Pinterest Trivia and Other Data for Social Media Marketers

This past week I've been puttering around with my Pinterest Boards and got to wondering how many people have staked a claim on the Pinterest terrain. I'd read that Pinterest can be a useful marketing tool, though I'd never used it in that way before. I used it more like a scrapbook that you show friends. Recently, though, I noticed that people place links in their pins and in this manner can begin a relationship that -- if this is your aim -- leads to a sale or customer relationship.

All this to say I became curious how many Pinners there were and other such numbers. Here's a current set of ballpark numbers from the Omnicore Agency. Once I started collecting numbers I went ahead and checked into analytics for other types of social media. Omnicore has way more than you need here to get a sense of Pinterest's scale. A link at the end of this blog has more data to digest.

Pinterest Stats of Note

Pinterest was founded in 2010 and currently has 75 million monthly users in the U.S., 175 million worldwide.
Total Number of Pinterest Pins: 50 billion
Number of Pinterest Boards: 1 billion+
Men account for 7% of all Pins, 19% of all users.
There are over 17 billion recipe Pins here.

Noteworthy Numbers for Marketers
87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest.
Over 5% of referral traffic to websites comes from Pinterest.
80% of Pinterest's users access the site through mobile devices.
FWIW, you can find data for Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Periscope at Omnicore as well.

Social Media Statistics: SEO
Better content can drive traffic to a blog by up to 2,000%.
Google is responsible for 96% of all smartphone search traffic, and 94% of total organic traffic.
Search engines drive 93% of all website traffic.
About ½ of all searches are four words or more.
Two seconds is all companies get when it comes to website load time. Anything longer increases bounce rates by 50%.
82% of searchers will use their phone to help them make a decision about an in-store purchase.
42% of all men use their phone to call their wives and ask what it is they were supposed to get.*
Google claims it has an average of 63,000 searches every single second of the day.
#1 social media platform for teens is Snapchat. (What kid wants to hang out where his or her parents are?)
40% of all mobile users are searching for a local business or interest.
16% are looking for a parking spot.*
Location-specific ad campaigns are 20 times more effective than traditional banner ads.

Content Marketing Stats of Note
Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.
Content creation leads to 434% more indexed pages than websites without updated content.
38% of marketers are publishing content at least once a week.
60% of B2B marketers say they have a difficult time coming up with content that will engage their audience.***

Noteworthy Blogging Stats**

Featuring a blog as a key part of your website will give you a 434% better chance of being ranked highly on search engines.
Using images in your blog posts gets them 94% more views.
Companies that published 16 or more blog posts per month got 4.5X the leads than companies that published 4 or less monthly posts.
EdNote: The matter of how often to post is something I will address in a separate post. I post daily but at least one blogger says posting daily is "silly." 
B2C companies that blogged 11 times or more got more than 4X as many leads than those that publish only 4-5 posts per month.
Blogs that post daily get 5X more traffic compared to those that don’t.
58% of marketers voted for “original written content” as the most important type of content, outdoing images, videos, and infographics.
EdNote: This stat seems to affirm how I feel about video content. I don't watch videos online, or hardly ever. I like skimming written content for the nuggets I am looking for. The info on this blog post comes from cutting and pasting words, which would be far more time-consuming if delivered via video.

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When you start looking for stats, you'll find more than you ever dreamed possible. The ones that jump out for me pertain to content marketing, SEO and blogging. But I'll save my remarks for another post because there's more to say than time allows right now.

Till next!

* Fake Stats
**More Blogging Stats   
*** Need help? Talk to me.

Increasing the Odds of Success: Putting SEO In Perspective

Peter Bernstein, in his bestseller Against the Gods, the Remarkable Story of Risk, stated that no matter what the venture, whether managing a family or managing nations, risk is a factor that must be taken into consideration. No one can infallibly predict success, because there are always variables beyond our control. “Even with thousands of facts," wrote Bernstien, "the track record of experts proves that their estimates of the probabilities of final outcomes are open to doubt and uncertainty.”

In short, risk is part of business; there are no sure things. Wall Street does not always lead to Easy Street. Nor does an Internet retail strategy always lead to Internet riches. As Robert Burns noted in his ode to a mouse, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Nevertheless, we also know from experience that the very opposite is also true. Attempt nothing, and nothing you will achieve. In light of this latter equation, efforts at Search Engine Optimization are not optional but necessary.

This past month a friend of mine who runs a specialized online retail music business lamented that despite efforts at click-through links and banner ads, he had not found himself making any money despite the traffic brought in.

I observed, “Your lack of success might well have been your website's inability to easily and quickly lead to a purchase decision. Another failing may be that the traffic generated was too general and not specific enough.” In other words, SEO and other mechanisms for bringing in web traffic are only one piece of a larger strategic marketing plan.

He replied that he’d not thought of that.

The wonderful thing about the net is that we can measure everything. The hard data we gather helps us fine tune our efforts. By continually improving our systems, we generate more revenue with the same amount of effort (greater efficiency). Banner ads, pay per click ads on search engines, Google Adwords are all tactics, though none guarantee sales.

All that said, one sure way to be unsuccessful is to have no traffic at all because no one can find you. SEO is one tool among many that we use to minimize risk and increase odds of success.

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This article was originally published in Internet Retailer circa 2004.

A Rewarding Visit with Influential Writer/Entrepreneur Charles Chu, Including 4 Tips for Bloggers

I discovered the blog of Charles Chu by coming across an article he wrote about mental resilience and the techniques Navy SEALs use to develop it. The article struck me as not only useful, but engaging enough to make me want to explore more about the author. Its home was a blog with the intriguing title Market Meditations.  

EN: Where did you grow up and how has your family influenced who you are?

Charles Chu: I was born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents. My parents were extremely poor and came to the US in search of a better life. It's the classic immigrant story. I grew up with a Chinese cultural environment at home but a very American one everywhere else. There was always a sense of not belonging and not fitting in. That made me ask a lot of questions about human nature, how the world works, etc.

EN: How long have you been writing your Market Meditations blog? What was its original purpose and how has it evolved?

CC: Funny story. The original blog was meant to be about finance, particularly global macro trading. That's why the word "Market" is in the title. That was one of the dozens of failed experiments I've had.

The real blog (as you know it) has only been around for two months. I was answering questions on Quora, and I was surprised to find that over one million people read my answers in a single month! That was the proof I needed that people like the way I think. I take a different approach to challenges (both philosophically and technically), and that reflects in the success the blog is seeing.

EN: Where did your belief that "success can be engineered" originate?

CC: Few people know this, but I come from a mathematical background. I used to do math competitions in grade school. I've also dabbled in poker and equity trading. If you look at successful performers in this field (or any field), they share common philosophies and attributes. And when you study the failures, they tend to lack these same qualities.

Success in investing or gambling is typically attributed to "luck", but the best know that it is engineered. You can create conditions to maximize the probability of profit (or success, in our case). Afterwards, all that is left is to survive long enough for results to start coming in.

EN: Who are some of the great thinkers whose ideas you deconstruct and share?

CC: Anyone who inspires me. The blog hasn't been around that long, but I've looked at statesmen (like Ben Franklin), writers (like Isaac Asimov), marketers (like Seth Godin), and even Hedge Fund managers (like Stanley Druckenmiller).

EN: What was your method for generating blog traffic?

CC: I can't cover this in detail without several dozen pages, but let me outline the general concepts.

• I borrow traffic. I write 90%+ of my stuff off the blog. Why? Because posting things on a blog shows it to nobody (except for your existing readership). You have to find places where people gather, show your work to them and give them a way to come to your site.

• I don't use SEO. For new bloggers, SEO is like picking pennies in front of a steamroller. You can do hours and hours of research to target keywords that bring 100-200 readers a month. I could spend that time engineering a hit on Reddit, Quora or another social sharing site and bring in 10-20 thousand readers instead.

• I find the right audience for my work. If I write something about minimalism or frugality, I'm not going to promote it to an advertising channel. It's not my right audience. I write about what interests me. This tends to fall into several core categories. The rest is just about finding where those people gather and showing them your work.

• I don't network. One of my posts was recently featured on the NY Observer. The editor emailed ME to ask to republish it. All I have to do is focus on putting my work out in public and making it top 1% in quality. Why spend hours pitching editors and other bloggers with mediocre writing when I can put that time into making amazing writing that other people beg me to share?

EN: Excellent advice. What are your favorite topics to write about?

CC: I scratch my own itch. I have a long laundry list of exciting ideas, but here are some—entrepreneurship, human nature, cognitive science, philosophy, biohacking, movement, productivity, world travel, risk-taking, guerrilla marketing, learning languages... I could go on forever.

My advice to other writers: if you want interest, you need to be interesting. And if you want to be interesting, be interested first. There are millions of other wannabe writers out there. What makes you the best in the world at what you do?

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Want more? Join 5000+ readers of The Open Circle, a free weekly newsletter where Charles deconstructs great minds and shares actionable insights from his own crazy experiments. 

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A lot of good suggestions here. Don't just read it. Ingest it and make it your own.

Warhol, Jackie and SEO

The top feature in today's ArtDaily Newsletter is about Andy Warhol's "Sixteen Jackies" which is going on sale at Sotheby's on May 10. They are predicting it will fetch 30 million dollars. I'm wondering if having these pieces featured in news stories like this one helps amp their prices by increasing their apparent value. I'm also curious how many prints were made the day this one was screened. The article calls it a painting, but it's a screen printed piece, right?

Warhol's persistent use of celebrities and ubiquitous imagery is a real life illustration of how the Google algorithm weighs the value of websites on the internet. Internet marketers are keenly interested in having a high ranking in the search engines so that net surfers will find their wares more easily. One way to get a high rank is to be linked to websites with still higher rankings, and vice versa. The affiliation increases the value of the affiliated.

No doubt Warhol knew what he was doing by giving us a multitude of Marilyns and Liz Taylors. He hitched himself to stars and was thereby lifted to heights unseen in a screen print artist. The timing was right, too, as photostencil technology was coming of age. When Picasso claimed to have produced 4,000 masterpieces in his lifetime, Warhol quipped, "I can produce 4,000 masterpieces in one day."

Andy stayed current with the technology and produced work that really does have impact, though in his ironic way he actually stated the opposite. "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel," Warhol explained in 1975.

A shrewd marketer, Warhol catapulted himself into the center of the contemporary art scene. His prints, drawings and paintings are among the most coveted and valued in the art world today.

Top right: Warhol On Easel, photo in my studio.

Looking for a Job? How To Make A Parachute

In the early 1980’s when I had returned from a year in Mexico I needed to find a way to plug in to the job market. A book that was exceedingly helpful to me that year was Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? Peter Drucker praised it and so do I. The sub-title is A Practical Manual for Job Hunters & Career Changers.

Now when I discovered this book, the advice I was urged to follow was this: skip the book and do the exercises in the appendix. Sure enough, this was superb advice at the time because those exercises helped shape and affirm a strong sense of self-concept that proved to be the real key in my career success.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, whereupon the wise counsel “Know Thyself” was inscribed, Bolles directs us to the only valid start-point in a career. Who am I and what can I contribute? Without clarity here, the whole process of interviews, resumes, applications gets pretty grainy.

A recent BusinessWeek story (April 30, 2009) stated that there are 3 million job vacancies in the U.S. right now. This is fairly significant mismatch, in part due to some unusual factors. The housing crisis has made it challenging for many people to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. Another problem is that a lot of today’s unemployed are untrained in areas where there are needs. Experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not easily found amongst the ranks of the hammer-and-nail construction layoffs.

The advice that follows may not apply to everyone, but it is something that worked for at least one fellow in the tech sector, formerly employed by Yahoo!, named Jeff Scott. What do tech people do for fun? They go to places like Mashup Camp and play hacker games, among other things. Networking, learning new skills, new tools…

Mashup Camp is a production of Techweb’s Aleternative Events Group which aims to bring Internet developers and attendees into close proximity in an unconference-style event. The first Mashup Camp took place in February 2006. The highlight is a competition to see who can develop the best mashups. (A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple sources.)

Jeff Scott not only won a Dell E248WFP 24-inch Widescreen Black Flat Panel LCD Monitor, he landed himself a job by means of a mashup he created titled I NEED A JOB. Using Mozenda data harvesting technology Scott essentially sewed his own parachute. The net result: Scott is now publisher and editor of 148Apps.com, an iPhone App News and Review blog launched in 2008.

A PRWeb story explained. Scott designed his Mashup to help people who are now or soon will be out of a job. The mashup takes the text from your resume or a URL pointing to your resume or Linked In profile and processes the text through Yahoo! Text Extraction to get key terms about you, your skills and job experience. Then it processes over 50,000 Craigslist.org listings all scraped from the Craigslist site by Mozenda looking for the best matches for your skills. It then ranks, by city, the best places for you to look for a new job possibly giving you some options you wouldn't have considered previously.

According to Scott the speed with which one can get set up setup for creating, testing and scraping templates with Mozenda was most impressive. “The quick setup and testing is the killer feature,” said Scott. “What Mozenda does isn't unique, it's the way they do it that rocks.”

As they used to say in the old days, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know if they skin cats anywhere these days, but for sure there are a lot of people in need of good parachutes. I wonder if there's money to be made in writing mashups for job hunters. Or maybe those Mozenda folks can help you write your own. Nowadays parachute makers weave code instead of fabric. The goal, in either case, is a soft landing.

Increasing the Odds of Success Through SEO

Peter Bernstein, in his bestseller Against the Gods, the Remarkable Story of Risk, stated that no matter what the venture, whether managing a family or managing nations, risk is a factor that must be taken into consideration. No one can infallibly predict success, because there are always variables beyond our control. “Even with thousands of facts, the track record of experts,” wrote Bernstein, “proves that their estimates of the probabilities of final outcomes are open to doubt and uncertainty.”

In short, risk is part of business; there are no sure things. Wall Street does not always lead to Easy Street. Nor does an internet retail strategy always lead to internet riches. As Robert Burns noted in his ode to a mouse, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Nevertheless, we also know from experience that the very opposite is also true. Attempt nothing, and nothing you will achieve. In light of this latter equation, efforts at Search Engine Optimization are not optional but necessary.

This past month a friend of mine who runs a specialized online retail music business lamented that despite efforts at click-through links and banner ads, he had not found himself making any money despite the traffic brought in.

I observed, “Your lack of success might well have been your website's inability to easily and quickly lead to a purchase decision. Another failing may be that the traffic generated was too general and not specific enough.” In other words, SEO and other mechanisms for bringing in web traffic are only one piece of a larger strategic marketing plan.

He replied that he’d not thought of that.

The wonderful thing about the net is that we can measure everything. The hard data we gather helps us fine tune our efforts. By continually improving our systems, we generate more revenue with the same amount of effort (greater efficiency). Banner ads, pay per click ads on search engines, Google Adwords are all tactics, though none guarantee sales.

All that said, one sure way to be unsuccessful is to have no traffic at all because no one can find you. SEO is one tool among many that we use to minimize risk and increase odds of success.

en ~1996

For additional articles I have written pertaining to achieving success in business, visit: http://www.enewman.biz/MARKTNG.html