Check out the process of making this infographic on our Facebook page.

• How following a brand can effect customers purchase intent.
• What companies are saying about the effect of social media.
• The value of Twitter and Facebook followers.
• Average costs of acquiring Twitter and Facebook followers through promoted means.

In the past the web has been very much a written word medium. It began as a coders paradise and has steadily become more and more accepting of visual design. The first two social networks to really kill it, Facebook and Twitter, have news feeds that are predominately text based (Though Facebook is becoming more visual daily with the inclusion of Timelines and larger photo displays in news feeds). Then we have Pinterest, with a very visually stimulating news feed. Instead of people sharing website URLs they are sharing pictures. This is somewhat of a kick in the nuts for bloggers and article marketing. Without stimulating pictures articles will never be seen on this up-and-coming social network!

So what should article marketers and bloggers do? They need to shift their mindset from creating great articles to creating great content. I’ve seen so many bloggers slam the typical White-animorphous-being-holding-some-abstractly-relevant-object stock image into their posts and letting it coast on their words.

This simply won’t cut it from here on out. Not only does the content matter but the way you deliver that content matters too!

When you write your next article make sure you are not only thinking about:

What they are reading AND seeing!

Your articles need to be visually stimulating as well mentally stimulating to fully take advantage of the direction the social sharing is going. If you don’t believe me just look at some of our own referral traffic:

22% from Pinterest! Why is this? It’s because we have a couple of infographics that people absolutely love and they are in a frenzy repining them on Pinterest. Pinterest eats infographics up! They are big and bold and almost inescapable on Pinterest.

Go ahead and try it!

Challenge

Before you post your next article make sure you use one or two images that are highly stimulating and relevant.

I guarantee you will dramatically increase the amount of traffic you get from sites like Pinterest. If you do accept this challenge let me know the results with a comment.

WATER BOTTLES BE HERE!

Thankfully there are loads of social media tools for businesses out there to try and lighten the burden of managing a social media presence on top of everything else. Don’t get too caught up in all the little tools that are floating around out there, remember that growing a social media presence can be done without any of these but also recognize when certain ones that can optimize or save you time! Here are a few social media tools for business that I recommend:

Hootsuite

This web-based software is quite effective at consolidating your social media efforts into one central hub. Allows you to pick out social networks to send specific messages to, for example: Lets say you want to send an update to your Foursquare and Twitter accounts but not your Facebook, this is easily done through Hootsuite by selecting those specific networks and crafting an update. This alleviates the signing in to multiple websites and copying and pasting needed to do the same process manually. Hootsuite can be a huge time saver if you are worried about having to manage a lot of different networks.

Pros:

• Makes sharing to all your accounts easy.
• Hootsuite browser button makes it easy to quickly share things while browsing the web.
• Can schedule out your social media updates to make sure the maximum amount of eyes see your updates.
• Strong support and consistent updates means Hootsuite will always be fairly up to date on the largest
• social networks.

Cons:

• Posts to Facebook as a 3rd party app, this means your edgerank (What Facebook uses to determine how relevant your updates are to the people who follow you) is degraded some.
• Only supports up to 5 social networks on a free account, but the price point for an upgraded account is very reasonable ($6.99/month at the time of writing this with no commitment)

Edgerank Checker

This is a free tool that lets you check how you are doing on your edgerank. If you’ve never heard of edgerank I’ll give you a brief rundown: Edgerank is Facebook’s algorithm to determine how updates are seen on a user’s newsfeed, obviously we want to be as close to the top of user’s news feeds as we can get. To get a higher edgerank we need to encourage interaction. You can use Edgerankchecker.com to determine how your Edgerank is lining up against other pages. This is useful for making sure you are getting the most out of your Facebook pages.

Tweriod

Great tool for Twitter. This neat little application lets you check to see what times your Twitter followers are on. This is great for determining when to send out tweets to get the most interaction and retweets! When you combine this application with Hootsuite you can schedule your tweets any time of the day and make sure they are going out during the most optimal times.

Slideshare

A great tool for creating dynamic presentations. This can be helpful for making a larger point than 160 characters allows you to. It’s also somewhat of a social network too so it can help get more eyes on your business.

Hubspot’s Marketing Grader

Hubspots free marketing grader is a great way to find out what parts you are missing in your sales funnel. Knowing where you could be leaking customers is incredibly valuable. I encourage you to check it out and see what kind of grade you get.

These tools should help you focus and manage the beast that is social media for small business. Are there any that I forgot that you currently use? Leave a comment and let me know what I missed. I love learning about new tools.

Update: Due to the popularity of this infographic we’ve created a slide presentation of this as well.

Keep in mind that just because a network has a lot of users doesn’t mean it is the most effective one for you to be focusing your efforts on. More targeted networks can often bring you far higher quality customers than huge networks.