these boards in fashion and outfits and shoes and I pin them up and I remember thinking, that's not interesting at all to me. Well, she is into fashion and that's an industry that she's always had an interest in, so that's what her boards were. So I immediately equated my lack of interest with her interest, meaning we're just not the same people. So as I got to discover Pinterest and we took it further, yes, she had the pressure going on for me to log in and see what was it all about. I found that we could create boards with a collection of anything that you're interested in. When I say anything that you're interested in, and yes, I am still talking personal, but there's something that's gonna connect the two. We have our do it yourself home projects. We have cooking, we have fashion, we have makeup. We have all sorts of stuff. Maybe you want to renovate a Volkswagen bus if you're a camper. I happen to like to camp and I also have a place off the grid, so I'm always interested in off the grid ideas. You name it, it's out there on Pinterest. So you might be asking, why am I taking a business course and she's telling me about makeup or how to renovate a Volkswagen bus. The whole point here on Pinterest is I'm collecting ideas that I'm excited about. I'm actively engaged. I'm happy to go on on a good winter day or a good rainy day. I could spend three hours on Pinterest looking for ideas. Well, those ideas aren't just little notes. Those ideas are marketing. Someone put that outfit together and it's gonna link me out to a site where I could actually buy that pair of jeans or with makeup. I'm gonna link in and go right through because I really like that palette of color, I like the makeup tip. And I'm gonna keep clicking so I can find out more about it. And it might lead me to a Mary Kay site where I say, you know what, I'd like to try that. And now I'm gonna look for a representative. That's how Pinterest works. So it's not just about the subject and how I'm personally using it. It's the fact that behind all of that is marketing and people pulling you in. They don't pull you in by saying buy this new lipstick. They pull you in by giving you useful information, fun information, something that you're willing to pin and come back to later. And eventually you might actually click through and buy something. There's a lot of different uses for Pinterest. So each time I talk about it you can hear the excitement because I use it, it's fun. I have probably 50 boards in there with everything from cooking to working and when living off the grid. But on the personal side that's what we're gonna use it for, for the cooking, for the fashion, for specific ideas on how to get something done. Sometimes if I'm working on a project, maybe for my daughter's birthday, I create a board that's private. Now a private board means I can create it and stick all sorts of ideas on it but the public can't see it. So it's almost my own pin board to collect ideas to get myself through a project but I don't necessarily want to share it or have other people know what I'm up to. But on the business side, that's what's on the other side of personal. It's all about promotion. So with your business, you can actually be creating things to pin and hope that people will reshare and it's all about product and service promotion because ultimately as people start pinning and re-pinning they might actually click through to your website and gain a little more interest on what your business is all about. Also for business, I use it just like personal, I use it to collect ideas. How are other people marketing computers? How are other people marketing this service? How are other people presenting their business on Pinterest? I may follow them as well. Sometimes I follow them on the private boards. So I create a board that's collecting information on what all my competitors are doing so that I can gain some ideas on how to promote my business through Pinterest as well. Within Pinterest, you have both personal accounts and you have business accounts. Both of them are free. The features are for the most part exactly the same. But the business page has a couple of differences. For one, websites are easier to verify. So you go through a process to verify your corporate website. Once it's verified, you get a great green check mark, which basically gives people to go ahead of, this is a legitimate business, it's safe to click through. It also comes with a page for business analytics. People are terrified of the word analytics. What it really means? How many people pinned your pins? How many repinned your pins? And is there any interest going on? So all the statistics on, I've put all this together as anyone even looking. And we also get this neat feature, it's brand new, it's called rich pins. And rich pins allow us to do more than a picture on a website. They actually allow us to backfill it with a lot more description and more reasons to be intrigued and to click through. So we're going to create a business page. And we have to make sure that we optimize everything about this page. So many people go in random and you really have to be careful of that. First off, you wanna make sure that your company is easily found on Pinterest. Make sure your business name in there is in there. Not just an acronym, not just be, have it somewhere in the description. But you wanna make sure the full business name is there when setting up the account so when people search for you, they're gonna find you. You also wanna make sure that you claim your name in a Pinterest URL. So an example here, we have our username and we have Pinterest.com slash Sandra Classroom. So as you're leading people back to your Pinterest page, they can type that URL directly and see everything that you've got for your boards. So as soon as you set up that account and you've got your full business name in there, make sure to claim your URL. If your business name is a little bit longer, you want something short and easy to remember when you look at that URL. Your optimal character length for your business name is three to 15 characters. So there is a little conflict in what I'm saying. Make sure your full business name is in there, but make sure it's less than 15 characters. Again, if that's not the case, we're not saying 16 characters is out of the question. But we're really looking at display issues, people and how much they can remember issues. So find something that is clear and concise and that can identify you hopefully between three and 15 characters. There is a little about you. So many people set these up and they don't take the time to really fill that out. Not only do you wanna fill out about you so that when people hit your Pinterest page, they know what your company is all about. But it is also for search engine optimization. Part of what search engines are looking for is that particular field. So you wanna make sure that you fill it out, that you fill it out clear and concise and that you're using all the key words that you've identified are good for your industry. So use any key words. In fact, in a different portion of this course, we do talk about key words, it actually is part of every single course. If you haven't got there yet, go ahead to Google, search in keyword finder. Google has a keyword finder where you can start testing the keywords you'd like to use, what the hits are, how much people usually pay to advertise them. If you've got a keyword that 8 million people searched for and there's all sorts of businesses that are gonna come up before you, you might wanna find something a little more unique that identifies you. So do that homework before you come in here and at one point you will hear me talk about it as a completely separate topic. And the about you is limited to 160 characters. So here's what I have for my business and it certainly wasn't something I came up with when I opened the business. But the more we learn about all of these social networking, the more it is important. I actually have three versions of an intro paragraph about my business. I have the long version. The long version is one to two paragraphs depending on how you look at it. It really is an in-depth who we are, what we're about, what our philosophy is. And then I have a shorter. My shorter one is 255 characters, possibly a couple characters less. Because I happen to know in a lot of memo fields, a lot of websites, that's all you get is 255 characters. So I spent time working that paragraph to make sure that I could meet that requirement. And then I have a super short paragraph because there's a lot of social networking sites that literally give you 140, 160, somewhere in there characters in order to describe yourself. These three paragraphs I don't write every time I open an account. I've got them stored. And anytime I look and I have to fill out about you, I go to the one that physically fits. I copy and paste it so the message is consistent. The other part about your message being consistent is back to search engine optimization. It's consistency. It's everywhere. People are finding you on those keywords no matter where you go. So it's extremely important. Now, when you optimize your business name, what I also put here on this slide is two different versions. I put my, well, I guess we can say boring version. And then we have Carnival Cruise Lines, which accrues as much more exciting than computers. So I'd kind of rather read theirs anyways. But let's take a look. Reliable IT management, backups, email management, virus protection, setup, maintenance, training related to hardware, software, and computer networks. Why that is so important is a lot of those are my keywords. Those are keywords that will lead you to my ultimate website. Those are keywords that my industry is searching for. So I wanted to go up on the keyword search because when people are looking for a business like mine, they're going to tend to search and ask around and network, et cetera. So for me, that was extremely important. However, if I wanted to have more fun with it or if I was lucky enough to be advertising cruise ships instead of memory, then let's take a look at what Carnival does with theirs. Carnival, at the top of their Pinterest page, we have the about you section. This is what they filled out for about you. The official Pinterest page of Carnival Cruise Lines warning may cause intense need to travel. Well, that looks a whole lot more exciting about wanting to install some software. I have to give it to them. But there's two different ways that you can think about the about you section. So you have to think about your business, the message you want to spread, how you want to hook people and bring them in. Are you going to bring them in because that looks more fun and it was a really terrible winter in Boston this year? Or are you going to try to do the technical aspect of using the keywords and pulling them out of the search engines and Pinterest searches as well? That's for you to decide. And that's also based on what type of business you have. I don't think Carnival wants to use ocean, cruise, food. It's really not how people are going to look for a vacation. So how do you create an account? Well, step one, visit Pinterest. You then want to fill in a business email. Now, again, don't be random. This email is how you're going to log into Pinterest. If you have someone in marketing, it's how they're going to log into Pinterest. You want to make sure that you have a password that is secure because this does represent your business. And if it ever got hacked, people could do horrible things and you'd have no control until after it was posted. You also want to think about passwords. Don't fill it in with your super secret password and then realize you have to go ahead and share that with someone else. Same thing with the email address. Do you want all the pins, all the emails, going directly to you? Or is there a distribution list or a more generic email that's going to go to you and anyone else that's going to be helping you? So people don't even think about these. But you really do want to think about it going in. You also want to make sure it's an email that you can easily recover. I can't tell you, as an IT person, how many sites I have to try to get through because they've lost their credentials and they don't even know how they signed in or what the backdoor email was or any of that, really. So again, plan it so you don't lose it. So once you put in your email and your password and you click on the infamous red sign up button, you're going to move to the next page. Now here, the last step is your first and last name and your age. Most people go right for that, but you don't want to. What you want to do is you want to continue as a business. I know it's hard to see me drawing black on black here, but you see I've circled it in red. Continue as a business. It's that little tiny text that no one notices. They create a personal account. They've already used the email address. You realize your mistake, you back out, you go in as a business and it says, hey, that email address is already in use. Pick another one. So all that planning is for nothing. Make sure you click on that link. So one of the first steps that you're going to do is set up your home feed. So here's my initial screen. Hello there, Sandra Classroom. It helps us discover and save creative ideas, get started, we click on next. The first thing it tells us to do is to follow five interests. Now, in this particular scenario, I was reasonably random. And when I say reasonably random, I did immediately go click, click, click, click, click. These are the things that I might want to see in my feed. But you also want to see what your competitors are doing. It's not to say that you can only do five interests. You can add that in later, but look at what it is and don't just think about what you might want to see in a feed that you could re-pin or prefer or show your customers, but what you can also learn from others in that feed. So in this particular case, we have technology, information technology, new technology, technology news, educational, futuristic, wearable, energy. There's all sorts of them. Now, what I did when I was creating this, and literally I'm just doing some screenshots with a test account, I picked on technology humor. And I didn't go back to this for about a week because I was writing a course and I was trying to create these slides for you so that you could learn by them. And when I went back, I had a lot of technology humor, but some of it for the record was a little bit off color. And maybe personally, that is, there is not funny to me. I have to remember it as a public business feed. And if there's something off color and someone hits my business page, they may not necessarily appreciate it. So you want to make sure that you really know what those feeds are bringing you. Do yourself a little bit of homework. If even under a test account like this, you can always unfollow as well. So again, we're gonna follow five interests. I typed in technology. It gave me all sorts of technology ones. Click, click, click, click, click. I did my follows. And then from there, you start browsing and you might find that you change your mind.