It’s that last feature – the link – which quickly saw Pinterest become a contender in the “other websites that can send me traffic” category. In fact, in its early days, many were reporting that Pinterest was sending more referral traffic than Twitter. This made a lot of brands and businesses suddenly show pinterest … sorry … interest.

While Pinterest has faced more than its fair share of copyright infringement issues, perhaps the cause for this report from Shareaholic which suggests that traffic is dropping, but Pinterest do appear to be working on features that help to improve the correct credit is retained when an image is repinned (pinning anything from Flickr adds a Flickr logo and a link to the Flickr user’s profile. Pinning anything from Facebook is blocked completely).

It’s only recently that I started putting a bit more effort into Pinterest. When I first started, I did the classic “follow a few popular users” to see what the deal was. I then checked back a few days later and my newsfeed was entirely full of shoes, hair, fashion, cakes and general ‘pink’.

It took a while for me to refine my follows and find a few more people more relevant to my interests to follow, but once I had I sat back and proudly looked at my new ‘much more me’ newsfeed which was full of content that I would really want to discover and learn more about.

Me on Pinterest (web stuff, cars, and coffee).

I’ve also tailored my own boards a lot more to suit my own interests. Some boards relate to the web, others to cars and bikes. I also have a board that displays photos of New Zealand (bit nervous about losing the credit on that one). Check ‘em out by clicking below.

Adding Pinterest Buttons to your Blog or Website

Encouraging others to ‘pin’ images from your own website or blog can help to increase awareness of your blog and can also increase referral traffic to your site. Pinterest provide a few goodies so that you can add both ‘follow me on Pinterest’ and ‘Pin It’ buttons to your website. At this stage the button isn’t as dynamic as, say, the Twitter button, in that it doesn’t display the user’s name. It’s actually just a html link and image. That’s made this post a bit tricky but luckily there’s a standard “Pinterest” button that displays no name at all.

The Pin It button can be a little tricky to set up. If your blog is set up on the WordPress platform, simply search for a good plugin to make things easy (I’m using this one at the moment – so long as I’m still using it while you’re reading this, you should see a Pin button at the top and bottom of this blog post).

Click the Pin button and you’ll be presented with the images from the page you’re viewing. Choose the image, select an existing board or create a new one, add a description and the pin will be … pinned. It will automatically include a link back to the source (i.e. in this case, this blog post).

Businesses Using Pinterest

While the majority of users on Pinterest are using the service for their own entertainment, there are still plenty of brands and businesses using the service. Some in a way that is quite a strong ‘sell’ – you can add an image for a product along with a banner that displays a price simply by typing in a dollar amount as part of the description. That image can then link straight to the product on your website.

Pinterest also has a nice feature which allows you to quickly see who has pinned content from your website. Just swap out your website address in this URL:

http://pinterest.com/source/nzraw.co.nz/

Plus you can install a Pinterest tab on your Facebook Page, displaying all or a select few of your boards. Check out Woobox for that. The tab looks like the below (I set this up for my other blog, NZ Raw):

Other businesses are using Pinterest simply to get their brand out there and to show that their brand has personality and is staffed by real people with real interests.

New Zealand Brands on Pinterest

While I haven’t seen many business websites displaying a link to Pinterest, I had a quick play around guessing Pinterest usernames and within minutes I’d found a few New Zealand brands using the service.

ASB Bank

No surprises here. ASB have shown themselves to be leaders in their field when it comes to making the most of social media. It looks like they’re in the early stages of experimenting with the service. At this stage they’ve set up 5 boards and have 14 pins.

Follow ASB Bank on Pinterest:

Trade Me

As an entirely web-based company and one that millions of people upload photos to, it’s also no surprise that Trade Me are on Pinterest. Again it looks like early days for Trade Me. 5 boards display a total of 9 pins. Board titles include “The Office”, “Blasts from the Past” and “Cool Auctions”. Could some users get upset if they upload a photo to an auction and it appears on one of Trade Me’s Pinterest boards? I personally wouldn’t – extra attention for your auction would be great. But some people might be funny about it.

Trade Me on Pinterest

Trade Me look like they’re set to be a pretty cool brand to follow. Their office looks very modern and trendy and, to some degree, you could almost determine the state of the nation by viewing current cool auctions and comparing them to past epics – like the classic ‘handbag’ incident. I hope they get the scary washing machine on there soon as well. The birth of viral in New Zealand.

Trade Me also have a separate account for Trade Me Motors. That one contains some great looking cars and is worth a follow if you’re an automotive fan. Cans can make for great pins as they’re obviously so visual.

Follow Trade Me on Pinterest:

Follow Trade Me Motors on Pinterest:

Other than those, I haven’t come across too many other New Zealand businesses on Pinterest. Even the above two – very ‘web 2.0′ companies – don’t appear to be using the service in full force yet.

If your business is on Pinterest or if you’ve seen a few good Kiwi brands on there, feel free to leave a link to them in the comments below.

Air New Zealand

Another hugley ‘socially-aware’ brand. Air NZ are so into social media that they have a separate blog specifically built for it, entitled The Flyng Social Network.

Unlike others, Air NZ also feature a ‘follow me on Pinterest’ button on their blog which suggests that they’ve had a good play and they’re pretty happy that they’re ready to push follows on their Pinterest boards to the general public.

As a service that’s all about travel, in some ways they have it easy. Boards include those dedicated to New Zealand photography as well as a ‘Meet the Fleet’ board for aircraft interior and exteriors, a board for locations that Air NZ fly to, a board dedicated to ‘retro’ photography, and more.

Follow Air NZ on Pinterest:

International Brands on Pinterest

Overseas, a few brands are already full-swing when it comes to setting up their Pinterest presence. An interesting one for Twitter fans is Hootsuite. They have 28 boards and 418 pins although a fairly low 145 followers. To be honest, I think they could do with re-arranging their boards slightly and eliminating some boards altogether.

Anyone interesting in Hootsuite is going to be interested in Social Media. They have a ‘Social Media Best Practices’ board which I’m sure would contain some useful tips, but it’s relegated to the second row. The top row is dominated by owl boards. Owls & Crafts, Owl Chow, Wild Owls, and Owl Wear are the first 4 boards. It doesn’t stop there either, there are heaps of other owl boards further down. Ok Hootsuite, we get that your mascot is an owl. But… 15 boards dedicated to owls? Seriously? “Owls that come in handy”? “Owls at work?” Hmm. I think a fair few people will find their boards a bit off-putting at first glance.

Starbucks are far more onto it. Their boards recognise the interest of their fans in relation to their own products. At this stage they have just 8 boards and most are related to coffee and cafe culture. This appears to be paying off well for them and they have over 2,200 followers.

The Problem with Pinterest for Brands

Two big problems for brands that use Pinterest are reasonably serious ones, especially considering Pinterest’s history with copyright issues.

These two problems are related to each other:

1. There’s no way to recognise a brand Pinterest account as being official. Twitter displays a blue tick next to a select number of brands and celebrities and clamps down on anyone pretending to be someone else without stating the facts in their profile.
2. Username squatting already appears to be widespread on Pinterest. It looks like it’s quite easy to take a brand name and use it for your own.

It looks like the problem exists for some pretty huge companies as well. I didn’t spend long trying but the usernames for Ford, Audi, BMW, Coke and even Apple were all already taken by personal users. A couple of others look like they’ve been set up different like Pinterest. Trying pinterest.com./facebook will take you straight to the Pinterest app on Facebook, for example.

On Twitter, it’s reasonably easy for a brand to flex their muscles and take-over a Twitter user’s username if it’s too close to their brand name, but so far it doesn’t look like brands have bothered yet for Pinterest. Or maybe they just didn’t have much success when they did try. Audi simply went with AudiUSA instead.

As Pinterest grows and becomes even more useful for brands, this could cause plenty of issues. New Zealand brands could also suffer – TVNZ is already taken by ‘Tia Venezia’. Looks like brands might have to get more creative with their usernames.

Graeme is a ‘Non-Profit Strategist’ helping New Zealand non-profits with all aspects of their organisation; from fundraising to governance, and from media relations to social media. It may seem strange to think of it that way but I’d imagine that non-profits can be just as competitive as other businesses – as Grame says, “with a vast array of non-profits competing for attention, funding and more, it’s important that all areas of an organisation are fine tuned, that new ways of doing things are explored and that the organisations profile is high and people know and understand the work that you do.”

As part of his work and as a way to provide interesting resources and guides for non-profits, Graeme has put together his blog.

The Charity Matters Blog

What you’ll find on the blog

The Charity Matters (oh hey, I just got the pun) blog exisits to discuss subjects that matter both to charities and to all those individuals and organisations “working in and supporting this important sector”.

Posts cover those issues that are key to charities and fundraising, such as the post entitled ‘Charities and The Privacy Act‘, as well as posts on the use of social media networks – Twitter, Facebook, and the like – from a non-profit perspective. Take a look at this post on using social media to help create awareness for your fundraising event, ‘Social Media and your Event‘.

Worth subscribing to if …

Obviously this looks to be a great blog to subscribe to if you’re in any way involved with running a non-profit organisation in New Zealand and you’re looking to increase your profile, or perhaps you’re in the early stages of running a fundraising event (in which case I’d recommend getting in touch with Graeme directly as well).

The blog’s also worth keeping an eye on if you or your business provides non-profit organisations with products and services.

You can subscribe through your Posterous account or perhaps catch up with Graeme over on Twitter (button below) or via his Adage Business Facebook Page.

Follow @AdageBusiness

Now that it’s been bought by Facebook, that could change of course, but for now at least it’s still worth a look.

One thing that’s always made Instagram a little different to other mobile apps is that there’s nothing much on the Instagram website that provides the functions of the app – no way to view your network’s photos or edit your own photos. It’s all very much down to the app itself.

Why not just use the mobile app?

For me, as a New Zealand mobile internet users, using only my mobile to access Instagram is a bit of a problem. Like you perhaps, I’m on a sucky data plan (mine gives me 150mb of traffic a month plus 1gb of national traffic – which basically just means Trade Me). As Instagram is all about displaying or uploading large images, you’ll easily get through a fair chunk of your dataplan in no time, therefore restricting you to only playing around with it when on a wireless network.

The good news is that Instagram do have an API that is available for other developers to do what they like with. For that reason, plenty of other people have stepped up to the plate and created their own websites that you can log in to with your Instragram details. Not only do some of these websites let you view your photo-feeds, but they also provide some interesting stats and other features.

I’ve had a quick play around over the past few days and have put together the top 4 websites for Instagram lovers.

1. Statigram

Statigram is an Instagram webviewer with a heap of extra features crammed into it. It’s easy to get started – just log in with your Instagram details – and you’ll find your way around in no time. You’ll also get your own vanity URL, like mine: http://statigr.am/marklincoln.

As well as the standard webviewer features that include viewing your friend’s photos, adding comments and likes, and even a ‘repost’ function similar to Pinterest’s ‘repin’, Statigram gives you plenty of statistics that include standard stuff like number of likes and number of comments, but also some cool percentage ‘scores’ for things like:

• Love Rate – a score based on likes
• Talk Rate – a score based on comments
• Spread Rate – a score based on likes received from people who don’t actually follow you directly

Optimisation

For serious Instragram users looking to get more interactions and more followers, there’s a host of optimisation tips personalised for your account. View your posting habits and compare these with the times that your community interacts the most, find out which tags are getting you the most views and find out which are the top tags used on Instagram (e.g. food, love, cute, smile, bored, etc.), and more.

Another cool feature of Statigram are the Snapshots. Snapshots are dynamically created images of your Instagram statistics that you can share with others. This may only provide a few minutes of amusement but it’s nice to easily see your most popular photos and check out which Igers (Instagramers) you interact with the most.

Facebook Integration

Statigram has some bonus features for your Facebook Profile or Facebook Page. You can add a feed of your Instagram photos to your Facebook Page (which will look like this), create a timeline box of your activity or quickly create a Facebook Cover Photo based on a collage of your Instagram photos. If I still have that loaded for my own account (I get bored easily) it looks something like this.

Finally, Statigram also hosts its own contents on Instagram where you can win real prizes – although these can be a little biased to overseas participants (share your best Ohio memory, share your photos of Rome, etc.).

Visit the Statigram website at statigr.am.

2. Gramfeed

Gramfeed is another website that acts as a webviewer for Instragram .Like Statigram, you’ll also get your own vanity URL of the format www.gramfeed.com/marklincoln.

Unlike Statigram, Gramfeed tends to stick to the core elements of Instagram – simply viewing a feed of your friend’s photos, checking out the popular photos, etc. You can also give a photo likes and add comments.

On top of this, Gramfeed displays an interactive map showing all photos that have location-based information. Quite a nice feature for those taking photos while on holiday.

View the Gramfeed website at gramfeed.com.

3.  Instacanvas

In a nutshell, Instacanvas allows others to purchase your photos online. The photos are printed onto canvas and delivered to the customer. Everything’s taken care of by Instacanvas who, obviously, take a share of the revenue.

You’re given the ability to choose which of your photos make it into your gallery for sale and can view statistics on views, sales, earnings, and the like.

As the ‘artist’, you receive 20% of the sale price for each item sold, as shown in the following table (in US dollars and current as of May 2012):

Obviously there’s a reasonably good chance you’ll only make money from this if you’re either a) a very popular photographer or b) you do a heap of work to help promote your own gallery (like OMG check out these amazing photos! I’d so buy all of them!). Plus their terms and conditions page is both difficult to find and very very long, which is always a worry.

But, hey. Maybe give it a go. Who knows, you could be a hugely successful mobile phone photographer and not even know it yet.

View the Instacanvas website at instacanv.as.

4. ifttt

Nope, I didn’t just fall asleep on the keyboard, ifttt stands for ‘if this then that’. It’s a brilliant tool that allows you to automatically perform actions based on other actions.

I’m cheating a bit as, unlike the other websites here, ifttt isn’t just about Instagram, but it’s a really cool tool for Instragram users that deserves your attention.

Basically, you can use ifttt to set up a bunch of tasks. These tasks are based on triggers which can be pretty much anything related to pretty much any online serivce.For example, you could set up a task that says “If I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook, post a Twitter update that says ‘OMFG look at me! LOOK AT ME!!’ with a link to the photo.” Handy huh?

Because ifttt can connect to Instragram, it’s a great way to either:

• Back up your nicely filtered Instagram photos
• Shae your Instragram photos on other services

Again, because of my crappy data plan on my phone, I cringe whenever I have to upload photos to the web. And yet I don’t want all my photos to be stored on my phone in case I lose them and I’d rather than a better way to access them online instead of just using Instragram.

So I have a couple of ifttt rules set up so that whenever I upload a photo to Instragram, it also adds the photo to an album on Facebook called “Instagram Photos” and at the same time adds the image file to a private folder on Dropbox. Because these secondary actions take place online instead of from my phone, I only ever upload the file once. Nice huh?

ifttt can do a heap of other stuff as well. Check it out at ifttt.com.

Know of any other good websites for Instagram users? Share them in the comments below.

I’m not the only one who recognises Simone’s talents on the web. She was recently chosen from a list of thousands to speak at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Simone joined a panel of four others – two from the UK and two from the US – under the heading of ‘Financial Services and Technology Rockstar Women’. It was awesome to see New Zealand represented at such a huge event. I didn’t see Australia on that panel. Just thought I’d drop that in there (we love you really Australia).

What you’ll find on the blog

Simone’s blog, simonemccallum.com, is an insight into what she calls “my random musing about stuff”. In reality, it’s a great way to pick up some tips and tools when it comes to using social media from a New Zealand perspective. Simone loves to learn about new developments and handy tools in the online world and then share her experiences.

You’ll also find plenty of mentions of other players in New Zealand’s online space, as well as some reviews and insight into how other NZ brands are using social media. Check out her tips for Countdown Supermarkets as an example. Finally, Simone also sometimes summarises social media events by putting together the best tweets in a format that’s highly readable and gives you a great snapshot of the event without even being there.

Worth reading if…

Well really the blog’s worth reading if you’re just like me and have a keen interest in getting more out of social media as well as finding out how others are using Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other social networks and social sharing sites.

By putting together blog posts on how businesses are using social media, Simone also sets the field for the odd interesting discussion in the form of blog comments. I love getting involved and talking about this kind of stuff with other New Zealand web industry professionals so maybe I’ll see you on there!

You’ll also find Simone on…

Like any true social media fan, Simone likes to get stuck into any social network to have a good play and understand the pros and cons of the service so you may find her accounts all over the web, but most commonly you can catch up with Simone on:

• Facebook at facebook.com/simone.mccallum
• Pinterest at pinterest.com/simonemccallum

Or of course you can follow Simone on Twitter by hitting the button below.

Follow @simonemccallum

For example, some of the team behind Top Gear will often leak when the next season is going to start long before it’s officially announced on their website.

As these messages are usually straight from the horse’s mouth, they can be great reference material for a blog post. When discussing the particular ‘tweet’, you can simply type out the content of the message into your blog post but it’s a lot more visually appealing, and can appear to be more trustworthy, if you actually display the tweet itself within your post.

By the way, I feel like I’ve been using a lot of capital letters recently so for the purposes of this post I’m going to type tweet with a small ‘t’. This may or may not be correct. Sue me.

There are two methods to display a tweet in your blog. One is through taking a screenshot of that tweet and uploading that to your blog. This can help you to future-proof the tweet as it will be stored as your own image so even if that person then removes their tweet, you’ll still have a copy.

The second method is to use Twitter’s tools to embed the tweet in your post. This allows for a greater deal of interaction with the tweet itself – known as ‘web intents‘. In some ways, this can be quicker and easier than taking a screenshot and uploading an image at the correct dimensions. Here’s how this looks:

Worth travelling the world for the sale of a good New Zealand Flat White…

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) February 16, 2012

Twitter often play around with their design and layout but the following gives you an idea of how to embed a tweet as at February 2012.

As an example, I’ll use a tweet from the fantastic Stephen Fry who is currently filming in New Zealand and, right about now, raving about how awesome our country is.

Step 1. Open the Tweet

On a Twitter user’s update stream, you can hover over a particular tweet to display a few options – reply, retweet, favorite, and finally, open.

Clicking on open expands the tweet window to display information about how and when the tweet was posted, as well as the conversation that took place in regards to that tweet (predominantly the people that clicked on ‘reply’ on that specific tweet – see why Twitter wants you to use its own reply and retweet buttons rather than compose your own tweets from scratch?). Quick tip: when clicking on ‘open’, if you open it in a new tab/window instead you’ll skip the next step.

With celebrities like Stephen Fry, you’ll generally see a lot of responses from other people and, occasionally, maybe even a follow up comment by the legend himself.

In this view, you’ll see a link called ‘Details’. Click that and you’ll be taken to the full URL specifically for the tweet. This should look something like this:

https://twitter.com/#!/stephenfry/status/170252353688182785

From this new view, you can see that the ‘Details’ link has changed to an ‘Embed this Tweet’ option. Click that.

Step 2. Choose Your Embed Options and Code

Click ‘Embed this Tweet’ and you’ll be given a few options as per the below screenshot.

Once you’ve selected an alignment, there are three options to embed the tweet within your blog post.

HTML

To be honest, this option can be the most future-proof option of the three as the tweet’s text is physically copied to your blog and, using Javascript, is simply presented in a nice way. Once you have this on your blog, the only content that is pulled from the actual tweet each time the page is loaded is the current Twitter profile photo. If Stephen Fry were to delete his tweet, the message itself should still remain on your blog post.

Disclaimer – I’m basing this assumption simply on an understanding of the code and I’m pretty confident that it’s the case. For that reason, I basically can’t be bothered testing it! If you’ve found that the embedded code is somehow broken when the user deletes their tweet, do let me know in the comments below!

The HTML code provided by Twitter includes the code for the tweet itself, as well as the JavaScript code that renders the tweet n the correct format. Simply copy the code, jump to the HTML view of your blog’s new post window and paste the code where you want the tweet to appear.

If embedding tweets in your blog post is going to be a fairly regular activity, you can instead take the script section of the code and paste it into a new line near the top of your websites header. This then runs the script every time the blog is loaded. It’s also a little tidier and a bit cleaner for Google to keep your script tags in the header of your website rather than half-way down the post itself.

To do this in a wordpress.org blog, jump into the ‘Appearance’ menu item, then ‘Editor’, click on the ‘header’ option and paste the script line into that file. If you see some other script tags near the top of your file, paste it just under those.

Quick tip: Even if you don’t want to mess with your header file, be aware that you only need to post the script section of the code once in your blog post. So if you’re embedding two or three tweets in one post, just delete the script section of the code from all but one of the tweets.

Shortcode

This option provides you with a special tidy shortcode version which ‘speaks’ to certain blog providers, like WordPress.com, and magically tells the blog how to display the tweet.

All you need to do is paste the shortcode, which looks like the below, into your blog post and WordPress will take care of the rest.

[tweet https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/170252353688182785]

As you can see, this doesn’t actually work in this blog post (unless I’ve since changed something!) because this is a self-hosted wordpress.org blog rather than a free wordpress.com blog. Also note that the only content you have copied across to your blog is the URL of the tweet so, again, if the Twitter user deletes that tweet we can assume that it will no longer display on your blog.

Link

This option is actually a bit bollocks. All it does is provide you with the full URL of the tweet. If you are viewing this option on the Twitter website, the chances are that you’re already at that website address and so already have the full URL.

For that reason, you can basically ignore this option.

You’re done.

That’s pretty much it. You’re done. Be sure to preview your blog post before it goes live and make sure that the tweet is properly embedded.

More Examples and a Free Tip:

It can be hard to trawl back through a user’s tweets to find that specific update you saw them mention a few days back, so make use of the ‘favourite’ function to save the tweet for later use.

Here’s a few more examples from my own favourites. Note that if the tweet includes a Twitter photo (hosted on Photobucket or similar), the photo will be included when embedded. You can also see that if the tweet you are embedding is a reply, the original tweet will also be embedded.

@marklincoln *high five*

— Campbell Live (@CampbellLiveNZ) June 20, 2011

@marklincoln Great to hear Mark!

— Mark Inglis (@MarkInglis) February 5, 2010

I don’t think I will ever be able to fully rid myself of the suspicion that somewhere out there is an episode of Friends I haven’t seen.

— Simon Pegg (@simonpegg) February 10, 2012

They might miss all the time but even Stormtroopers have 20/20 vision in hindsight. #StarWars twitter.com/DeathStarPR/st…
— Death Star PR (@DeathStarPR) February 11, 2012

Note: for more advanced coders, there are a few more options for displaying tweets on your website. View the full list from Twitter themselves.

Featured image credit: Simon Pegg photo taken by Gage Skidmore.

Kim asked:

“I currently have a giveaway to help promote a friend’s business. I’ve had 69 views on the page but only 6 comments (entries for the giveaway). I’m wondering if the layout of the blog makes it difficult for people to leave a comment.

Can anyone leave a comment? I do have a friend who said that she couldn’t comment because she doesn’t have a Gmail account. Is this so? Thanks.”

Encouraging blog comments is a common problem, and one that’s emphasised when running a promotion. Attracting entries in this method can be risky as the entries (comments) themselves are public so it can be very easy for your readers to tell how well your promotion is running! In one sense that may encourage comments further – in the reader’s eyes, few comments equals a greater chance of winning – but it can also look a little like your promotion isn’t running all that well.

To address the question, let’s look at a few issues.

Increasing Pageviews

You say that your blog post (you can view this here on the Five Minutes’ Peace website) has had 69 views. This could be pageviews or unique views and it’s important to know the difference. Pageviews are the number of times the page has been viewed, no matter who it is that’s doing the viewing. Unique views (or unique visitors) is the number of unique people that have viewed the page. So if I were to visit that page, leave a comment and then visit the page again two more times to see how the competition is going, I’ve increased the number of pageviews by 3 but the number of unique visitors by just 1.

It’s worth noting that some statistics provided by blog services do ignore the blog owner’s activity when the owner is logged into the site, so your own views shouldn’t affect the stats.

In this example, either way 6 entries for 69 views isn’t all that bad (8.7% entry rate) but it could certainly be better. One way to improve your conversion of views to entries could be to make it easier to enter the promotion (I’ll look at this further down).

So increasing views is always a good way to help increase entries. To increase visitors to your blog, you could:

• discuss the competition on your Facebook Page or on Twitter and ask friends and family to share the post
• ask your friend to link to the blog post from their own online content
• list your blog in 2 or 3 New Zealand directories (try NZS.com, Finda.co.nz and Hot Frog – although you may need your own domain name rather than one hosted on blogspot)
• post some relevant comments on other New Zealand blogs that allow you to add your website address to your comment (although be sure to avoid spamming)

By increasing the number of visitors to your blog, you’ll naturally increase the chances of encouraging more entrants. Although before you put too much effort into this, it’s a good idea to make sure the entry process is as smooth as possible.

Make it as easy as possible to enter

Running promotions on your blog is a great way to encourage interactions from your website visitors, but can be a little tricky to get exactly right. In your case, the entry process is a little tricky, may make contacting the winner difficult, and in fact there are a number of ways to enter.

Specifically, you say to enter the promotion:

… please do the following:

• visit Chantal’s shop and choose your loveliest set.
• If you have a social networking page, please ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ her page.
• leave a comment telling me what set you would like to receive.

Or

• ‘Like’ my facebook page and tell me what set you would like.

I will then use an online number generator to choose the winner and I will get contact details from you.

It’s important to make any promotion as easy as possible to enter. When browsing the Internet, we often have short attention spans and, if we do decide to complete a website’s call to action, we expect the process to be as easy as possible or we may get bored and leave before the process is complete.

There are a few ways to make this promotion a little easier for people to enter:

1. Change the prize from a choice of set to a gift voucher, or to one specific set

Obviously this would need to be arranged by Chantal but doing this would instantly eliminate  the perceived effort that it would take to visit another website and choose a set. Especially as the link takes you to a section of Chantal’s website which has 4 pages of products to browse through. Changing this to a voucher or removing the choice and saying “this is the set you will win” will take away a lot of the time involved in entering.

2. Remove the ‘if you have a social networking page, please ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ her page

As this isn’t a requirement of entry, it could be a little confusing to mention this in the instructions. It also, again, adds a little extra perceived effort as it suggests that the reader has to log in to their own Facebook or Twitter profile and link to Chantal’s website in order to enter. Instead, you could leave this line out of the instructions area and add it as a suggestion elsewhere in your blog post.

Don’t be afraid to actually ask for help as well – New Zealanders love to help out fellow New Zealanders so you could simply say “Chantal has recently started her own business and it would be so nice if you could support her by mentioning her lovely items on your own Facebook profile or by giving her a shout on Twitter.”

3. Make the entry process specifically to leave a comment, and skip the Facebook Page option

By reducing the number of ways to enter, you’ll make the process more straight forward and you’ll be able to focus your efforts on increasing blog comments. Plus, by introducing Facebook as a promotion entry method, you actually step into a whole new world of rules and regulations and, in fact, your entry method of ‘Like us and leave a comment on our wall’ is actually against Facebook’s promotion guidelines in its current format. Check out these Facebook tips for more info on running Facebook Promotions and operating a Facebook Page in general.

As an example, a promotion that was more along the lines of “Be in to win a $20 Gift Voucher! Tell us where you’d place your butterfly set below and you’re in the draw” gives readers an easy entry method which allows them to simply say “My living room” in order to enter. In this case you would ideally need to write up some quick terms and conditions and perhaps link to those from your blog post. This would need to include an end date for the promotion and would need to say that entrants would have to choose to comment under an account or email sign-in rather than anonymously.

Which brings me to …

How can people leave comments?

Blog Comment Methods

As leaving comments is a core requirement of the promotion entry process, it’s important to have an understanding of how this works both in terms of how easy it is for your readers and what information you’ll have on the reader once the comment is placed.

First off, to answer your question about whether you need a Google account in order to leave a comment, one way for you to test this is simply to try leaving a comment yourself – or ask someone in your household to. When doing this, make sure you have logged out of your blog hosting service fully – in your case, Blogspot – and then visit your own post and leave a comment.

In your case however, it does appear that a reader can leave a comment in one of a fair few different ways. The ability to leave a comment anonymously or through logging into one of a few different accounts is fairly common.

I’ve taken a screenshot of your reader’s comment options, which you can see on the right. It looks like your friend may only have seen the first option – the Google Account (to be fair, this could have been the option that showed by default before the reader clicks the drop-down arrow. It’s worth seeing what this looks like in a couple of different browsers to be sure).

The problem here is that none of these methods are likely to result in the commenter providing you with their contact details. So they would leave a comment but you would have no way of letting them know that they have won other than by publicly replying to their comment on your blog and asking them to contact you – something that’s open to others contacting you in that person’s place. You’ll also be left in an awkward situation if you reply to them to let them know that they have won but you then hear nothing back from them as they haven’t received notification of their response. Plus, finally, if one of your reader’s was a little un-sporting, it would be fairly easy for someone to enter as many times as they liked under various names.

So, in this current set-up, despite what I’ve said above you would actually have to add another step to your entry process! You would have to ask people to leave a comment and then email you with their contact details so that you could contact them in the event of them winning. At the moment this would mean providing people with your email address within the blogpost which, unfortunately, exposes you to receiving spam.

The ideal solution would be to add a contact form to your blog. People could then provide you with their details privately without you ever revealing your own contact details. Unfortunately, with Blogspot’s free hosted blogs, it might not be possible to add a form to your blog. This may require plug-in functionality or extra coding that could only be available on a self-hosted blog or website (although please do correct me if I’m wrong and you find an option for it!).

What can be changed in the design?

Finally, you do ask whether there’s something in your blog’s design that’s making it harder to leave comments – and that’s a great question as the design of a website and of a blog post certainly has a large part to play.

In your case, on the blog post itself the comments area could be brought up the page a little so that it’s more prominent. To do this you could take out at least one row of photos. This would shorten the blog post content – and make it a little quicker to read – and also mean that the reader doesn’t have to scroll down too far before they find the comments area.

The website itself is set up in a way that if someone where to visit your home page, they would be able to read the entire blog post without actually clicking through to view the post itself on its own page. This can be good in some ways but does mean that someone could read your full post and then not understand how they could place a comment (as they would have to click on the ’7 comments’ link itself first). One way to address that would be to change how your website displays blog posts on its homepage – depending on your layout, there may be an option to display just a short summary with an image and a few lines of text for each post, thereby encouraging the reader to click through to view the blog post in its entirety on its own page – and so the comment box would also display properly. As an example, the home page for NZ Blogs is set up in this way – with a short summary for each post.

So, I hope I’ve helped you with your promotion in some way! I’ve certainly written a lot. Sorry about that. It’s Waitangi Day and I had a spare afternoon!

All the best of luck with your promotion and with Chantal’s business. Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments area below (see how I encouraged a comment there?) ;)

Featured image Flickr credit: joshjanssen

It’s a fair comment and one that actually makes sense when you find out more about Cate Owen’s day job. As the ‘social media strategist for many of New Zealand’s leading media brands, and the people who front them’, Cate spends a substantial part of her day online, although not necessarily as herself.

Cate’s blog is a chance for her to express her own personality and to speak without the restraints that go hand-in-hand with corporate social media. I’ve placed it in the ‘Social Media Blogs’ category as this is a common topic on her blog, although she also blogs about other topics such as entertainment and more.

What you’ll find on the blog

As mentioned, the blog features posts that are mainly related to Social Media or other aspects of the internet. Cate shares some interesting tips and insight into the use of Social Media in New Zealand, often including some insider information that only those in positions similar to her own would have access to.

In her own words, “This site is a mashup of many of the things I enjoy – arts, culture, memes, film, TV and my day job: Facebook and Twitter”. Cate also regularly publishes a Tweets of the Month post that features some of the best Twitter updates from that month.

Worth reading if …

… you’re in any way involved with the online presence of a New Zealand business or you have a keen interest in social media for any other reason. You’ll also love her take on the entertainment industry from a Kiwi perspective.

You can find Cate on …

As someone who’s day job is all about Social Media, it’s no surprise to see that Cate has an active Twitter account. This is probably the best place to catch up with her, if not through the blog itself.

You can follow Cate over on @CateOwen by clicking the follow button below.

Follow @CateOwen

Kirsty’s blog is entitled ‘Mummybrain’ with a tagline of ‘The how-not-to-do-it guide of marriage, miscarriage, children, divorce, step-children’. In her words, it’s a ‘bit of this, bit of that’ with a focus mainly on family and crafts.

Her blog (blog.mummybrain.com) is well written and she does a great job of getting her fun and caring personality across in her writing. As well as describing her blog, she also sums up herself well in her Twitter bio ‘Attempts to be an amusing, but sometimes serious, witty, but sometimes pathetic, person, about being a mother, a wicked step-mum, a divorcee, and fiancée.’ You can find her on Twitter here: @mummybrain.

What you’ll find on the blog

The blog is quite varied but I think I can possibly sum it up well by summarising the last three blog posts. These are:

• Guest Post: The Big “C”
  A blog post written by Heater; a mum and a cancer survivor. An amazing and heartfelt  insight into Heather’s life and a step by step account of what ran through her mind when she was first diagnosed with cancer at the age of 36.
• Pinterest Pins
  A quick snapshot of some cool and unique photos that Kirsty has found on Pinterest (a fast emerging website that I keep meaning to get into!)
• Do I Work?
  A smart and amusing look at a common scenario for many busy mothers.

Kristy’s blog posts are refreshingly short and readable. They’re just long enough to provide you with a smile or to just touch on your emotions without being so long that you lose interest. It also looks like she has a few dedicated followers that she interacts with through comments.

Bonus points for Social Media

I love a blogger that likes to make the most of social media and experiment with new channels as they become available. Kirsty appears to be one of these people as she not only has a Facebook Page but she also has a Twitter account (mentioned above) and even a Google+ Page. She has a respectable number of followers on Twitter with over 2,000 Tweeps/Twits following her updates.

Be sure to connect with Kirsty through the above channels and have a read of her blog. If you like what you see, you can subscribe through RSS or email. Great work Kirsty.

He’s quite popular in social media circles and is someone that I’ve been following on Twitter for some time now (if you’re not familiar with Twitter, don’t worry. Following someone on Twitter is not like following them down the street).

Bill owns a blog that he regularly keeps updated with news that’s often related to IT and new media. Perhaps one of the most popular sections of Bill’s blog is his brilliant directory of New Zealand media professionals on Twitter.

This directory features a list of NZ media-types and their Twitter accounts for a number of categories, such as newspapers, journalists, bloggers and more.

What’s on the blog?

As you’d expect from a journalist, the blog itself is well written and is highly readable. It mainly features posts related to the IT industry in New Zealand.

You’ll also find a number of posts related to blogging and social media, such as this post on why you shouldn’t tweet exclamation marks with some interesting insights on how to encourage retweeting of your updates.

Where else can you find the author?

As mentioned, Bill is a popular and frequent publisher on social media channels.

At this stage, one of the better places to follow his work in through his Twitter account, @billbennettnz.

Why? Search engines are just one way that people can find your blog. Another is through the use of social media.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past decade, you’ll know that social media is pretty big right now. Facebook has over 750 million users and each user has on average 130 friends. If one of those users visits your blog post and wants to share it with their friends, without sharing buttons they’ll have to copy the URL, visit the Facebook website and manually post it onto their wall.

Sure there’s a chance they would do this but why not make it easy for them by allowing them to share your content with a simple click of a button?

The same goes for many other social networks.

4 key social networks are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+

Google+ is the baby of these four and, at time or writing, is still only in testing stage. Despite that, it has thousands of users and is set to be a major contender for Facebook.

Google provide a sharing button in the form of “+1″. Adding that button to your blog is actually a little trickier than the others mentioned here so it might be worth checking out our other blog post on the +1 button.

For the remainder, there are two main ways to add them to your WordPress blog post.

One is in the form of WordPress plugins. There are a number of plugins that offer a simple way to add sharing buttons to your blog. However, for me at least, many of these feel quite dated and don’t allow a great deal of customisation.

The second way is to add them manually. Each of the big social networks has a resources page that provides you with the code to add the buttons to your blog posts. At first it might look like you have to manually add them in the ‘html’ tab of each blog post you write, but there is of course a much easier way to add them which means they will automatically display on each new blog post.

First off, if you want to check out the small customisations of these buttons for yourself, the resource pages can be accessed as follows:

• LinkedIn ‘Share’ button on the publishers page
• Facebook ‘Like’ button and more on the developers page
• Twitter ‘Tweet’ button on the resources page
• Google Plus 1 button on the webmasters page

You don’t actually have to have your own account in any of the above networks to display the code on your website or blog, but it’s a good idea to so that you can test the buttons for yourself once you have placed them.

The problem with using the above is that it can be tricky to get them display neatly on your post. Buttons could be out of line and with random spacing which can cause a real headache and make your blog look unprofessional.

One way to get them to line up correctly is through the use of a table.

html Code for Social Media Buttons

To save you a heap of effort, you can use the code below. This code is the code used to display the sharing buttons that appear at the bottom of this blog post.

<p><table width=”430″ border=”0″>
<tr>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”60″><div id=”fb-root”></div><script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=154603594613054&xfbml=1″></script><fb:like href=”" send=”false” layout=”button_count” width=”60″ show_faces=”true” font=”arial”></fb:like></td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”50″><a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-count=”horizontal”>Tweet</a><script width=”50″ type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script></td>
<td>
<script width=”60″ src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”right”></script>
</td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle”>
<g:plusone size=”medium”></g:plusone>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</p>

Just remember that the Google +1 button, used in the code above, won’t display correctly unless you use the extra code mentioned in our other blog post. If you’d rather forget about the Google +1 button, use the following code instead:

<p><table width=”430″ border=”0″>
<tr>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”60″><div id=”fb-root”></div><script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=154603594613054&xfbml=1″></script><fb:like href=”" send=”false” layout=”button_count” width=”60″ show_faces=”true” font=”arial”></fb:like></td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”50″><a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-count=”horizontal”>Tweet</a><script width=”50″ type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script></td>
<td>
<script width=”60″ src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”right”></script>
</td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle”>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</p>

This code only displays the Facebook Like, a LinkedIn share button and a Tweet button.

Where do I place the code?

As always, it’s not a good idea to try the following unless you have backed up your files. One way is to open Notepad and copy the full existing content of the .php file you’re about to edit into a new .txt file. Should anything go wrong, you can replace your modified code with the code you have saved in your Notepad file.

If in doubt, ask a web professional to help out.

1. On your WordPress dashboard, head to ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Editor’.
2. In the list of files on the right column, find the file called ‘single.php’ or ‘single-post.php’, depending on your theme.
3. Click on that file to load it in the central editor.
4. Find the line of text that, most likely, says ‘php the_content(”); ?>’
5. To place the sharing buttons at the bottom of your post (like in this blog post) paste the above code directly after the below the <?php the_content(”); ?>. To place the sharing buttons at the top of your post after the title, paste the code directly above the <?php the_content(”); ?>

Save the file and then head to one of your live blog posts to check that it has worked. If anything displays oddly on the page, restore your old file and find someone that can help you.

If they display correctly, give each one a go for yourself and then check out how it looks on the relevant social network.

Flickr Credit: Ed Yourdon