Until now, Pinterest, the world's third-largest social network, has been lacking one big thing: analytics. Users could rack up followers and repins of their content, but there was no way for business owners to find out what had been pinned from their sites, or, in the other direction, how many people were coming to their sites from Pinterest.

But today the company announced that it has introduced an analytics dashboard to help website owners -- whether they're running a small business or a big brand -- gauge the popularity of their content.


The analytics will show how many people have pinned content from your site and how many users have seen those pins. It will also track visitor traffic from Pinterest, and you'll be able to see recent pins and your most repinned content of all time, so that you can get a sense both of what is currently trending and of what is most popular overall.

"We think that these tools will help website owners understand what's working for them and what’s not so that they can create even better pins in the future," writes Tao Tao, a Pinterest software engineer, in a company blog post.

To start using the analytics yourself, first get your website verified by Pinterest and then simply access the Analytics tab on the top-right menu. You can even download your analytics to study offline.

News of the analytics dashboard comes only weeks after Pinterest closed a $200 million funding round that valued the social bookmarking site at $2.5 billion. With Pinterest experiencing explosive growth, brands are taking a greater interest in it than ever before.

As of February 1st, 69 of the world's top 100 brands, as measured by consulting firm Interbrand, had Pinterest accounts. Large retailers are especially eager to capitalize on Pinterest's majority-female user base. Pinterest shoppers spend $169 on average per session, according to RichRelevance, an ecommerce consultancy. Nordstrom, one of the most popular brands, has nearly 4.3 million Pinterest followers, and L.L.Bean has 5.7 million.



































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Twitter is a great tool to build your brand and spread the word about your business. Here are six tips for building your brand on Twitter.


1. Use your brand name as your Twitter name. 

This seems obvious, but I see many companies not using their brand name as their Twitter name. They use a cute Twitter name that isn't related to their brand name.

2. Use your logo as your Twitter picture. 

Again, this sounds very obvious, but some companies don't use their logo for some reason.

3. Send Tweets that provide useful information to customers and prospects.

Always add a link to more information on your website. It should be a page on your website that adds value to the Tweet but doesn't require them to fill out a web form to view the information. This complements your lead-generation Tweets. You don't want to make people fill out a web form every time or they may get frustrated.

4. Send Tweets to new blog posts or videos. 

You can also send Tweets to older blog posts and videos that are still relevant.

5. You should Tweet 10 to 20 times a day to keep your brand name in the Twitter stream. 

You can schedule the Tweets that have links to valuable content and complement that with five to 10 personalized Tweets where you are interacting with other Twitter users.

6. Create a persona for your Twitter presence so people will get to know your brand.

Investopedia defines brand personality as "A set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand name." A brand personality is something to which the consumer can relate, and an effective brand will increase its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits. This is the added value that a brand gains, aside from its functional benefits. There are five main types of brand personalities: excitement, sincerity, ruggedness, competence, and sophistication.

• Excitement. It's easy to spot a person who's excited on Twitter.These people love life, and they love everything they do. They also love to share their excitement with the Twitterverse, and it's fun to follow these people. Their Tweets will almost always uplift you.
• Sincerity. We all know the sincere people in our lives. They really care about you and your well-being. They Tweet the same way by always being genuine, caring, and sincere when they converse with others on Twitter.
• Ruggedness. These are the tough guys who never shed a tear. Their Tweets sound like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood confronting their adversaries and never backing down. You'll never see a hint of compassion or sympathy from rugged Tweeters.
• Competence. This is a well-educated, knowledgeable person who loves to Tweet information that will impress others. They love to share their knowledge and use big words in their Tweets, which can be challenging with the 140-character limit.
• Sophistication. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are sophisticated Tweeters. They love to Tweet pictures of their shopping trips and expensive cars, and let you know they're eating in the finest restaurants.

Appearing on the first page of a Google search can be the difference between the success or the failure of your business
.
The smart business owners and the savvy operators of eCommerce stores know that the free traffic delivered by search engines is worth gold to a business.
Research shows that ranking first on Google produces over 40 percent of all clicks to websites. Listing on the first page of a search, results in over 90 percent of all clicks. Now that is important in a digital economy!
Also a Google search can produce a negative or positive impression about a brand depending on what content and links appear in the search results. So online reputation management is also an important activity.
For a long time, Search Engine Optimization and Online Reputation Management have been looked upon as two parallel services. Google recently has changed how it performs its search. These updates to the search engine algorithms were titled “Panda” and the most recent changes were called “Penguin“.
So with these changes where does the future of both these services lie?
Let’s breakdown each of the services.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When SEO started, it was easy to do. There were guaranteed success methods and approaches such as the following produced great results.

• Keyword density
• Meta tags
• Content

There were sites which went up overnight by acquiring links from questionable sources. Spamming an important keyword on the page was a very likely affair. People posted articles on blog networks, with each topic as unrelated as chalk and cheese!
The creation of low-quality, thin content was an easy option for a lot of people who were trying to gain success overnight! This list can go on and on!
Anything that is abused over time is likely to burn out. And so did these practices!

Google Wants Quality Content

Google’s Panda update was aimed at providing more relevant and quality content to users. This update was rolled out in the USA in February 2011, with various refreshes and updates over the course of the next 16 months. Panda 3.8 was released in the end of June 2012. While webmasters were still trying to come to terms with the Panda update (about 11.8% of all searches were affected with the first update.)
Google recently rolled out the Penguin update (about 3.1% of all search queries were affected). This update was aimed at keeping a check on

• Link schemes
• Exact anchor text linking
• Blog networks
• Duplicate content etc

Here is a great infographic comparing Google’s Panda and Penguin updates and how they affect your Brand’s visibility to the Google search engine.

Infographic  by Reload Media – Difference between Google Penguin & Panda

Content Marketing is Vital to SEO

Post these two updates, the SEO world has started viewing the terms ‘content’ and ‘links’ differently. For an SEO guy, content started focusing more on pieces that were not only unique and engaging but also something that a user could associate with!
Content Marketing became a term that every SEO expert started relating with more closely!
SEO agencies have started rolling out extensive content marketing plans for their clients, focusing on the creation of detailed content plans including the following

• Blogs
• PDF documents
• Whitepapers,
• eBooks,
• Presentations,
• Image syndication

You name a medium, and they have targeted it! SEO started focusing strongly on content marketing, wherein content marketing has become the crux of any SEO campaign.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

ORM is one of the most dynamic activities online and one of the most difficult too. It is the only activity where you have little or no control over different situations and/or circumstances which can completely turn around all the hard work invested into a campaign!
An outsider speaking about your brand, the brand’s offline activities, and the actions of an important entity associated with the brand, all these can completely change the statistics of your campaign overnight! Positive mentions, neutral mentions and negative mentions! These more or less rule the life of that person who is trying to protect your online reputation.
Let’s run through the aim of any ORM campaign:

• Ensure that the client get as much positive exposure as possible. Try and get as many positive mentions up in the top 10/20/30 results!
• If it isn’t positive, ensure that you have neutral content about your brand!
• Neutralize the NEGATIVE content pieces!!!!

The easiest way to go about doing this is to ensure that you have positive/neutral content online talking about your brand. (Not that it is easy to do that!)
Also, since you work closely with the brand, you become the official channel of sorts, responsible for creating content and syndication across mediums and platforms! The content creation involves having an exhaustive content plan in place and using various mediums including videos, blogs, articles, etc.

Does this Sound Similar to SEO?

The lines distinguishing both these services are becoming less distinct by each passing day. The objective of both SEO and ORM now align towards the creation of good, unique and engaging content. Content marketing remains the focus of both services. Reaching out to new people, gaining greater visibility and creating a stronger brand presence are extremely important. The principle of SEO is now to ensure that not only is your brand reaching out to more people but also focus on creating a strong brand presence online.

SEO is Now Part of Brand Building

Brand building is becoming a more integral part of SEO activity! ORM has by principle always concentrated on promoting the brand!
It seems that a new service package offering Branding + SEO + ORM is the call of the hour. Anyone who has an online store, not only wants to increase their presence and standing, but also wants to ensure that their brand is being recognized by their target audience. It is essentially the first step to become a major player and stand out in a many player market! I can guarantee that this will not only be used by the big fish who are well established and will rely more on the monitoring and the reputation side of things but also by the small startups looking for a strong branding campaign to promote themselves and garner greater visibility!
Is Branding + Search Engine Optimization + Online Brand Monitoring & Online Reputation Management the next big thing? Thoughts?
Author: This post is written by Anindita Debnath, who works with Convonix as a Project Manager – SEO. She manages a big team of SEO professionals handling a substantial number of campaigns collectively. Apart from this, she takes up the responsibility of training fresh recruits and ushering them into the ever-evolving world of SEO.



































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