Pinterest.com - a rapidly growing visual content site!

If you haven't joined Pinterest.com - here is a breakdown on everything you need to know about this rapidly growing site - http://www.blueglass.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-pinterest/. 

It's a great site for visual content and for all your work/interests/ to be seen, build brand advocacy, create interesting boards and share to other social media sites. 

It's also a great site to find inspiration, tips and ideas. There are quotes, clothes, home decor, locations, tutorials, infographics as well as delicious cupcakes and cakes for you to drool over. It's extremely visual and you can search for anything and everything.  

Often when you click on a pin, it leads you to a site you have never seen before - this is a huge advantage for marketing your business or blog.

It's also easy to use, people can like,comment on, repin or share your pins, so it's a great site for start ups, bloggers, people who work from home and small businesses.

For creative companies like designers, architects, bloggers, cooks, chefs, moms, illustrators, artists, musicians - this is a great site to share your work.

And if you're curious top designers and musicians are starting to use the site as well - so there is a branding advantage for businesses and individuals.

Michael Kors is an early user and his boards are divided up between his work and his interests - http://pinterest.com/michaelkors/ - it will be very interesting to see how people make use of this site!

Here's a Pinterest Guide for beginners from Mashable - http://mashable.com/2011/12/26/pinterest-beginners-guide/

And for people like me who love quotes, reading books and infographics - http://pinterest.com/ebbye/ - I am using it to pin info about social media and business - I spend a great deal of time online researching and searching for content to train my clients and this site is a source of inspiration for me!

Are you on Pinterest.com yet? I'd love to know what you think of this site?

One of my pins today http://pinterest.com/pin/76631631129250424/

Let's get real with social media - how to find content - so you can update often!

We don't always have the time to find information and spend hours writing and editing our own content.

Social Media needs at least an hour a day of work.

Whether it's checking/ monitoring accounts, checking feeds, responding to comments or queries, social media is becoming a part of the other work you need to do daily.

So here is a link which helps you find ways ways to stay updated, to find and use content, to share relevant links via Twitter, the blog and the Facebook page and a way for you to find any info, to update, to link, to respond to, to share, and keep your accounts active.

While writing unique content is important on social media, so is sharing, linking to and acknowledging other relevant content as well as building a like minded community.

You can write/ schedule a unique blog post every few weeks or so ( I will be blogging about why you should blog often, some people blog daily some blog once a week- it depends on content and business practices), but find resources and have information at hand, so you can share/ update ( on Facebook or Twitter) every few days to keep your accounts active and build a community and engagement online.

Don't forget to read updates on your timeline on Twitter and Facebook and comment and respond to people as wel l- this will make you sound like an interested person and depending on what you say or answer, you may find yourself building a very interesting community of followers.

Take 15 minutes a day to find and put aside content, links, blog posts, pictures, that you can use when you have a bit of downtime- save all of it in a folder on your desktops or on a dropbox free app (download on computer, link to your smartphone) and use that saved content to share, comment upon, and use ( for an inspirational blog post perhaps or a marketing idea)

http://www.momeomagazine.com/business-101-feeding-the-content-monster-10-ways-to-stay-active-in-social-media-without-rewriting-the-yellow-pages/ - thanks to Iggy Pintado on Twitter - who shared this, this morning:

Feeding the Content Monster - 10 Ways to Stay Active in Social Media by @AndreaVahl - http://ow.ly/5Pcft RT @CarlaYoung

Social Media is an active part of marketing, it will only work and benefit by your doing, by your engagement and incentive to drive the accounts.
Set aside time each day and if you need help with planning and using techniques wisely, please just contact me.

Benefits of Social Media

With social media you can find information from anywhere about anything you are interested in.

I love finding information and reading other blog posts and sharing information with people who are using social media or are just learning how beneficial social media is as a business tool, for people who work at home and for anyone who wants to learn and explore.

I regularly update the Social Status Facebook Page to share with you the benefits of social media. People are writing blog posts, opening social media accounts and sharing information 24 hours a day.

If you want to find out something, whether it's an idea to promote and market your business, or how to use a certain tool or program, you can find your answers by searching on YouTube for how to videos, and by following realtime search on Google, find the realtime tab on the left hand side of the Google home page by clicking the more button. This will keep you up to date on whatever is happening in the world.

Use Facebook and Twitter search to find and follow great business pages, read blog posts, watch videos ... information is constant and changes in the blink of an eye, so a great way to make sure you don't miss something of interest to you; is to add links, pages and blogs to your favorites or if you want the information to come to you as soon as it's put on the Internet then subscribe to RSS feeds.

We are certainly learning to search and find information. And then we are sharing across Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other software programs to reach other people.

I love Read It Later, you can save any link from Twitter or the Internet and then read it later when you have some down time. I use Read It Later to track information and find references and get ideas for blog posts. I find it is also great to track information to send to clients to assist them with their marketing and promoting and to help them with their social media.

The greatest benefit is that social media is so accessible to use as a learning tool.
Social Media gives you a chance to learn, to connect with people all over the world, to find tips and info and to share, therefore helping other people with a how to, or a tip or a blog post on their journeys.

And remember learning never exhausts the mind - Leonardo Da Vinci.

What inspires you?

When I started Social Status, I had to ask myself what motivated me to run this business? What are my passions? What do I believe would work? And how I could make my business work?

I knew that I always had a huge curiosity and I am the kind of person who is constantly reasearching, reading, looking up answers and finding information.

I knew that social media would be a great fit for me, because I love to communicate, I love to learn, I love reading (news items, blog posts, websites, content, newsletters, discussions ... you name it) I love new ideas, I love finding interesting people and learning from them.

I love how fast technology is, how many people are involved with and in social media and how there is so much information that we have access to.

When I thought about my business, I wanted something to stand out, that would show what the most important thing to me was and my tagline was born Be Aware of Wonder ...

I got it from the author of "ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN" by Robert Fulghum.