As with all social media platforms, Pinterest started as a cute and fun way for people to share their interests with their friends and peers. Also as with all social media platforms, it has also become an incredibly valuable forum in which businesses can find and be found by their target audience. A purely visual medium, Pinterest relies on at-a-glance information so it is not the place to write great tomes of content. There are four ways to get the most out of Pinterest for your business:
- Tell your story – Use images, graphics, photos, drawings, infographics, cartoons and memes to define your brand’s personality and engage consumers.
- Build a community – Encourage interaction (by pinning, re-pinning, following, etc.) and talk back when your audience communicates with you.
- Send traffic your way – Pinterest makes it easy for people to find you and share your material with their own followers.
- Learn and grow – Figure out what’s working well and do it more.
- Link pins to additional content
Ok so you can’t add too many words to your pins but Pinterest is designed so that you can hyperlink the pins to whatever content you like. Of course, pinning directly from a web page, say on your business’s website automatically creates a hyperlink to that page. But if you want to, you can alter the link’s address to go anywhere you choose.
You might want to link a photo of someone tucking in to a fatty, sugary donut which should attract other Pinterest users right when it counts … the 3.30pm sugar low. At that time of day, concentration is waning and up comes Pinterest for a little light diversion. Well if you’re a personal trainer, then it’s an excellent way to use Pinterest for business! Grab the sugar addict (a huge proportion of us!) by the tastebuds and point them towards your special offer landing page.
- Create order with your boards
At any given time, you can change the order in which your boards are seen on your profile, simply by clicking ‘edit profile’ and dragging and dropping the boards as desired. This allows you to shine a spotlight on the most current information or to respond to time-critical events such as items in the news, celebrity sightings of your products in use, upcoming promotions, changes of season or latest launches.
- Use prices to draw more attention
Whether you sell products or services, you can display your business’s prices on Pinterest to create a clear, unambiguous selling proposition. (Remember though, social media is about 20% sales and 80% engagement.) When you use a dollar sign in the comments for your pins, Pinterest overlays a price banner in the top left corner of your picture. This helps your followers to know the difference between when you’re just sharing interesting material and when you’re actively promoting your goods or services.
The big benefit for you is that displaying prices on Pinterest has been proven to increase a pin’s click through rate.
- Add a ‘Pin It’ button to your web presence
You’ll be amazed how your audience will help to promote your business for you. Simply by adding a ‘Pin It’ button your blog or website, you invite your followers to spread your message. That way, all their followers get to see your business on Pinterest, when they may not have otherwise heard of you. And while you’re at it, pop a ‘Pinterest’ button alongside your other social media buttons on your website.
- Create Group boards
Similar to a normal Pinterest board, Group boards allow other people as well as you to pin. How does this help you use Pinterest for business? Well, it helps to increase your follower numbers because they will feel more a part of your brand and exponentially, you will gain a much wider audience. The number of re-pins you achieve will also dramatically increase as a result and the follow-on effect is more traffic to your website and greater visibility and awareness.
- Turn followers into brand advocates
When organisations develop an effective social media presence, their followers often turn into raving fans. Brand advocates are an enormous, unpaid asset and as long as you keep feeding their desire to engage with you and share their support of your company, then your use of Pinterest for business will create a perpetual cycle of share/re-share, pin/re-pin, spread the word, gain more fans and so it goes.
The more you use Pinterest in your business, the more familiar you will become with its mechanics. And the more effectively you use it, eventually, your followers will play a more prolific role in adding and sharing the content for you.
