As social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter become increasingly vital in the visibility and marketing of small businesses, finding the right hook to catch potential customers is critical to successful use of these tools. In today’s hi-tech, online world, if the right image or display catches someone’s eye, it can go viral in a matter of hours. Our own “Urban Farmer of Seward” from Growing Lots Urban Farm recently struck Internet gold with a blog post describing a clever above-ground potato tower that made its way onto the popular Pinterest website.
Pinterest is a social photo sharing website that allows users to build their own image collections that features their interests and hobbies. Users can look through other users’ ‘pinboards’ and ‘re-pin’ photos onto their own collection. Users can also pin images onto their collection from websites, blogs, or their personal collections.
The Famous Potato Tower
In early February, a Pinterest user from Oklahoma who saw Growing Lots blog post pinned an image of the potato tower and the link to the blog on her Pinterest board. By the beginning of March, the image and blog post had been pinned over 900 times by other users, and now has almost reached the 3000 mark. This caused a huge increase in traffic to the Urban Farmer of Seward’s blog. In January, the blog only had 92 unique visitors. In February, the number of unique visitors skyrocketed to 27,515. This represents almost a 30,000% increase in visitors to the website! In the first week of March, 13,723 unique visitors had already come to the blog.
In an email to local community members, Peter Fleck of PF Hyper stated that these are incredible numbers. It is a great way to raise awareness to the site, as well as Growing Lots Urban Farm and other areas of Seward’s web presence. The potato tower blog post had people commenting from all over the country, including Missouri, Arizona, Georgia, and Tennessee. People were even posting the blog onto Facebook and Twitter.
This is great news for our tight-knit community and places Growing Lots Urban Farm on the “Internet map.” People all over the country will now continually check with them to be updated on new and inventive urban farming techniques. In the process, other aspects of the Seward community will continue to gain exposure. While drawing that many viewers to your own site might take a bit of luck, it is up to you to create that right image, marketing scheme, or blog post that can catch fire.
