Pinterest!!

This week we were given a Pinterest assignment for my principles of social media class. I have never used Pinterest in my life which some people may think is crazy, but I had no idea what was going on. Once I got into this assignment, I had a lot of fun! I never realized how easy it is to organize similar information into a board. We had to pin at least ten relevant things and pick three concepts to connect back to books we read this semester. I went way over and just kept pinning things because I found so many things that related to social media measurement. I picked Hashtags, the SWOT Analysis, and LinkedIn for my three concepts.

Hashtags were something I have never really used, but I did not realize how much of an impact they play in social media. Using an article I found on Pinterest and a chapter from Guy Kawasaki's book "The Art of Social Media," I was able to find a bunch of important information on hashtags and why they work so well. Two or three hashtags are recommended for most social media platforms except for Pinterest, which is zero. Using hashtags can give you two times the engagement but on Twitter, more than two hashtags will drop your engagement an average of 17%. On Instagram, the article I found said that posts with eleven or more hashtags have the highest interaction. I was surprised to see how much of a factor hashtags play.

The SWOT Analysis is something I am familiar with, and I think it is one of the most important analyses that can be performed. It helps determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I used a chapter from the book we are currently reading, "Social Media for Strategic Communication" and another article from Pinterest. Each article gave very similar explanations of the analysis, but it helped me understand more than I knew about it before looking into these two sources. By performing this analysis, an individual or organization has the potential to grow.

LinkedIn is one of my favorite social media platforms to use. It is filled with business professionals and tons of positivity. I get on LinkedIn almost every day to try and make new connections with others. Using a chapter from "The Art of Social Media" and an article about LinkedIn on Pinterest, I was able to discover more tips to help improve my LinkedIn experience. It was nice to see that I was already doing most of these things like being active in groups and acting professionally, but I did find some weaknesses in my profile after reading these two sources. Posting more monthly is something I am trying to increase to create more engagement with the connections I have built from this platform.

I would advise anyone who has not tried Pinterest to give it a shot. I can't believe it took me this long to make an account and I realizing what I have been missing all of these years. There are so many cool ideas that can be grouped into a board to refer to later and I am going to use Pinterest all the time now!