Social

Social media influencer marketing is all the rage these days, with brands looking to partner with just about anyone who has over 1,000 followers on social media (Instagram being the flavor of the day) and a pulse.

With just a nominal following in a niche market, these “influencers” are being invited to media events, given swag, and offered discounts on products in exchange for coverage to their audience.

As a blogger, I've been called an influencer due to my social media fan count and offered many of these freebies in exchange for coverage (often purely on my Instagram alone).

More often than not I say no, and outside of a few perfect fits for our Pittsburgh blog (where I am invited to do something I was going to pay for to feature anyway) the model is not something I am fond of.

While my normal response is simply “don't call me an influencer” and to quote my advertising rates, today I really want to highlight why I take that stance.

Read moreDon't Be a Social Media Influencer, Build a Brand That Lasts

Before reading this guide, please note that our strategy is suited for those who have a few thousand followers on Pinterest on all boards (say 5,000 or more). Not a few thousand on one board, a few thousand following your whole account such that they are following every board. While you can certainly follow all tips in this guide with any following size, a few things included are tailored to those with larger followings.

We all know the general procedure for being a model pinner on Pinterest. Pin a few dozen images a day. Pin images that are colorful, contain beautiful scenes, text, and are vertical in orientation. Join group boards. Keep the vast majority of your pins to be by others such that your activity doesn't look like a self-promoting love fest.

In one paragraph I've summed up pretty much every Pinterest article ever written, and outside of this article, every article ever to be written on the subject. So when we get into our approach to running Pinterest via the scheduling tool Tailwind, we'd hope to offer something a bit more in-depth than that because the above is just common knowledge.

With a tool as powerful as Tailwind, Pinterest optimization has never been easier. To help you get more out the service, today we wanted to share our current Pinterest strategies for our travel blogs.

Read moreTailwind Pinterest Review – Unleashing a Powerful Strategy for Our Profiles

For those who don't know me, you should know that I am an engineer as well as a travel blogger- which at times is a very dangerous combination. When I try out something new to help my brand grow, I put together a test and log everything so I can get to the real reason for why something works. (We then write about it in our Blog Your Trip series to share it with you).

Over the past year I've been conducting many successful Instagram tests, and they've been picking up in popularity thanks to this social network's continued rise in prominence.

As I've had some time to reflect on our most recent tests (find the one on Instagram hash-tags and the one on gaining targeted Instagram followers here), I need to tweak some of the recommendations I wrote about in those posts to form our game plan moving forward.

So, before reading any further, I highly recommend you read through both of those first. Finished? Good, let's recap.

Read moreTravel Instagram Strategies to Take Your Profile to the Next Level

It is a sad day in the world of social media and social advertising when brand credibility and effectiveness is measured by the number of followers you have and not the type of niche website content you publish and who it is going to.

This phenomenon is especially true on Instagram because the service is so locked down that you really can only measure two things when sharing your account: the number of followers you have and the number of likes you receive on any given photo (which is highly dependent on the amount of followers you have in the first place).

In not being able to effectively measure who makes up your blog traffic, there is a veritable arms race to get more Instagram followers and likes at any cost.

For many years we stayed away from Instagram for reasons similar to this, but it wasn't until we really put social media as a primary focus with our sites that we decided to open an account.  That was in 2013, and over the subsequent year-and-a-half we grew to a decently sized 1,800 followers with a long period of stagnated growth.  We knew we had to take a step back and find out what we were missing, and a test for our Blog Your Trip series was born.

Read moreHow to Get More Instagram Followers and Likes – A One-Month Test