Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that allows users to share images that they find interesting with their friends. The website is particularly popular with the female gender, who pin everything from recipes, hairstyles, clothing, wedding plans, and do-it-yourself projects. Nevertheless, the website is not just limited to teenage girls and stay-at-home mothers. Much like the other major social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, companies are beginning to utilize Pinterest for business purposes.

Not every business will benefit from advertising on Pinterest. Craftsman power tools and Harley Davidson motorcycles probably would not be very popular with the demographic that the website reaches, so those two companies are better off sticking to Facebook and Twitter for their social media needs. However, business that are aimed at women or provide recipes, do-it-yourself ideas, or room décor will find that Pinterest allows them to reach their main demographic with the click of a button. Even small companies, like the crafters of Etsy, should notice a large increase in profit if they utilize the website to its fullest.

There are three main things that companies should do with Pinterest in order to go viral on the website. First, they should provide an easy way for users to pin their photos. They should also create their own account on Pinterest for business purposes promoting their product. That way the company can pin pictures of products or ideas that are relevant to their business, and sit back and watch other users repin those photos. From there, users can share those pins on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Lastly, follow people. That’s what it’s all about right? Follow everyone from consumers, to celebrities, to other big companies. Very often, people follow back. In addition, the more followers that your company has, the more people you are reaching.

Pinterest for business purposes can be a great thing. The website basically offers free advertising, which is perfect for small companies that are just starting out. Everybody likes the word “free” and the results can be astounding!  If your company isn’t on Pinterest, it’s time you start looking at it.

Who doesn’t love the ever-popular social media networking site Facebook? I can’t think of many people who don’t love it and judging by the number of people who’ve joined Facebook and use it (some 845 million people as of February 2012, according to the numbers in Wikipedia).

People use Facebook for maintaining friendships, marketing their products and businesses, posting their photos and keeping up to date with news, gossip and technology. We’ve even seen it used to help change the world, create uprisings in some parts of the world, broadcast messages to fans and support causes. All good.

However, Facebook has been known to irritate, whether it’s due to privacy issues and more recently, the number of changes Facebook has brought upon their users. I say this because I hear complaints all the time from developers and just plain ordinary users of Facebook.
“Coming Soon: New Facebook Pages. On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages will get a new design. Preview your page now to see what it looks like and try out the new features.” These are the latest changes coming to Facebook. We’re on it! People, adapt! yet again. You have no choice, the deadline is March 30th.

We’ll be updating and publishing our new Facebook timeline some time before March 30th.

It’s all about the back links… well not really. It’s about back links, yes, but.. It’s more than just back links.

Quality of back links is important. Some websites with fewer backlinks will have more traffic because they are a well known brand name, have a large clientele, have been online for years and years and years. Or, it could be their social media campaign or their marketing campaign, part and parcel. Back links are important, but the quality of back links is also something to consider. A variety of backlinks is good. Make sure your back links come from a variety of sources.

Back links from commenting is good, provided you use your keywords as the anchor text which links back to your site. Directories are also another type of back link. Some directories charge for your submission and others ask for reciprocal links back to their website. Having an authority site within the same subject area as your website or blog linking back to your website or blog is the main prize. This will boost both your traffic and page rank. How you get a back link from an authority site is a task in itself. You can write to the webmaster and ask, or else you can hope that your article or website has quality content and is worth back linking to. That’s the best way to go about it.

So, it is somewhat about the back links. It’s more than that though. Quality content and lots of it will do the trick.

Want a few more reasons to attend Social Media Week?  Watch the promotional video from where else?  YouTube.

Not to be missed: Social Media Week begins February 13th this year around the world. You’re in luck to attend if you live in or close by Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, or Washington DC. If you don’t live in these cities, you will have to travel to any one of them to experience one of the best international events in the social media world. Your other options, of course, are to connect through mobile and the Social Media Week’s conferences online.

The mission of Social Media Week is to “ … explore how local and regional societies, cultures, and economies are becoming more integrated and empowered through a global network of communication.”

If you still doubt the strength and power of social media throughout the world and its effects on our society and economy, then you must have been living under a rock for about the last two years. Social media has fueled revolutionary movements in the Middle East that had the power to bring on regime change. Businesses live and die by the power of social media. Ignoring the power of social media is like being an ostrich who buries its head in the sand and hopes that everything will just… go away.

It’s not going to happen.

Social Media Week aims to explore trends and create discussion, debate and conversations around the world in this phenomena that has and is: changing the world we live in. 60,000 people are expected to actually attend the organized events and another half a million will connect through mobile and the Social Media Weeks conferences online.

Each city will host special events and speakers with insights, ideas and strategies with the goal to open up discussion and perhaps change your world.

Join in the conversations. Social Media Week runs til February 17th. Visit the Social Media Week website at http://socialmediaweek.org/

If your company is not going to hire an agency, you’ll need a social media management system to handle your social media campaigns. Social media management systems will coordinate your efforts in the world of social media, assign roles, schedule publishing, and provide analytics to measure those efforts. We’re liking Shoutlet. Check it out in this video.

How does one find search engine optimization training?  How one to know which school is the best education institution to become a trained professional in search engine optimization (SEO)?  Since search engine optimization as a career is relatively new – a little over three years old at the time of writing, it may be a hit and miss deal as far as training is concerned.  Currently, there is no official certification for this career option which is a part of internet marketing.  However, once you have learned the basics, the best way to learn the craft is to do it.  Practice what you learn.  Start your own site or blog and get it into Page One in Google.  It’s a lot of work, but it can be done.  Challenge yourself, your knowledge and your acquired skills.

There are many people that call themselves “search engine optimization experts.”  These people may even say that they’ve been in the career since the internet got going in about 1999.  Ask to see their website or blog and ask them what keywords they are targeting.  Check them out in Google.  If they don’t have their own website or blog, it’s difficult to believe if they really know what they are doing.  Targeting keywords and gaining a position on the first page of the Google search engine for those keywords is a skill which requires practice.  Show the world you can do it.  This is the only way to really demonstrate that you know what you’re doing.

There are several courses you can take online which will prepare you to become a search engine optimization expert.  However, just taking these courses will not make you search engine optimization.  You still have to learn by doing.  A piece of paper – a certificate or diploma, even though it will say you are qualified, does not mean that you can actually succeed at search engine optimization.  You have to “do it.”

If you are looking for courses to become a search engine optimization expert, there are several courses available that our staff at Verotaro Marketing have taken to hone their skills in search engine optimization.  We can recommend some of those courses to help you with your own skills development.

The University of Waterloo offers a course for beginners and intermediate persons wishing to learn and improve their search engine optimization skills.  In their continuing education online courses, the University of Waterloo offers the course “Achieving Top Search Engine Positions.”  The course includes in its syllabus:  keyword research, the history of the search engines, determining keyword effectiveness, how website layout affects your results, what black hat tricks and spamming techniques to avoid and basic techniques for marketing your site.  This online SEO course is a good place to start to learn the basics of search engine optimization and how to improve your ranking in the search engines.

The University of Toronto offers several courses and workshops dealing with marketing and social media marketing – all related to how one’s business or site can improve position in the search engines.  These days, not only do you have to know how to optimize a website for the search engines, you also need to know how to use social media for marketing your site.

There are also a lot of good books you could read to train yourself to become a skilled search engine optimization expert.  However, without actually doing search engine optimization yourself with your own site or blog, you will never truly be a search engine optimization expert unless you can show results, results that find your website in Google, on Page One.