The book I read to research this post was How To Use Pinterest For Marketing Purposes A Beginners Guide by Jeff A Hamilton et al which is a very good guide which I bought from kindle. Pinterest has 21 million members and is the fastest growing social network on the planet behind Facebook & Twitter. It's even bigger than linkedin & google+. Added to that where is an unusually high proportion of women and people into things like crafts, the right product can really sell like hot cakes. To get an account with Pinterest they have to give you an invite which isn't a problem and you have to link it to your twitter and facebook accounts to help them avoid spam accounts. When you go on the website there is a kind of revolving display of popular repins and you can either repin, follow or comment on an item you are interested in. A lot of people look for a narrow niche they are interested in and concentrate on that. Whatever you offer on this site has to be interesting and avoid spam as this site is very much geared up to penalize that and most members are very much against it. With the right product marketed in the right way you can get a lot of business. A lot of what this site is about is giving something back whether that be special offers, free gifts or free information etc. One word of caution be careful what you repin, you can repin ie someones website but that can infringe on copyright and the same goes for images. Pinterest make it clear in the event of a lawsuit you are responsible for any legal costs etc although if they are sued they will defend their interests. There is no cut legal agreement as tried and tested in the courts so you must be careful. I don't currently have a pinterest account as I think it would be difficult promoting my blogs on there but it does look interesting as a source of information. I did really enjoy reading this book which I think was free and I would recommend it

The book I read to research this post was Promote Your Business Or Cause Using Social Media by Dennis Smith which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book which is around 170 pages is a reasonable length and a good introduction to this subject although if like me you are quite savvy about social media it might not offer that much new information. There is quite a large section on Facebook which is quite interesting and something I didn't know is if you promote a business or cause on a personal profile page which is quite common that is a serious infringement of their rules. Also if you have a page like a product you don't need to authorize every like button message you get which is the equivalent of a friend's request on a personal profile. There is a substantially shorter section on pinterest and this site boasts predominantly women users and apparently the average user clocks up 89 minutes on this site every month. The figure for Google+ is 3 minutes per month. Twitter is another powerhouse on the social media front with micro blogging which they call tweets which has now become a part of our language. I did quite enjoy reading this book and there is some interesting stuff on BlogTalkRadio where you can upload a podcast and there is the option of using the website which is free or downloading the software which you pay for but has additional features. There website is http://blogtalkradio.com.