New Virtual Search Tool from Pinterest

There’s something new in Pinterest, and it is called the Visual Search Tool. If you’re the artsy and creative type who prefer working on images instead of texts then Pinterest is one social media network that you must explore and use for marketing your business.

Pinterest is “the visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas”. As of September 18, 2015, Pinterest has over 100 million users. 30% of US social media marketers used it and its estimated value is worth $11 B. There is an overwhelming 87% Pinners who bought something because of Pinterest and this can still go higher because of the new virtual search tool.

Have you ever found yourself looking at images and find some objects in that image particularly interesting? Have you often wished that you could just zoom in on that particular object and be able to search for similar objects, patterns, designs and even colors on Pinterest? The new visual search tool allows you to do that.

So what is this new visual search tool from Pinterest?

According to Pinterest, the new visual search tool allows the pinner to zoom in on a particular object on the pin to get similar images (including patterns, designs and colors) from other pins. This is particularly helpful especially when you want to get similar images immediately.

Pinterest knows how frustrating it could be if you find something you like, and you do not even know the name of that object.

With Pinterest’s zoom capabilities, you can close into the desired object.  In this example that Pinterest has given in their own blog, the pin is an image of a dining/living room. When zoomed in on the lamp, it will give you visually similar results including the name of the object you have selected (in this case, the lamp) and where you can find or purchase it.

You can also do other similar searches for the other objects found inside the pin. All that you need to do is to click on your selection to produce search results.

Just like any new features from any social media sites, the new visual search tool was under intense scrutiny from the heavy users of Pinterest.

Is the new feature really necessary? Will this new feature affect the way you market your goods and services? Is it something worth checking out?

Pinterest would like to think so. The tool was developed in cooperation with USC-Berkeley  Vision and Learning Center using techniques that helps the reader finds thousand of similar images from other pins thus making searching for related images simpler for you. It also allows your reader to know where they could find the object.

For example, you found a cabinet whose design you really like but you wanted it in a different color and would love to know where you could get it. You just need to zoom in on the object and Pinterest will search for visually similar objects for you.

Based on comments from users who have already tried using the new visual search tool, one would like to know if this feature can be disabled because it “ruins the picture’s integrity”.  Another user said that this should just be an option that can be turned on when needed since it is distracting to get other images when not needed.

For a business owner, the new Pinterest Visual Search Tool is an advantage since it allows locations where the images or objects can be bought or found. You may include the physical address of your store (if you have any) or provide the link to your website that can be visible when the pinner zooms in on the object.

For the user, Pinterest should take into consideration that not all users would like to use the tool. Therefore, it would be preferable to have this feature optional only. The different social media networks are really doing a lot of changes and innovations to stay relevant. Your responsibilities as a business owner and a marketer is to use all options available for you to promote your brand.

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How To Post To Facebook And Keep Your Account Safe

Depending on how much you post on Facebook you might have noticed that they changed their algorithm yet again, they have been on a penalization spree for a couple of weeks now, setups that were working fine prior to the recent update (November 2015) stopped working and many accounts got penalized for 1 or 2 weeks.

They are constantly tuning their algorithm but I think this time they over did it. We’ve talked with a lot of clients and we’ve heard a lot and let me share some of the extreme things that happened, it really is something you should know if you want to keep your account safe while posting to Facebook.

Accounts got penalized even though they were posting manually to 5-10 groups. Yes, we also keep testing that and it happens, a few of our clients share the same stories with us as well. People that manage accounts for a lot of clients and had this happen.

We had one of our devs do a test and he received a “slow down you’re posting too fast” message from Facebook after posting to 1 (yes that’s right only one) group and that was a test group that belonged to us, so no one could have reported the post.

They also started checking the image that you use to post, people received “slow down” messages after posting the same image a couple of times, not even with a link, just text and an image. The problem wasn’t even the link of the image, we’ve tried with posting the same image hosted in several different places and the result was the same, Facebook recognized the image and took action.

Links haven’t escaped this check but, to be honest, they were there already. If you post the same link with two accounts at the same time there’s a very high chance that both will get a verification step soon. Using url shorteners doesn’t help with this as Facebook simply follows the shortened link and sees where it leads to.

As you can see they started to check a lot of points from your posts, it might sound bleak but it’s not that bad, as the more we know about this the better we can bypass their checks. This will probably trim the people spamming Facebook to death and only the ones marketing the right way and with quality posts will remain.

1. First of all, you might want to lower your expectations a little. I know, we too have been posting to 500-700 groups per day a couple a month ago, it’s simply not feasible anymore, you should concentrate more on quality rather than quantity.

For this reason we’ve recently introduced UTM parameters so you can track your traffic, if you figure out what group is actually sending you traffic and which one is a waste of time, you simply only post where it matters and ignore the rest. The days of the shotgun tactic are approaching their end, blasting as much as you can in the hope it works is no longer the way to go.

2. Try to leave no footprints in your posts, I understand sometimes this might not be possible but you should try your best. Here’s what I mean:

always use spin syntax for your text and make sure it’s a high quality manual spin not some automatic spin that will give you away, people will still read your post and can report it if it looks like spam.If you’re going to post to a lot of destinations (50+) do a spin of your link as well, instead of using just one link, make it a spin of 2-3 or even more links. As I said using an url shortner won’t work. There are a couple of thing that you can do, you can create a couple of subdomains on your main domain for example, and post the same thing there or simply redirect them to the main page or iframe your main page in the subdomain page. Just make sure the actual urls that you post are varied.A couple of people tried paying for Facebook ads and it seems this helps too, so if you have some money to spend promoting a post on  your page from time to time seems to help in case you’ve posted too much, they’ll let you get back to it soon.As I said Facebook looks at the images too so just make sure you vary your images as much as you can, we also have an extra module that will change the images you post a little, the human eye won’t see it but check from facebook and other platforms should think the images are unique. You can do this on your own as well, even if you have the same image, edit it a little a couple of times and save it, make it smaller, bigger, cut off parts of it and so on, after that use all of those in a spin if you’re hosting them somewhere.

3. In case you’re not already doing this, you should remember to have your account do other things as well, not only post to groups as that’s a dead giveaway. Set up 1-2 rss feeds from news sites or anything else you like and post on your wall, like other people’s posts, make some friends. Make your account look as human as possible.

4. Post less with one account, instead post with several accounts. Think of it like this – instead of trying to post to 400 groups with one account why not try to post to 40 groups with 10 accounts? This will spread the load and you won’t have to worry about your one account being penalized.

Just make sure you do not post with 2 or more accounts at the same time for the same link as that’s a clear giveaway, instead spread the posting over the whole day. You can set up a campaign for each account and set it so each campaign can only post during 2 hours of the day, for 10 accounts that should be 20 hours and even if you add many posts to all campaign they will never intersect.

5. Another tactic you can use is – post only clickable image links. This is especially good if you got your site banned on Facebook and cannot post that link anymore. Also it might even allow you to post links towards the same site at the same time. The settings should be done like this. Take 5 accounts for example, you should set 4-7 clickable image servers for each account and add those servers in Social Profiles – click on each account – “Show advanced profile settings” – clickable image servers.

This way each account will use its own servers. Where to get that many servers? You can get a cheap domain for each account a .info should be around $1, create a couple subdomains on it and you have the 4-7 clickable image servers you need for an account as each subdomain is treated different by Facebook.

You should also use a spin sintax for your images and host the same image in a couple different places. Someone suggested you could use an AWS S3 account which is free to host the images – haven’t tried that so it’s up to you to give it a try.

6. I know many of you are promoting your site but you might consider changing your tactic a little. Create a page for your site on Facebook. Promote that page on group using the share function. You can then funnel the traffic from that page to your site and you only have to post a link to Facebook towards your site, to your page that is, no more spamming hundreds of groups – at least not with your main link. You just be posting/sharing your Page’s link instead, which should be a little safer to do as it’s part of Facebook.

This is pretty much it, as you can see, there are many ideas you can try, some of them will require a little setup at first, that’s true, but if it were easy then everybody would do it! If you want to be successful you do need to put in a little work all that matters it that it will pay off.

If you encounter any other problems or if you have any solutions for the existing problems that I haven’t listed above be sure to add a comment below and I will update this to include everything that works.

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