Most businesses have social media strategies included in their marketing plans. However, social media includes much more than just Facebook and Twitter. Other social media sites such as YouTube, Tumblr, and Pinterest are fast growing platforms and are helpful for increasing SEO and product awareness. Each platform has it’s own unique value and its important to have a plan for each site your company is on.
So should your business have a Pinterest account? Short answer: yes. Long answer: if you don’t have a Pinterest account, you could be missing out on a large consumer base.
What Is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a fast growing social media site. It has been said that Pinterest has been bringing in more traffic to websites than LinkedIN, Google+, and YouTube put together. On the site, users upload images and videos (called “pins”) and use a Pinterest home page to save them for later access. Each user has “boards” that they can use to organize the pins they collect. Users can then “like” or “repin” the images in order to share with friends and followers. There is also a “home feed” where users can search for specific topics in order to find pins from other users.
What makes Pinterest unique and valuable is the audience. It’s harder to grab consumer attention when users are on a site for leisure or communication with friends. This is very often the audience on Facebook or Twitter. Pinterest, however, has an audience that is specifically looking for a product or service. Businesses can add pictures (or pins) of their products in order to encourage users to share the image. Pinterest caters to those wanting to save images, ideas, and videos for later. So this can be a great time to share images of products, helpful information, and for users looking to make improvements in their life. With many users having boards titled “home improvement” or “makeup ideas”, this can be a perfect place to showcase your product or service and explain how it can fit into your audiences life. The best part is, the image or video can be shared over and over again, increasing the viewing audience every day.
There is also a product feature where businesses can showcase products and assign a price to the image. This can be especially helpful in creating leads and for users to recommend a product to friends and family.
How to Get a Business Account
The first step to opening a Pinterest account is to make a business account. There is a special sign-up available for businesses. This will help fans and potential customers identify the account as a business and help with brand recognition.
It’s important for those interested in starting a Pinterest business account to be careful when posting pins. The “repin” feature is a great way to share pins that other users have posted. However, be mindful of pin descriptions. The pin description will stay with that image when re-pinning unless it is changed prior to posting. Make sure all pin descriptions are appropriate and free of foul language and spelling/grammar errors.
What is Your Strategy?
Just like with any other marketing campaign, its important to develop a Pinterest strategy in order to get the most out of the marketing campaign. Is your goal to gain leads? If so, make it easy to find your website by linking the picture to the site, or by putting the site in the description. Is your goal to communicate with users? If so, add followers, encourage past customers to add you to their followers, and interact on a daily basis. Is the goal to increase SEO? Make sure boards and pins are labeled correctly with important keywords.
It is also important to set guidelines or goals. Some examples of goals include certain numbers of followers, re-pins, or sales leads per week/month/year. This will help to keep the campaign on track.
Tips and Tricks
Brand your page. Pinterest allows you to customize your profile by adding in company descriptions and pictures. This is a great place to infuse your company brand.
Share and “re-pin” useful content. Users don’t want to simply sift through advertisements. So in between posting pins related to your company, “re-pin” and “like” other pins that contain valuable content. This will keep your pins fresh and followers happy.
Have original content. Besides just sharing other users’ pins, its just as important to create original content. This is a great time to create pins that link back to a company site or blog. Pinterest also allows pins that contain embedded YouTube videos.
Use the “Product” feature. If you sell physical products, you can upload an image and assign a price to it. This shows users exactly what the price is, possibly enticing them to visit your website.
