Our blog, D Brief, shares succint expert advice, trends, tips, and ideas for marketing communications tactics—focusing on print, Web, social media, and promotional products—from a corporate visual identity perspective. We welcome your thoughts so we can learn from each other.

Lessons on social media & blogging from #DFWSM

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the DFW Social Media Marketing meetup. A panel of experienced speakers discussed the topic SEO/Blogging and Using Social Media to Drive Blog Traffic. Here are a couple of takeaways:

1) Hot trend to look for in 2012: http://pinterest.com. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard—a place to create collections of things you love and “follow” collections created by others.

People use Pinterest to collect and share a variety of things— wedding inspiration, favorite T-shirts, DJ equipment. You name it, people are pinning it.

Pinterest is one of the hottest new social networks. It’s on the current list of top 10 social networks, and it’s technically still invite-only.

With over 400,000 visitors per month and growing, Pinterest is a referral source for brands. Real Simple reported that in October, Pinterest drove more traffic to its website than Facebook.

How does Pinterest help bloggers with SEO? Pin images from your blog on Pinterest with a link back to your site. Pinterest users who have an interest in that image then get directed to your blog.

2) Where to build your blog for best SEO: Many bloggers start at a third-party site like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, or Tumblr.com. However, the panel was unanimous in this advice:

“Always own the content.”

Build your blog on your own domain; don’t entrust your content on someone else’s site.

If you currently have a blog at an online resource, move it to your own site. WordPress.com sites can be ported over to your own hosted domain using WordPress.org.

Hosting your blog on your domain offers the following benefits:

1. You own the content; no one can take it away from you
2. More professional on your domain
3. Complete control of your theme, can customize it to your design and upload plugins
4. Can run Adsense and profit from your blog
5. Can add blog to your existing website (yourwebsite.com/blog) or create your entire site on the blog platform
6. SEO and social media send links to your domain/your site, not to a third-party site

It was a very informative evening! I enjoyed seeing: @SocialMediaDFW, @pokersteve786, @tonycecala, @LissaDuty, @RobinatRibit, @bigpromotions

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