How to Make Pinterest an Integral Part of Your Business

Pin Power

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Net-worth can indicate many things, from strength of investment, how heavily something is trending or just how imposing and significant a particular app or social media platform is becoming. Thus, it’s worth taking note of the fact that Pinterest is now valued at $11 billion. It might seem like a casual, disposable tool, but more and more, it’s been as heavily relied upon in social media business tactics as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ (although the days may be numbered for that last one). You might wonder exactly how a service that seems to be largely geared towards hopping online and sharing information about your favourite restaurants or a fascinating article about how to fit your exercise routine around your 9-5 has become so significant.

You’d be surprised, though, Pinterest gets more web traffic, pound for pound, than any of those other heavyweights, apart from Facebook. The reason it makes so much sense for businesses is because it’s a marketing playground. It’s far easier to engage people through visual content than almost any other means and Pinterest gives you a wide range of options to explore. Creative marketing is essential in the modern business world and no other social media platform suits it better, if you ask me. That in mind, here is a handy guide for making Pinterest part of your business’s social media arsenal.

Getting Started

Obviously before you do anything else you’ll actually need to set up an account. You’ll need to select the ‘join as business’ option. All you’ll need to give it at that stage is an email, business name and business type, after that you're asked to select a set of interests and Pinterest builds your home page for you.

Once you have that done, take the time to explore the Pinterest Business Centre (business.pinterest.com) to see a more comprehensive spread of all the resources you’ll have at your disposal. Log as many relevant interests as you can in this early stage and really take the time to study other pages to see how best to promote your pins. Whatever content you post on your site, make sure you go into the site host settings and add a ‘Pin It’ button/’Follow Me’ button so that readers are guided to Pinterest in the same way that they would be to Facebook and Twitter.

Once that’s all taken care of, make sure to really synergise everything, use your other social media accounts to guide people to the Pinterest one, you can like your Pinterest to your Facebook and Twitter in account settings, meaning that everything which you share automatically crops up there as well.

Now you’re ready to start pinning, but lastly make sure that you look at the ‘Pin Etiquette’ guidelines, it will show how to make sure any content you Pin or Re-pin is credited and source-checked.

Build an Active Network

Like any other platform, building an active, organic web is absolutely key. In this case that means building up a wide range of boards to pin on and following as many other relevant accounts as you possibly can. With the pins themselves, make sure they’re easy to find for anyone who isn’t already in your network, more or less anything text-based that appears on a board or pin is searchable, so make use of key words as often as you can (within reason, don’t just have the word ‘cake’ over and over again as a description, it’ll come up on searches for sure, but you might end up looking a bit insane).

Pinterest feeds (especially among businesses) move very, very quickly and it can be easy for your posts to get buried, so make sure you have several posts going out every day. Not everything needs to be a product promotion or event listen or whatever, even pictures of the office team, motivational quotes, anything that keeps the current flowing. Remember, even if the pin isn’t directly promoting your business, it’s still coming from you and other users will take notice of that. Keep them spaced out throughout the day though, rather than doling them out in big lumps. Pin on weekends, too.

To help your cause further still, use Pinterest’s Rich Pins function. This will allow you to include more information on each pin, as well as mapping it to a specific format (app, movie, recipe, article, product or place). With the benefit of this, the context and purpose of each pin will be that much more targeted and more visually appealing.

Outside of your own stuff, keep an active dialogue open with your connections. Comment and like just like you would elsewhere, tag interested parties when you pin something relevant to them or even find something they might want to look at elsewhere. Perhaps most importantly of all though, keep track of your pins, if you type in www.pinterest.com/source/(yourwebite) you will get a rundown of all the pins and repins from your site. No other platform offers this service in such a streamlined way, take advantage of it.

Tailor Your Content

All of this effort will be for not if the content your pinning just isn’t interesting or engaging. Remember that Pinterest relies on images and videos primarily, you have to present the revelent information in a way which is striking. Say you run an online magazine, making sure your articles have striking banner or featured images is vital, since when you pin it, that’s what your followers will see first. Strictly speaking, the human mind processes images much faster than written text, even more so if you make sure your images effectively ‘summarise’ your pin. Pinterest users interface with it just as much on mobile platforms as they do on desktop, so bear that in mind. Vary it between pictures, videos and SlideShare presentations as much as you can. The latter in particular is worth paying attention to, since it enables you to incorporate infographics and photo galleries without need to link away from Pinterest. There are image creation tools, like Canva and Pinstamatic enable you to build content perfectly suited to Pinterest before it even goes up.

Be as creative as you can with the promotion, too. If there’s scope to run some kind of completion, user poll or whatever else. It doesn’t have to be anything massive, but it gives your business profile an interactive element that will increase engagement and make you more memorable. You can post a ‘call-to-action’ pin description to immediately increase your engagement chances (as long as context allows for it).

Finally, once you have content going out that’s well suited to Pinterest, keep an eye on what gets engagement and what doesn’t, track your recent activity and use that information to decide how/what to pin next. Think of it as an ongoing marketing experiment with live, by-the-minute stats. Make sure that you utilise SEO and Google Analytics to their full extent.

That’s about all, the thing with Pinterest is that you will almost naturally fall into a flow when you start using it actively, so keep everything here in mind, sign up and get pinning!

Callum Davies

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

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