Pinterest is one of the newest social media platforms on the internet. The basic idea is sharing pictures on the internet that relate to things in your life. These shares are known as ‘pins’. The uptake of pinterest has been huge, so large in fact that signups are currently limited. Like any new social media website Internet Markets have jumped straight onto the bandwagon to find out how to utilise Pinterest to drive traffic to your website. In this article I am going to discuss a few of the techniques that people have come up with so far, remember, this site is new so the techniques are constantly evolving and some many change dependent on changes to the pinterest terms and conditions. Always check first whether the technique can still be used before spending time on it.

Need hits to your Facebook pages? Is no one visiting your page and providing Facebook likes? Building a following of Facebook users for your content is no easy task. While Facebook has many users the site is so large that your amazing content can get lost in the sea of pages on the social networking site. Without enough Facebook likes your page isn’t going to get looked at very often. Here are some ways you can increase Facebook likes and bring more users to your pages.

To maximise social media marketing to its fullest potential, you shouldn’t be directing your audience solely to your product/service site, you should be aiming to do much more than that. A common mistake by marketers new to social media marketing is that they get satisfied if people simply like or follow their social media presence. However, in reality it is not enough.

The ultimate aim of all marketing is to grow the business, so engagement must build awareness and value of the brand with the aim of converting that into sales. Social media is a very powerful marketing strategy that can make your business expand rapidly, provided you are engaging with the right audience in the right way. This is only possible if you have an effective social media marketing strategy.

When planning your social media strategy it is important to understand your audience and the type of things that will engage them with your brand. Know the demographics of your perfect customer, what their wants and needs are and what they are likely to be engaged by. This should include not only areas that are specific to your products or services, but also related areas.

For example, if you are a plumber and you want to engage with your audience mix discussions about plumbing projects and products with kitchen design and bathroom design tips, then you could also partner with a decorator to include colour schemes and advice about flooring. You can include information about the cost of various heating systems and discussions about water conservation. This would further engage your audience to interact with your site. This changes your social media presence from one of a plumber to someone that cares about all your customers home needs.

The actual challenge here is how you transform one time visitors to a product or services site to people that interact on an ongoing basis so that when they are ready to buy your business is the natural choice.

This requires that you to be more observant, sensitive and critical in order to come up with an effective strategy to attract internet users. Chances are if people like what you write, post and tweet, there is a good chance that your activity will create real traffic, allowing people to share your content from one platform to another.

If you are a small business or your have a Managing Director that is highly visible, it is important to include a small amount of the personal. Research shows that people are actually eager to know more about the person they are dealing with to decide whether their products or services are trustworthy or legitimate enough for them to use.

Don’t just think that social media marketing as a phase for your business to get through because it is not, and whether you accept it or not this is the key that can empower your business to success.

Effective social media marketing does not only depend on how many fans and how big your network is because a huge number of fans and connections will be useless if you can’t make them engage with your company and buy your products and services. It will only make sense if this audience is transformed into raving fan customers who help you publicise your business products and services without you telling them to do so.

Many people think that if they have established a good number of fans, followers, friends and subscribers, then the job is done and they will stop developing their social media marketing plan. However, seasoned marketers knows that this is not enough. You don’t only make a marketing plan for marketing alone – you make a marketing plan to increase sales and profits within your business.

One of the key places you can test out your social media muscles and get feedback about your reach and engagement is on Facebook with a Facebook Business Page.

It has been widely promoted as the top notch site in terms of ad impressions and social networking, so you might as well maximise it to inform the public that your business exists. This is particularly useful if you are currently launching a new product or doing a time sensitive promotion.

It is important to understand the common factors that your target audience has. For example Nike use specific imagery and content to appeal to an active (or aspiring to be active) late teen early twenties audience. You can actually observe how well you engage with your target audience via your own facebook stats. The next step is to do more of the things your target audience likes and drop the things that fail to engage them.

One key factor is to remember to keep your message simple and focused, aim at your prime audience and engage on their terms. This does not mean that others will not be attracted to your messages, it simply helps to build an image in the mind of your audience. When you do all these things you cannot fail to grow the engagement, and by extension the business, from your key buyers.

Viral marketing has been described as the holy grail of social media as it is both highly powerful in generating brand awareness and traffic, and at the same time extremely challenging to do effectively.

So, what is a viral marketing? Well let us put it this way, it is an online word of mouth buzz, sometimes it’s called a marketing buzz. It works just like an interesting news story or gossip, where the story passes from person to person. With viral marketing some information, a video, a photograph or something else of interest is passed from person to person through a range of media. It could be emailed, shared on facebook, messaged on twitter, shared on a social bookmarking site and so on.

It works because people are naturally social. If you find something interesting, you tend to share it with your close friends and they share it on with their friends. With the speed of the internet, word of mouth has become lightening fast, with a variety of social networking sites you are not only connected to your city but to the whole world.

To have a successful viral marketing campaign you need to have two things: The right message and the right connections.

A message can be anything that creates an emotional response that is a simple idea. Why simple and plain? Because simple is indeed better and it is easier to understand. It can be anything that is likely to spark interest, whether a worrying trend that creates outrage or an amusing photo or video. Providing it generates a strong desire in the person receiving it to pass it on to others, then it is likely to go viral.

Second, utilise the right connections. It is important to ensure that the message gets seen in a way that can be easily shared. For example, posting the video in youtube allows it to be easily shared via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email and embedded in a blog. It may be necessary to give it a boost by making the video a featured video or by posting it to a number of social networks yourself, but if it is genuinely of interest, then it will go viral.

As you can see, the mechanism of viral marketing is pretty easy, as long as you provide something creative, entertaining and simple that engages people it can go viral and generate significant traffic.

One thing is important with anything that you plan to send viral – make sure there is a way for people to come back to your business. This can be a link in the article, photo or video, plus if you have a video make sure you put a clickable link into the description as well.