This week you will:

• Create a Pinterest Board on Social Media Tips and analyze your effectiveness.

This week you will: Create a Pinterest Board on Social Media Tips

Create a Pinterest Board called, Social Media Tips, with as much clarity, accuracy, significance, and depth as possible, and by providing evidence of all your blog posts to the concepts studied in this course:

1. How do you engage in an online community?
2. How do you create compelling online content?
3. How do you create an online identity?

Did you Join Pinterest?

1. Sign-up for a Pinterest account- on the Pinterest home page
   1. How to Sign Up for Pinterest
   2. How to Use Pinterest
   3. When you do sign up, you’ll have the option to link either your Facebook or Twitter account with your Pinterest account. Why should you consider connecting? It’ll make it easier for you to find your friends, family members, and favorite blogs and brands to follow on Pinterest. If you prefer to start with just your e-mail address, you can always connect your social accounts later.
2. Create Your Profile. When you create your account, think about the other social accounts you have. Try to stick with a consistent username if you already have a Twitter or Instagram account. That will make it easier for anyone who follows you to find you via searching on Pinterest. It also helps to use the same profile photo—that way people know it’s you.
3. Check Your Settings. Once your account is active the first thing you should do is take a look at your e-mail settings.
4. Luckily, Pinterest’s options are straightforward and easy to understand. When you first start pinning, keep all the e-mail notifications on. It’s a great way to find new people to follow by seeing who likes, comments, or repins ideas from your boards. You can turn them off later if they are clogging your inbox.
5. Install the Pin It Button- The easiest way to add content from any site is to add the "Pin It" button to your web browser.
   1. Visit the "Goodies" page on Pinterest to learn how to install it. You can also add pins via the Pin It button on your favorite sites. It will usually be close to the Facebook and Twitter share buttons.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images—known as pins—and other media content (e.g., videos) through collections known as pinboards. Pinterest acts as a personalized media platform. Users can browse the content of others in their feed.

Pinterest has the most potential to gain recognition and drive traffic to your blog. I cannot stress the importance of how much Pinterest can help grow your blog audience. If you’re not on it,stop reading right now and open an account on Pinterest.com before you proceed.

Just lets these statistics do the talking…

Quick Stats (as of March 2014)

• launched in March 2010
• 70 million active users
• 80% women, 20% men
• Pinterest drives more revenue to ecommerce sites than any other social share
• in Jan 2014, Pinterest overtook Facebook in terms of revenue per visit
• Call to action pins increase engagement by 80%
• The average user has a household income of over $100,000
• The main demographic is between ages 25-35
• Users spend 4.5 more time on Pinterest than Linkedin

How to Use Pinterest for Beginners

Pinterest is a highly visual virtual pinboard site that lets you "pin" or collect images from the Web. You create boards to help you categorize your images and add descriptions to remind you why you bookmarked them in the first place. ("This shade of yellow would look amazing in the foyer," or "My nephew will love these headphones for his birthday.") Most of these images—or pins—link back to the original website they appeared on so you can easily access them later.

When people hear "Pinterest," they often associate it with recipes, wedding dresses, and braids (i.e. women: some studies suggest up to 80 percent of Pinterest users are female). It's true that many pinners use the site to glean inspiration in these areas, but the social site is also flooded with teachers, universities, designers, airlines, nonprofits, businesses, real estate brokers, and news outlets that have explored other ways to use Pinterest.

Ready to find out how Pinterest can work for you? Follow us as we walk you through getting started. And of course, check out PCMag on Pinterest for tech tips, product reviews, and more.

1. Join Pinterest

Visit pinterest.com and click Join Pinterest. It will ask you to join by connecting with Facebook or Twitter, but a third option lets you sign up using your email address.

To connect with Facebook, you need to give the app permission to access your basic info, email address, birthday, and likes. This lets the app post activity on your behalf, though you can decide whether or not your pins get reposted to Facebook. It automatically imports your Facebook photo; you can then create a username and password. Here you can uncheck or leave checked two boxes: "Follow recommended friends" and "Publish activity to Facebook Timeline."

By connecting with Twitter, you're giving the app permission to read tweets from your timeline, see who you follow and follow new people, update your profile, and post tweets for you.

Not cool with these stipulations? Dive in on your own by signing up with just your email. You'll be asked a few more questions such as your gender since that info isn't imported from an existing social media account. Upload a profile photo and proceed. VIEW ALL PHOTOS IN GALLERY

2. Follow Some Boards

Once you have an account, you'll need to find fascinating boards to fill your feed. Pinterest gets you started by suggesting some. Select a category from the list such as Design, Geek, Science & Nature, and Technology among others, and then check at least five boards to continue.

These boards are just to get you going. As you navigate the site you'll find other boards worth following. For more recommendations, see PCMag's picks for tech boards to follow on Pinterest. Keep in mind that most accounts have multiple boards, so if you follow an account you automatically follow all its boards. You can also follow specific boards, and can unfollow a board at any time without the account being notified.

3. Verify Your Account

After selecting some boards you'll receive an email confirmation.

Once you verify your account, the next screen you'll see is your home feed, which features the most recent pins from people you follow. The more users or boards you follow, the more content will turn over.

4. Adjust Settings

Now is a good time to adjust your settings. Mouse over the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner with your picture and click Settings. Here you can update basic information, opt out of email notifications, and connect or disconnect your Facebook or Twitter account.

5. Create Your Own Boards

You need to build boards in order to collect and organize items you're interested in. To do so, click Your Boards in the upper right-hand drop-down menu, then click Create a Board. A box will pop up asking you to name your board, add a description, and categorize it. If you need some ideas, popular board names include For the Home, Books Worth Reading, Favorite Places & Spaces, and Recipes. You may want to get more specific with boards like Gluten-Free Desserts, Home Office Designs, Birthday Gifts for the Kids, or iPhone Apps I Love.

Once you create a board you can pin items to it. By clicking Edit Board at the top you can also invite others to pin to your board, but you need to either follow the user or enter their associated email address to do so.

You also have the option to create a secret board. Whatever you pin to this board is only visible to you and those you invite to it; if you don't want to freak out a new boyfriend by pinning wedding dresses you love, or spoil your wife's birthday surprise by pinning gift ideas, flip this switch to make the board private.

6. Get Pinning

Congratulations on making it this far, now you're ready to get pinning! You can peruse the pins of people you follow on your home feed (accessible by clicking the Pinterest logo at the top of the screen), or search more specifically by selecting a category from the drop-down menu in the upper left-hand corner of the screen next to the search bar. Speaking of the search bar, you can also find boards, pins, or pinners by entering a keyword there.

When you see an image you want to pin, simply hover over it and click the red Pin It button that appears in the upper left-hand corner. You'll be asked to designate it to one of your boards and add a description. Clicking elsewhere on the image enlarges it. (This helpful video has more about how to repin.)

There will likely come a time in your pinning career when you wish every image on the Web—not just images on Pinterest—had a Pin It button. Well they do, sort of. Many sites like PCMag have a Pin It widget on most of their pages to make it easy for you to pin content, but you can also install and use the Pin It bookmarklet in your own browser. (Chrome users can find the extension here and other browser users can grab it from Pinterest's Goodies page.) This allows you to pin an image or article from any external site—a picture of a new Editors' Choice smartphone from PCMag, for instance, or a delicious dish from that foodie blog you follow.

Lastly, you can upload your own pins. Say you have a picture of an awesome dinner you concocted or a great computer mod you built; visit the Your Pins page and click the plus button that says "Add a pin." Here you can upload your image, pick its board, and add a description. Others can then repin your image.

7. Get Social

You're officially part of the Pinterest party now so it's time to make some friends. Follow more boards and build out your own to attract new followers. Get friendly by liking (click Like next to the Pin It button) and commenting on other pins.

What words are people using most on Pinterest?

We were super curious about the words that people are using on Pinterest as it speaks to both the images they are sharing and what they think about them.

Here are the top nine words, ranked by volume:

Looking at the top nine words used most frequently in Pinterest captions, it’s neat to see the top three are Make, Design and Logo. This hints that the most engaging content might be rather creative and related to design (maybe even digital design with the word logo making an appearance).

After those three, the other top words are: new, love, get, one, free, day.

Make, the most pinned word we found in this study, appeared in 63,293 pins – that’s around 4% of the 1.5m pins we analyzed.

What are the most common words for the most popular pins?

After looking at the most common words in general on Pinterest, we wanted to tie these words into engagement, e.g. which words are being used in only the most popular pins.

The difference is interesting here. Make is still the lead, followed by One, Easy, Recipe, Free, Chicken, Paleo, Great and Love.

Experiment with using fewer words

We found that the average character length for pins was 98 characters. With Pinterest being a visually driven platform, very few characters are shown when scrolling through the feed. In our experience, our pin captions are truncated around 50-60 characters, with the rest of the caption viewable once someone clicks or taps into a pin.

This gives us the sense that it’s incredibly important to choose those characters wisely.

In this example, Kylee only uses 4 words (18 characters).