Megan Rivas will be speaking on the “Trending Visual with Instagram, Pinterest & Twitter” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
The last 6 years have been quite a ride! I graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth with a major in Communications with a minor in Arts in the Media. Right out of school I worked for an event management company. It’s safe to say that event management was my first marketing love, and the experience has served me well. So much about online marketing, especially social media, is a function of organizational depth.
Next I clocked time working at a traditional ad agency here in Northern Minnesota. As a result of hard work, slowly but surely I seemed to gain a reputation in our city as a solid organizational and creative team player. aimClear recruited me and the rest is history.
I feel fortunate to be part of growing aimClear’s agency logistics vision and I’m learning more about leadership from our team. My event planning background was a natural fit for the training programs and internal conferences I manage.
I’m also aimClear’s in-house Pinterest expert, often penning posts on this hot topic for aimClear blog. These types of tactical blog posts generally drive more traffic than other aimClear posts because our team has a cosmic knack for melding content hooks that readers crave.
I manage and support holistic online marketing projects including search and psychographic research, community management, search and social PPC, creative development, training and conference coverage. I’ve had the pleasure of lecturing at the university level and regularly represent aimClear in the greater business community, including speaking appearances at the social media breakfast and internal conferences.
2) I don’t think of Instagram in a business context…please tell me how I’m wrong.
Instagram could be a huge success for a lot of brands. Sure, a fun, sexy, or delicious brand like Ben and Jerry’s may have it (way) easier than a pipe coupling company but any brand can be successful on these newer visual social media platforms. Using these hot, new visually focused mediums is a way to humanize your brand and convey or augment your message with images.
However, Marketers, please be careful when launching your way into Instagram with ads and paid videos. The last thing you want is to lose followers and leave a bad taste in would-be followers mouths by being too invasive and not showing imagery that captures people’s attention. The images or videos can’t look like you are trying to sell something all the time or you will lose people. Just think of the very first Instagram ad a la Michael Kors…
In November of 2013 Instagram released ads to only few (major) brands such as Ben and Jerry’s and Levis. The case studies were sure impressive, but it’s too early in the game to know for sure how successful the Instagram ad platform will be until it opens up to the public. However, as Facebook owns Instagram it sure will be interesting to see how these platforms overlap, especially in terms of targeting.
3) Please share some creative ways that businesses use pictures to bring attention to themselves.
An image can convey a message in a second, whereas text may take a little longer to get a message across. Platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are driving businesses to be more visually compelling. The key is to figure out how to do that successfully. Below are a few fun examples of businesses using pictures to bring attention to themselves.
1. I’m sure you’ve noticed big images now being displayed in your Twitter feeds. In Twitter, Pinterest does a fantastic job of showcasing specific pins often in relation to seasonal events or even introducing a person or board to potentially follow.
2. aimClear’s signage in our Duluth, MN office. Who doesn’t love kittens? This window art has caught a lot of attention.
3. west elm does a fantastic job of using Pinterest to bring attention to their business. Their Pinterest boards are organized, interesting, and showcase a variety of pins from their own website (usually products they carry) and their blog along with 3rd party non-competitive content. Doing this provides your audience with an array of pins from different sources so your audience doesn’t get tired of looking at pins from only your business.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.