If you're reading this, you're probably failing at social media image marketing. That's not me being cynical. By examining dozens of business social media presences every week, I get to see what so many are doing and the unfortunate fact is that 9 out of 10 are doing it wrong or not doing it at all. I'm being conservative with that estimate.

The "unfortunate"…

Don’t worry. Women will still rule on Pinterest for the foreseeable future. That part’s not going to change. What will change is that Pinterest is edging its way into the hearts and marketing marketing toolboxes of businesses around the world, whether they’re run by men, women, or both.

As a result, the balance of power is shifting ever-so…

For a long time, I assumed that this was a well-known technique, but after talking to some clients I realized that it’s not as common as I thought. If you have a Pinterest account (you should) and you don’t mind using it for business (you might), then you should definitely be mixing in some business-relevant posts.

Here’s the basic idea – your personal Pinterest or…

There have been valid business reasons to use hashtags for years. Twitter started it off. Pinterest added to it. Google+ mastered it in many ways. Instagram, Tumblr… the list of social sites on which hashtags are relevant is long. Facebook was the last major holdout. Now that they’ve joined the bandwagon, it’s go time.…

When I was asked last year to develop a social media marketing service, the first question they asked was whether I already had software in mind or if it needed to be built. I told them that the software had already been developed and it was free. This didn’t go over well at first; they’d always used premium social media…

There are those who think that Facebook and Twitter are the only relevant social networks when it comes to business. There are those who go so far as saying that Facebook is all that you need. In truth, both may be right, but that’s strictly from a social perspective. Once you throw search into the equation, Google+, Pinterest,…

Yesterday, I found myself utterly mortified. I caught a Pinterest page that my team was managing uploading images to Pinterest. After several deep breaths, I talked to my teammate and corrected this for the future.

Pinterest has an image upload feature. I wish they didn’t. There’s absolutely no reason to pin an image directly…

There’s just no excuse for car dealers to not be on Pinterest. Some would say it’s worthless. Some would say it’s hard to understand. Some might even say that it’s a fad. They might all be valid arguments under normal circumstances, but there’s on thing that trumps them all.

It takes no time, almost literally. You can maintain a very strong, daily-updated Pinterest presence…

If there’s one major flaw with the way that many businesses use automation tools, it’s that they’re not able to properly control the flow of content from its longest form down to it’s shortest form. This is unfortunate because using RSS feeds to post to Facebook and Twitter from a blog, for example, doesn’t save much time at all but minimizes the effectiveness of the networks.

It’s all about flow. It’s about taking…

There’s a case against Twitter and Pinterest that is being waged by some in the automotive industry. They’ll say that there simply isn’t a good return on investment, that they aren’t worth messing with because it’s just too hard to find a benefit from them. This is true until you look at one major factor: time.

Twitter and Pinterest require very little time to maintain and keep vibrant.…

Over the past couple of months, I've been working on a standard operating procedure for a comprehensive social media marketing service. It has been a while since I had to develop an overarching strategy rather than one that was individualized for a business or…

There are two truly valid ways to post on social media. It depends on the personality, goals, and bandwidth available within your business. Both have pros and cons. Both have chances of success and failure.

This is Part III of the series on timing. Please read…

For the past several years, content has been a component of search engine and social media marketing that fell far below the tricks and techniques that helped achieve business goals. It was possible to be successful with limited or low-quality content. In…

It was the 2011 Driving Sales Executive Summit when I was asked by Joe Webb to participate in a debate about Twitter followers. I had around 100,000 followers at the time and he wanted me to argue for the side of quantity being more important than quality. This made perfect sense…

There is a rise in niche-level outsourced social media that is refreshing on one hand and discouraging on the other. It's encouraging because when agencies take the stance of focusing on a single niche such as automotive or entertainment, they are able to build up several resources to make their jobs easier…