Why bother with Pinterest to promote your business?

With Facebook and Twitter often the usual starting place for promoting your business on social media it can be easy to overlook the value of the ‘social bookmarking site’ better known as Pinterest. From a business perspective consider this fact Pinterest pins are 100 times more spreadable than a tweet, with the retweet average hitting only 1.4%. And, as for Facebook, the half-life of a pin is 1,6000x longer than a Facebook post. Also from a business standpoint, what makes Pinterest such a good network for marketers is that it is obviously visual in nature. Another interesting fact is that users on this network are 10 per cent more likely to buy something compared to other social networks. Finally, there is a powerful backend to deliver these benefits to growing your business available for making the most out of the platform, Pinterest for Business.

The first step therefore is to sign up to Pinterest for Business to get on the first rung of the ladder, and to check out the Pinterest Analytics which gives you access to important tracking information – it will enable you to assess which of your Pinterest strategies and work so you can improve your marketing efforts. But before you get going properly with using it for your business like any new social media platform it’s important first to get your head round the Pinterest community of users, and in more practical terms thinking about what your Pinterest ‘followers’ will be searching  search for (bearing in mind it functions as a visual search engine), and therefore to figure out the best way to create visual ‘pins’ (the name given to the images uploaded to Pinterest) which will resonate most effectively with your followers.

Getting started

The first practical step is to set up boards, the containers which organise your visual pins, according to the categories most relevant to your existing and new customers. Like any marketing strategy this depends in part on making sure you know who your customers are, if you want to get the most of Pinterest. Secondly, consider the quality not just the quantity of the visual pins if you want to get the best return on your ROI. The advice from most experts is that Pinterest images should in general be long and narrow to take up the maximum amount of visual space and get noticed. A useful rule of thumb is to take a look at your favourite pins and see what these images have in common so you can start to figure out what types of images are most ‘repinned’ and shared. And along with images another great use of Pinterest’s visual platform is to create infographics, a nice TOLF (top of the funnel) attractor that will draw in first time prospects to see what you have to say as an expert on a particular topic for example.

Once you have got going in terms of your basic set up and forward strategy on Pinterest, like any social platform attracting followers involves participating in other boards by re-pinning other’s pins, as well as commenting, and repeating that process to be most engaged. In turn it’s key for you to add web links to your own pins so when new followers come to your boards they can click through to a specific landing page or call to action that can turn followers into leads for example. In terms of best practice, the 3 top ranking reasons for growing your followers are the number of accounts you are following, or following you, how many pins you have and how many boards you have.

Daily pinning activity

On a daily basis to generate more pins its recommended to post 5-30 pins every day, though not to upload them all at the same time. Plus, as part of extending the reach of your Pinterest presence, to make sure you link your Pinterest account with your Facebook and Twitter profiles so every time you pin your followers in those platforms are automatically notified. It’s also worth noting that in creating your campaign plans, including your content calendar, that you want to be thinking about the visual and video components alongside written content as an integrated approach to your social media marketing. That way you are both re-using content in many different formats, and also ensuring the potential TOLF prospect is able to appreciate a new product for example in many different formats for maximum benefit and sharing.

SEO and ROI

In terms of creating content for Pinterest like any other social marketing its important to make the naming of the Pinterest boards clearly named for potential followers to find. Plus of course to maximise the SEO value to add a few relevant SEO keywords to the titling and pin titles. Like any other social media platforms, it helps to take part in the sense of community by following other pinners, that’s a given. But one way you can up the value of that approach in a more specific to your business fashion is to invite guest Pinterest contributors, particularly for an event, with a high attraction rate for your customers. Other tactics to improve follower numbers is to use pins to create how to content, particularly useful say for a DIY or gardening business, but also for more technology intensive businesses which are looking for more creative ways to improve customer retention by coming up with more accessible ways to show customers how to maximise the ROI from their products, a key failure for declining retention rates for example. Indeed, this retention value to the business can also take advantage of the ‘Open Board feature of Pinterest, which allows users to contribute their own pins. All you have to do is give them pinning access by adding their name or email. This feature is great for marketing because you get your community involved in a personal way.

Rich Pins

Rich Pins are just another feature of Pinterest that can be used to good effect, focusing on app, film, recipe, article, product and place, and what’s more all come with a rich feature set to boost your engagement and direct traffic to your site. In particular, Rich Pins supply real-time information on your pins and provide more ways to direct people to a website. To quote Pinterest: “Rich Pins show metadata right on the Pin itself, giving Pinners a richer experience and increasing engagement. A useful added value suggestion from Kissmetrics is to also collect all your article Rich Pins on one board: “You’ll want to put this board at the top of your page so your followers will see it first thing. This will help draw traffic to your site and make it easier for users to find your content since it’s all in one easy-to-find-board. They will thank you.” It’s obviously also worth adding Pinterest share buttons to your website and blog so that your visual content gets shared more widely, and attracts new followers to your Pinterest boards.

Finally, it’s important to keep measuring the success of your Pinterest using the Pinterest Analytics, available to business accounts. The analytics gives you information regarding your Pinterest profile, audience and website. Fortunately, there is plenty of support information and help videos, to ensure you get the most business value out of your Pinterest marketing strategy.

Article sources
1. Pinterest: Analytics for Business Help
2. Kissmetrics: The Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Guide
3. Search Engine Journal: 13 Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers
4. Peg Fitzpatrick: 12 Most strategic Ways to Use Pinterest for Marketing

Source: this article was written with help and inspiration from optimisation experts Convertize.

No Fields Found.