Here are five simple tips:

1. Keep it short and be concise. Don’t use more than two sentences.
2. Want likes? Ask for it. Ask your fans to “click like” in the post copy.
3. Want comments? Try a fill-in-the-blank post.
4. Photos work wonderfully. Use at least 1-2 photos each week.
5. Be consistent with your content and frequency but don’t be afraid to be random every once in a while.

Experiment with content, assets and posting time to get the best results. What works well on your page?

What I’m seeing: the CVBs that pin daily, or almost daily, see a gain of 20+ followers each week. Those who don’t pin weekly have almost no growth at all. Of course, the larger destinations see a larger weekly growth. And so do those accounts who have a larger following. Everything seems to be proportionate on size and activity, as it should be.

When I talk about “followers” below, I mean the amount of people following the entire CVB account / all of the CVB’s boards. Typically certain boards will have a LOT more followers than the entire account but it’s not possible for me to track the cumulative number of followers across all the boards each CVB has. I don’t have a script so I track everything manually and it may be hard to believe, but I do have interests other than social media.

CVBs, ranked by account followers

CVBs, ranked by number of pins

All 233 destinations on Pinterest, including international

If your CVB isn’t on this last list, please leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

1. Visit Bucks County “Repin It to Win It” Contest

The Kotex Campaign: Kotex reached out to influential Pinterest users in Israel. These users then pinned products to their boards and what they deemed as interesting. The agency that works with Kotex then created customized boxes with Kotex products and delivered them to the influencers’ doors.

The result – instant buzz and a ripple effect that got everyone talking about Kotex. Also, almost 700,000 total impressions is not bad at all. After all, who does not want free goodies?

The British Midland International (BMI) Pinterest Lottery: That name was quite a mouthful and I am surprised that it did not get more press coverage. BMI applied the Theory of Gamification very well and got people to do work that they usually won’t do. BMI asked users to pin BMI destinations on to their boards and each of these destinations had a number attached to it. At the end BMI picked six numbers and the person with that combination on their board won.

The result was that BMI got more than 3,000 entries in the first two weeks alone. Who says lottery can’t be fun?

Find the Style Spotter by High Point Market: I love fashion and everything that has anything to do with fashion. So obviously this contest caught my eye. The High point market recruited home fashion trendsetters (we’ll call them influencers) and got them to curate individual boards on Pinterest.

These influencers then found images that were their favorites and pinned them onto the High Point Market Pinterest boards. The influencers also collaborated with the exhibitors of the products that they had pinned and offered them a URL of a QR code directing to the Pinterest board. People can vote for the influencers by “Liking” or “Re-pinning” and the winner gets a trip to the High Point Market. Simple and easy this contest does not have a lot of rules around it. And High Point has over 2,000 followers on Pinterest, which is pretty impressive.

These were a few of my favorite contests. What do you think? Have you come across any Pinterest contests that should be included on this list?

Author: Joanita Bora

Don’t get me wrong; maybe with this acquisition Instagram has better resources at its disposal to achieve a deeper market penetration. But I wonder if an acquisition was really necessary, a joint venture or a partner project with Facebook would have served just fine. You might wonder why I am so averse to the idea of an acquisition. This has got nothing to do with the popular opinion that Facebook is going to screw up Instagram in some way. It has more to do with the soundness of this business decision. So Instagram is the new “IT” app for taking photos and has got some pretty sweet filters, but what does it really mean for Facebook? Does this acquisition even align with Facebook’s strategic business objectives? Facebook seems to have succumbed to the winner’s curse and ended up paying a lot more than necessary for Zuckerberg’s new toy. A friend pointed out: “Instagram: $0 ad revenue, 0 ad impressions, $1Billion acquisition on no hard assets.” Really what did Facebook pay $1 billion for, goodwill?

But business decisions aside, what does this acquisition mean for Instagram? It means that they have more money to do whatever they want to with the most popular photo-app ever. As one Mashable article commented: “you’d give Instagram founder Kevin Systrom whatever budget and engineering talent he wants to make this killer app even more killer.” Given Facebook’s Timeline feature and focus on visual story telling, the Instagram acquisition might be a good tactic to further this agenda. Remember how people went up in arms when Google bought YouTube and thought that it was the end of YouTube as we knew it? Though this acquisition did nothing for Google’s perception amongst its audience, it did provide resources that helped YouTube to scale up and make it big. Instagram has had an extreme run of good luck (Not Facebook; nothing will change the fact that they overpaid by way too much) and now it remains to be seen what other features they bring to the table to justify that price tag. What do you think? Can Facebook and Instagram make this relationship work?

Author: Joanita Bora

Investors should definitely be worried that in Groupon has changed its accounting methods time and again to hide the refund rates, which have increased by more than 40%. If that doesn’t give you pause, Groupon’s lockup is ending in May; this basically means that they will be releasing more shares into the market. These two factors should be enough to give investors the chills.

Groupon’s best bet at this point would be to try and work towards building a more sustainable business model. But sadly, I do not see that happening because in spite of losing out on revenue and facing flak it keeps on acquiring companies that are just an extension of its current business model. If it keeps heading on its current path, it won’t be long before Groupon comes tumbling down. What do you think? Is there any hope for Groupon still?

Author: Joanita Bora

1. Pay with Square – This is a mobile payment iOS app and was earlier known as Card Case. This app has been slowly gaining traction and has now added social elements to its payment service. Now you can discover Square enabled merchants and tweet or text message the merchant details. With mobile usage growing steadily this is definitely an app to watch out for.
2. Moshcam – If you love live concerts, then you will love Moshcam and the fact that it lets you watch thousands of free concerts on your iPhone or tablet.  Technically speaking, Moshcam has been around since 2007, but the new mobile app is Moshcam’s first foray into the field of mobile apps. All these concerts can be viewed in HD, though the videos cannot be stored on your handset or tablet. Downloading this app gives you access to five free performances. While the app is free, the concerts are not.
3. Karma –  Even if you don’t your friends’ physical address, Karma lets you send gifts to them.  Send a flower bouquet or a Hulu subscription and then your friend can specify the address they want the gift sent to. In case your friend doesn’t like the gift, they can swap their gifts or opt to give the gift’s value to charity as well. A social app with a conscience.
4. UpTo – Need to know if your friend is free for drinks on Wednesday night? Then UpTo is the app for you. This app lets you share your calendar events with your friends and look at their calendar so that you can coordinate your get-togethers. This app also has a heat map that shows which days are the busiest.
5. Instagram is coming to Android -  And the registrations are now open. The registration page for Android device owners asks them to enter their email ids to be the first in line. Android owners rejoice, Instagram is almost here.

These were a few of my picks for last week. What do you think? Is there anything else that should have made the list?

Author: Joanita Bora

There are two sides in this argument; let us first take a look at the companies that provide these apps. Take the example of Facebook – it has already been at the eye of the storm for many privacy violation lawsuits and can be taken as a veteran for navigating this gray zone – and if we look at it with a more critical eye, we know that we are in no way forced to sign up for Facebook. It is completely out of our own volition that we sign up and share content. Once stuff is online it is fair game for anyone and it would be naive to assume otherwise. And let us be honest, we do feel special when we get offers and coupons online from our favorite brands, offers that have been customized just for us. Where do our favorite brands get the information to serve us better? It sure isn’t from a crystal ball, and how come we don’t complain so much then? And lets face it, these apps have to make money somehow; aren’t we being unethical by throwing a spanner in the works for their revenue stream?

Now, comes the people side of the equation. According to the Ethics Resource Center (ERC), social networkers are more likely to believe that questionable behaviors are acceptable. But just because we don’t mind it so much, doesn’t mean that the social media apps can just run with it, does it? There is an idea that social networkers maybe more unethical just because of the anonymity that the Internet provides. This is absurd; in fact active social networkers may have a better idea of ethics due to their strong online communities and networks. So is it right on part of the social networking sites/apps to use this data that we trust them with? Shouldn’t they be more conscientious about how they use all this information that we provide them with? There is a reason why they have all these privacy regulations and it is the job of these social networking sites to ensure compliance.

Ethics is a very gray zone and needs to be navigated very carefully; it is more about the perception of what is right and wrong and for different people these perceptions will be different. There are more questions than answers and there is no definite end to this argument; in the end it really comes down to the user and the provider to define the boundaries. What do you think? Where do you stand in terms of this argument about ethics in social media?

Author: Joanita Bora

For this post, we’ll just focus on US and Canadian CVBs and DMOs.

One of the more important Pinterest engagement metrics is the number of repins an account receives. This is almost impossible for me to calculate manually as I’d have to look at each pin and tally the numbers for each CVB. This is why I focus mostly on the number of followers and the number of pins. The number of followers can determine an account’s reach while the number of pins shows how active/dedicated the account really is.

As a side note, a few CVBs got a head start and secured their accounts really early in the game. Users followed these accounts even though there was/is little or no activity. This is why I prefer a combination of followers and pins.

It’s no surprise that Visit Savannah is still in the lead in both number of followers and pins. With 12,422 followers, they actually have almost twice the amount of followers of all the other accounts combined (7,151 followers). The second highest is Wyoming Tourism with 775 followers. All the other CVBs have less than 400 followers.

Visit Savannah (1,090 pins) also has over double the amount of pins of any other CVB. The next closest CVB is Visit Salt Lake with 504 pins. Just beyond that are Experience Columbus (442 pins), SeeMonterey (409 pins) and VISIT Milwaukee (399 pins).

Here are the top 25 accounts in terms of followers and pins:

Now let’s look a little deeper.

Most of the CVBs have a similar growth rate in regards to their number of followers. Here are the top 7 CVBs with the most followers. Visit Savannah was not included since their growth rate would be off of this chart.

There are a few exceptions to this growth rate:

The Outer Banks grew from 32 followers on March 4 to 172 followers on March 11. My assumption for this growth is just promotion of the account. There was a Facebook post (over 218,000 fans) as well as a tweet about their Pinterest account between those dates.

VisitNC also saw a huge increase from 55 followers on March 4 to 158 followers on March 11.

Baltimore Maryland add 37 followers this past week. Even though it’s a smaller increase, it’s still well above the curve.

Two DMOs I think you should watch are VISIT FLORIDA and Virginia is for Lovers. Even though Virginia has yet to pin an image, they already have 84 followers, an increase of 42 followers from the previous week.

Let’s look at the number of pins.

Visit Savannah has consistently pinned approximately 113 pins per week. On average, that’s 16 pins per day, including weekends. I think a lot of Pinterest users probably pin that same daily amount.

Examining the CVBs just below Visit Savannah, you can see that most of them pin around 10-20 pins per week. One notable exception is FredericksburgTX CVB. They are very active and will probably move up a great deal by next month.

Had enough analysis?

Even though Pinterest is still a very new channel, you need to develop an ever-evolving strategy and stick with it to get the best results. Pinterest is not one of those sites where you can set it up and leave it alone. It needs weekly, if not daily, management. However, if you don’t have time to maintain your presence here, I think an inactive Pinterest account is better than no account at all.

Feel free to use my CVBs on Pinterest board as a reference for following your favorite destinations. If your CVB is not on that board, please share it as a comment below.