Guess which social media network has been the buzziest of them all in the last one year? Yes, it’s Pinterest.
That social media network that was all about housewives and pretty pictures and slightly lame quotes (with pictures, again!) is now comfortably taking on the big boys of social media. If you did not consider Pinterest a contender for your social media efforts, rethink right now.
Adobe’s research shows that 15% of all social media referrals come from Pinterest – a figure that is more than the twice the share of Twitter and second only to social media behemoth, Facebook.
According to the above-referenced data from ComScore, Pinterest users spend double the amount that the average shopper spends online. In comparison to Facebook users, Pinners are more generous with their online spending by leaps and bounds.
Not only is Pinterest a star social media referrer in terms of traffic, it also delivers in terms of revenue per visitor and average order value. According to a Shopify study across its websites, Pinterest delivers the highest average order value at $80 per order – double that of Facebook which stood at $40.
1. Cover The bases
Hopefully those stats were convincing enough to get you to consider Pinterest as a real option for your social media marketing.
Once you’ve decided to go ahead on a pinning spree, there are a few basics that you must take care of:
- Don’t look at Pinterest as a backup social media platform. It is much too important to be viewed as one. Give it, its due importance and you’ll start seeing results soon enough.
- Pinterest users are voracious consumers of content – there are currently 30 billion pins and counting on Pinterest. If you’ve signed up your business for it, put aside a fixed amount of time every single day building up your boards and pins on your Pinterest account. You don’t want to serve up the same old boring content on your page for days together.
Source: You do NOT want a page like this! Surprisingly, it has 48 followers!
- Build an inviting and complete profile page for your business. A great image (duh, it’s Pinterest!) to represent your brand as your profile picture, a well written brand description that tells users what to expect from your brand in your brand’s signature style, links to your website and your other social networks to allow users to learn more about your brand and so on.
- Ensure you include your most important keywords and industry terms in your profile description – it’ll go a long way towards attracting the right users to your pages.
2. Choose Variety
The most popular brands on Pinterest let their imagination run wild and offer reams and reams of content on their pages. With dedicated boards for every possible interest that their ideal users might have, successful brands ensure that they don’t lose any opportunities at all in connecting with the right audience and becoming more relevant in their lives.
It’s quite easy to see the connection between variety and engagement. The brands with the largest number of boards on the most varied topics see the highest engagement rates on Pinterest.
Get inspiration about what boards to create by analyzing the keywords your audience uses to find new content. You’ll be surprised to find some interests in there that you might never have considered promoting, but mean a lot to your target audience.
Source: Ann Taylor mixes it up with boards covering a wide range of topics from pets to inspirational quotes and more – not just fashion content.
Another way to discover fresh content ideas or board topics is to check out the competition. See what it working for them and use those as inspiration to build your own popular boards.
3. Promote Your Pinterest Page via Your Blog and Email Marketing
Why just let Pinterest users see the awesome content that you pin on your boards? Put all that hard work you spent in creating or curating your fabulous content to good use by promoting it across all your owned platforms.
Here’s a handy guide to embed pins from Pinterest directly on your blog to expand your Pinterest reach and make your blog a tad buzzier.
Going the other way around, let users pin your blog posts to their Pinterest profiles by including a simple ‘Pin It’ button on all your posts. If you’re unsure how to do that, learn here. If embedding your pins to your blog gives you a kick about Pinterest, you can take it a notch higher by using some lovely Pinterest themed plugins on your blog.
Give your blog a makeover with a Pinterest-themed plugin
Another great way to spread the word about your pins on Pinterest is by promoting them via your email marketing. You would be in good company too, as according to Experian Marketing Services, 64% of brands that are active on Pinterest promote their Pinterest accounts via email.
4. Become Findable, Be a Generous Re-Pinner
Pinterest, like most other social media platforms, helps boost your SEO rankings. As I said earlier, with the right use of keywords in the descriptions of your pins, you can attract the right audience. Pinterest’s own search function, which was revamped earlier this year, helps well fleshed out pins and business pages to be discovered more easily by pinners, whether they follow your page or not.
Another simple yet extremely effective addition to your descriptions are hashtags. Use hashtags on Pinterest the way you would on Twitter or Instagram and be discovered more easily.
Source: Pinterest’s dedicated ‘Gifts’ section is a perfect brew of social and commerce
Use prices in your product descriptions to be automatically featured in the Pinterest Gifts section. This is a page that features gifting ideas arranged by budget and category (handmade gifts, Christmas gifts, etc.) with click through links to the pinners’ websites.
Pinterest is still largely driven by organic content as compared to its competitors and any overt self-promotion can come back to bite you. Use Pinterest search to look up relevant, “re-pinnable” content from other pinners and share it on your own boards. It spreads the love, gives your users more diversity in content, and makes your brand look like an enabler rather than a self-promoter.
5. Have Conversations with Your Followers
Pinterest has plugged the gap in its ‘being social’ repertoire and now allows users to have conversations with each other through direct messages. The caveat here is that both users must follow each other to avoid spam.
This means as a business owner, you can now reach out to a follower one on one, instead of having just boards of content passively communicating your brand idea to your fans. Imagine how cool it would be as a fan to have your favorite brand talking back to you! Yeah, offer that experience to your own users. Group conversations have a limit of supporting up to 9 users at a time.
There’s so much that can be done with this messaging feature. For example, you could:
- Reach out to fans who have liked a product offering them assistance in purchasing the item.
- Offer thanks to followers through a personalized message for re-pinning one of your pins.
- Send out personalized coupons or gift cards to star re-pinners and get them to transact on your site.
- Set up group conversations with like-minded followers. Help them connect with each other and your brand on topics of mutual interest.
6. Milk Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest also has remarkable analytics for its business accounts! With Pinterest Analytics you can know who your users are – their gender, age, location, etc. You’ll get insights into the interests of your followers, what type of content from your site they pin the most, how many leads your site receives from Pinterest, and so on.
You can actually do so much with each bit of these free insights that Pinterest reveals to you. Take users’ interests for example.
Pick those interests that are common among a majority of your followers and create pins around them. Even better, start a board for a topic that interest the majority of your users. Increase engagement with them by inviting them to pin on these boards by making them collaborative.
Use an all-encompassing dashboard like Cyfe that lets you see all analytics data from your social media accounts, your website, your CRM tools, and elsewhere in one place. Cross-reference your social data with visitors’ interactions on your website or their activities on Pinterest to create unique blog content or email newsletters that they will enjoy.
Closing Thoughts
Pinterest marketing firm managed to put a price on each pin posted by users on their Pinterest pages. Turns out, every new pin is worth 78 cents of incremental sales to the brand that is featured in the pin. With over 30 billion pins racked up already, that’s a goldmine waiting to be tapped.
So put your best foot forward and say hello to the ‘ladies & gents who pin’ (and shop like mad) on Pinterest.
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This is seriously a helpful and information rich article. I really enjoyed the specifics of what I can do on Pinterest because its always been one of those difficult to engage with followers type of platforms.
Glad to be of help, Sevan. Pinterest has vastly improved their on-site search and group interaction features, as a result of which, board pages have gained serious visibility in Google SERPs over the past few months.
What’s more, engagement from Pinterest spills over to your site: visitors view more pages per session compared to any other social network (in the CPG business).
Very unimpressed that you started off your article with such inherently sexist categorizations: “That social media network that was all about housewives and pretty pictures and slightly lame quotes (with pictures, again!) is now comfortably taking on the big boys of social media.” That’s pretty offensive.
Janet, if you look into the history of Pinterest, you’ll find out that it was frequented overwhelmingly by female adults - (nearly three fourths). This was an aberration in the gender demographics of social networks, and naturally spurred internet-wide discussions and marketing campaigns that were geared towards women. At the moment, Pinterest is making a big deal of having double active male users over the past year: http://marketingland.com/pinterest-touts-manliness-107444
This is a marketing-focused article and we need to break the facts down for what they are. If you start finding sexist or other politically incorrect connotations where they aren’t implied, you’ll simply never stop feeling offended. Paul Vixie - one of the pioneers of the web - said, “The internet is not for sissies.” ;~)
Rohan, you seem to be so embedded in your sexism that you can’t even see the inherent bias in your statements. I’m not disputing that Pinterest started out as a platform that was predominantly used by “housewives.” It’s what you go on to say, “the big boys of social media” that belies your belief that only “big boys” are taken seriously, while “housewives” are not.
For example, you could’ve just said “the big kids of social media.”
I am very pleased to find this blog. I want to thank for your time for this wonderful read!!! Keep Sharing, I’ll surely be looking for more.
Great insights - you are spot-on with all the recommendations. We have seem similar observations working with our SMB clients here at Viraltag.
Would love to connect sometime.
Thank you, Sudheer. I’m always up for a chat on Twitter @searchrook 🙂