If you’re not on Pinterest yet, you’re missing out. It’s easy to see why marketers and users love Pinterest so much; this social media platform is wildly popular, with over 518 million monthly active users. It’s essentially just like a dream board or inspiration board. Users get to create different digital boards and pin photos to them. Pinterest allows people to collect inspiring quotes, great photos, DIY tutorials, or anything else they think is neat.
Pinterest stands apart from many other social media sites as users search for ideas, inspiration, and solutions. In fact, a whopping 93% of pinners use Pinterest to plan purchases. In other words, the site is a marketer’s dream.
Ready to work Pinterest into your social media marketing plan? Well, you’re in luck. Read on to discover just how to get started.
#1: The Key To Pinterest Marketing: Start A Business Account
When you first set up your Pinterest account, you can choose between either setting up a personal account or a Pinterest for business account. You’ll want to choose the business account.
A business account comes with a lot of cool perks, including:
- Free educational materials.
- Pinterest analytics, so you can see how many people you’re reaching.
- The ability to create rich pins. (More on these later. You’ll love them!)
It’s important to note that the terms of service are different for a business account. When you sign up for a business account, you agree to a few new rules, including:
- You won’t suggest that Pinterest endorses your business.
- You can’t run contests/sweepstakes asking people to repin or like your pins to enter the contest.
- You won’t promote spam. (Spam includes asking people to comment repeatedly.)
- See their Community Guidelines for more information
This is one terms and conditions agreement you don’t want to skip. Read carefully to make sure you understand the restrictions.
#2: Build A Better Board
Pinterest is all about the boards. Boards let users organize their pins around different ideas and interests. When you create boards on your business account, it allows you to tell your brand story clearly to your audience. In addition, you can use your boards to distribute your content, highlight your products, and as a source of inspiration for your followers.
What makes a winning board?
Well, if you want to build a successful Pinterest board, you’ll need to follow a few key steps when setting it up.
Keep It On Theme and On Brand
Your board should represent your company and marketing strategy. Determine whether your board will be focused on products and promotions or highlighting the behind-the-scenes of your team and process. Keep in mind your board’s grid and the flow of images, videos, products, and the rest of your pins to make a cohesive page rather than an assortment of random pins. More on Keywords and SEO below!
Explore Tools to Optimize Content
There are a lot of third-party tools that you can use to customize your Pinterest board to your brand and audience. Tools like Adobe Express can help you create custom and animated pins for your boards. They have everything from pre-made templates to key “add-ons” that can help you optimize your content. Best of all, it’s free to use! No credit card is required.
#3: SEO Matters for Pins Too
Pinterest is one of the few social media platforms that is built upon search and discovery. Moreover, including keywords and popular search terms in your pins can help them rank highly on search engines outside of Pinterest.
In fact, according to Pinterest, 89% of Weekly Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration on their path to purchase”. So it’s important to include popular keywords and terms that your audience might be interested in.
You want to create pins your followers will love, right? After all, if they love your pins, they’ll share them and draw more attention to your brand or products.
Here are some statistics and strategies to keep in mind:
- 97% of the top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, and top searches are limited to a maximum of three words.
- Pinterest is a search engine with over 5 billion searches on the platform per month; proper SEO and board optimization are key to growing your account and business
- Pinterest Ads not only work but are more effective for your business and wallet. They deliver 32% higher ROAS than other digital platforms and are 2.3x more cost-effective on average than other social media networks. More on Pinterest Ads below!
#4: Use Rich Pins to Enhance Your Pinterest Marketing Efforts
One of Pinterest’s coolest features is the ability to create rich pins.
What is a rich pin, you ask?
Rich pins work with the metadata of the page from which you’re sharing the pin. That means these pins can show more detailed information than a regular pin.
There are 3 different types of rich pins on Pinterest.
- Article rich pins: These show the title, meta description, and author of the article or blog post. This pin can help build your brand awareness, especially if you are sharing SEO-optimized content your readers are bound to click.
- Recipe rich pins: These pins show readers the title, rating, cooking time, diet category (i.e.vegan/vegetarian), number of servings, and the ingredients/instructions.
- Product rich pins: Linking to your products displays a product image gallery, price, direct link to the shop, additional product details/description, and availability details.
Of the countless benefits of using rich pins, there are 4 standout reasons.
- Users will see more information about your content and find it faster. For example, recipe pins may display the full recipe right in the description, allowing the pinner to make a more informed decision before clicking through to your website and potentially decreasing bounce rates.
- Rich pins will automatically update when you update your blog post. This includes existing posts that link to your updated post, which is extremely useful in keeping your board fresh and up-to-date.
- Rich pins stand out in pinner’s feeds. Most pinners will find your content in their Smart Feed and Home Feed, Organic Search, and aside similar content to yours. Including your logo, profile photo, and overall branding integrally to your posts will help people spot your pins.
- Rich pins have a built-in Follow button. Whether users are seeing your content for the first time, or 2nd or 3rd time, encouraging your users to follow is a must for your board/business growth.
To be able to post rich pins, sign up for a Pinterest business account, and verify your website URL. Then you can apply for the ability to create rich pins from the Pinterest business website.
#5: Pinterest Ads
With your business account, you are able to promote your pins and set up ads to display on a pinner’s home feed, category feed, and relevant search results.
Note: Currently, ads are only available for accounts in these countries.
In your ad account, you’re able to create Campaigns that contain your group ads and single ads. You’ll be able to manage full funnels, get access to educational materials, and tune your targeting specifically to the audiences you’re trying to reach.
If you’re curious about what can come from Pinterest ads, check out their Success Stories page, which details the ad strategies for brands like Kroger, PacSun, Urban Outfitters, and many more.
Learn how to create and optimize your ads here.
#6: Engage with Your Community
Like on any other social media platform, you want to connect with your audience. You can do this by creating pins that encourage comments, a simple image carousel, or an Idea Pin.
Engaging also includes responding to Pinner’s comments and cultivating a community through joining or making group boards that users can contribute to, getting your content in front of new audiences.
Engagement is a huge part of social media success. People don’t want to feel like you’re constantly pushing your own products and information on them. Reach out!
Follow pinners who share great content or who are influencers in the community. Repin other people’s posts. Be sure to leave comments on pins you find interesting; social media is all about conversations, after all.
#7: Timing and Trends Are Everything
A huge part of social media success is staying active and researching what trends are hot. When you’re responding to comments, or viewing your analytics, also take a peak at the top searches or check out Pinterest Predicts yearly report. It includes data-backed forecasts of potential trends for the year so you know what to expect.
Make sure to time your Pinterest activity strategically. You can set yourself up for success by posting things when your audience will be online.
The best time to post on social media varies for different platforms.
For Pinterest, try late afternoon or evening. If you’re able to, schedule a few pins to go out on the weekend, too.
#8: Use Pinterest Analytics
You know analytics are crucial to running a successful website. Well, they can help you run a great Pinterest account, too.
Pinterest analytics give you information such as:
- Your audience size. In other words, how many people you’re reaching.
- How many people are engaging with your posts.
- Average amount of daily viewers.
- The impression you’re making on people.
Your analytics will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Pinterest is a great social media platform for promoting your products and engaging with your customers. You may just fall in love with this visual platform—after all, pinners tend to use the website to plan purchases! These tips will help you use Pinterest for effective social media marketing.
You’re well on your way to creating boards and pins that your followers will really find Pinteresting.
