Content Marketing: Not Everything That Glistens is Gold
There has been a lot of recent buzz surrounding new social media websites such as Pinterest.com. Now, even the graveyard of social media, MySpace.com, is said to be making a huge comeback. Just because a website is getting attention on among Twitterholics doesn’t mean it is a useful tool for Canarian businesses.
Part of the challenge of social media and content marketing is knowing where to share your content for maximum return on time invested. Canary Content focuses on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr: They have user bases in the hundreds of millions and will be around for years to come. Some newer sites, while terribly fashionable, may well fade away, taking your audience and investment with them.
Pinterest.com is an example of a white-hot site that could well disappear in a puff of smoke. It has only has 14 million users (March 20112) and most of these are US women. In the UK, there are less than 50,000 users, mostly men using its boards for business purposes.
While Pinterest.com’s stats may improve, Canarian marketers would be better off focusing on Flickr.com, which is the 47th most popular website on Earth (Alexa). Flickr.com is ranked 23 in Spain, 25 in UK, 47 in Germany. It has 51 million registered members and gets 80 million unique visitors per month. Flickr’s stats dwarf Pinterest’s, and will do for some time.
Images hosted on Flickr can easily be posted directly onto Facebook and Twitter. They can also be tagged and described with SEO text that pushes them up the Google rankings. Flickr also allows its users to host and tag videos in the same way. Well described and tagged images on Flickr regularly appear at the top of Google’s Image Searches. As yet, Pinterest boards are not appearing in Google searches.
Success on Pinterest involves creating boards that contain your own images along with others repined from other sources. Flickr on the other hand, only hosts content that is provided by copyright holders. As the site gets larger, expect photographers to get more aggressive about protecting their copyright, especially if you are using their images to promote a hotel or service without permission!
The social media world is obsessed with the new and shiny, when it should be focusing on sites and methods that are proven to work. Time spent sharing photos on Flickr generates traffic, and gets your images in front of the right markets. Leave Pinterest to the evangelists for now! If Pinterest breaks through and becomes a vital marketing tool in Europe, we’ll let you know!
Canary Content specializes in social media and content marketing for tourist businesses in the Canary Islands. We focus on generating quality, targeted content, and sharing it with the right people.
