I love Pinterest. What’s not to love? You can be inspired and you get to dream. I have got so many ideas about decorating, cooking, dressing and art. If only I would live long enough to fulfill all those dreams!

I know many of you are already using Pinterest. Are you using it to your advantage, business wise? Here are three ways to do that.

1. Become the expert. How do you have time to develop all the content, pictures, etc., that you will need? The quick answer is you don’t have to. It is already on Pinterest. What you are doing is becoming a curator of information and sharing what you find. You might create a board called Art Tips and share relevant information that has already been pinned. By gathering and sharing useful information, you become the expert.




2. Drive your Pinterest traffic to your website. Did you know that Pinterest is the largest referrer to your website of all social media? And, even more important, people who come to your site from Pinterest spend more than those who come from other social media sites. Pinning great content is one way to get people to your site where they can sign up for your newsletter.
   
   
3. Engage your customers. One way you can do this by creating user-generated boards or by creating a board to promote your happy customers using your product. Look for ways to turn your pinners into your unpaid sales force.
   
   

What is your favorite business way to use Pinterest?

How effective are your efforts to engage and connect with your fans on Facebook? Perhaps you don’t realize that many of your fans never even see your posts. On average most Fan Pages reach only 12% of its fans. Not much for the effort you are putting in to try to engage your fans and develop leads. What can you do to increase that percentage? Here are a few ideas:

1. Post more often. Yes, you are already trying to post once a day. Consider that not everyone will see you post if you post once a day at the same time. I’ve heard that posts “live” for three hours, that’s the amount of time you have to engage someone. You can post more often and see if you get results. And, this is easy if you schedule your posts.

2. Post something people can respond to. That means ask questions, take polls or surveys. Think of ways that you engage the reader to respond or have a conversation.

3. Use graphics or photos. According to Hubspot, photos on Facebook generate 53% more likes than the average post. Think about your own experience on Facebook. Don’t you tend to respond more to posts with pictures? I know I do.

4. Pay attention to the analytics on your fan page and make adjustments accordingly.

The bottom line is that the more engagement (commenting, liking, sharing), the more likely your are to increase your fan base and the more exposure you will get for your business,

What are you doing to engage with your Facebook fans?