Pinterest… is it really worth your time? Can you use it to promote your business? How do I start? For those of you who are considering using Pinterest to promote your business, we’ve put together a guide to understand how you can make the most of it. Oh! and if you want to know how you can incorporate it into your social media marketing strategy you can always book a free digital consultation with our social media experts.
Pinterest: A different type of social media channel
Let’s start from the beginning. Pinterest describe themselves as:
“a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more”
If you’ve noticed, they describe themselves as a discovery engine?and not a social media platform. Why is this important? Well, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter place a strong emphasis on creating connections, conversations and engagement between users. Pinterest doesn’t care so much about that (although you can follow other boards and users). Think about it like a google to help users plan and learn how to do things.?
OK, but what does that actually mean?
It means people will be typing specific keywords to search for pins or boards that are relevant to them. Once you find some pins that might be of interest, you’ll be able to group them into a ‘board’, so you can organise your pins as you like, into themes or categories. The best thing? each pin is clickable, which means you’ll need to add a link to a page on your website, which is great because this opens your content up to loads of people that are actively looking to discover what you do!
Who is Pinterest for and what content works best?
This question came up in our #CBSession online webinar on social media channels (see slide below). Pinterest has 300 million monthly active users and 7 out of 10 people that use Pinterest are female (Oberlo). This means that Pinterest might not necessarily work for ALL businesses out there, but we’ve certainly seen success stories from companies working in:
- Travel
- Health and beauty
- Lifestyle services/products (interior design, homeware, fashion)
- Food and drinks (recipes)
- Charities and causes
- Education
What’s the recipe for a successful Pinterest account to promote my business?
- Think of it as your business card. When people land on your Pinterest account, ensure it has a description of what you do and how people can contact you. Here’s a great example from Rickshaw Travel:
- Make sure that every board has a title and a description that uses keywords that users are most likely to use to find them. For example, if people are searching for summer craft ideas, you can add a description to a board that says: “Need some summer craft ideas? Get creative with our board, especially curated by [insert company name] experts.” Note: Important to add your company name on the description so people associate the content you put out with your brand. Here’s another great example:
- Make sure that every pin links to a page in your website. This is a great way to promote your services, products, blog post or news articles. Remember people visit Pinterest for ideas and to discover how to do things, so the most useful your content is, the better! Don’t have useful content on your website at the moment? That’s ok. Create a blog post with customer questions and answers, or think of a problem your audience might need a solution for, and THEN create a pin on Pinterest to help people discover it.
- Don’t just build boards out of other people’s pins. It’s totally fine to build your Pinterest boards out of other people’s pins when it comes to a personal project. Maybe you need ideas to decorate your home, or you’d like some culinary inspiration and recipes (who doesn’t, right?). But when it comes to using Pinterest for business, please remember that the more pins you upload that match your company’s branding, the better. Being consistent it’s really important here because you are reaching a really big audience that might have never heard of you, and you want them to feel like your brand experience is seamless. And yes, you’re probably realising that actually using Pinterest for business might take you A LOT longer than you thought… welcome to my world!
- Get the image format right. Unlike other social platforms, Pinterest works with vertical images. That’s right, think of a portrait A4 sheet. We’d recommend the following sizes: 1000 x 1500 pixels but you can get more detailed information directly on Pinterest.
- If a pin can go in multiple of your boards, simply duplicate it and save it in the different boards. This might help you reach different audiences and save you some time!
Our client Kinderly updates their profile board according to trending dates like Father’s Day - Remember to keep your profile banner up to date. You cannot upload a hero image to your board, but you can update the look of it by linking it to one of your boards. This will help you amplify reach, and raise awareness of a specific service/product that you’d like to highlight.
How can I measure success?
There are different ways in which you can measure success, a great starting point would be:
- How many people are following your account? What is your monthly unique viewer data like? is it increasing?
- What are your top-performing pins? This will give you an idea of the type of content your audience likes
- How many clicks are your pins generating?
- How much web traffic is Pinterest generating every month? Is it generating or assisting in any conversion on your website? (you’ll have to understand a bit of how Google Analytics works to get an idea of this).
Any questions? Get in touch with us for a free social media consultation – we’d love to help you.
