If you’re going to embrace social media to promote your business, consider including Pinterest as part of your marketing strategy.
Evaluate the Pinterest option
Here are questions to ask yourself to help determine if marketing with Pinterest could be valuable to your business:
• Is your business B2B or B2C?
• Will you use Pinterest to get more traffic?
• Is your target customer mostly male or female?
• How do you think you will benefit from using Pinterest?
• Is your business, product or service based?
• Are your products or services mostly related to fashion, weddings, cooking or crafts? »
• Do your products have strong visual appeal? (Do you have time to improve the content and visual quality of your website and other social networking sites, especially photos?)
• Are you already using social networks to do business?
• Why are you interested in using Pinterest?
• Will you post items that are not entirely about your business (news, trends, ideas from others, etc.)?
If you have clear answers to all of these questions, you may find value in developing a Pinterest-based social media presence. However, if you’re overwhelmed, upset, or burned out on “another social media site,” you can put Pinterest aside for a while.
What do you know about Pinterest?
Pinterest serves a slightly different function on social media. It’s not the place where you chat to the same extent as Facebook or Twitter and it’s not another blogging site. Pinterest is a social/visual “virtual bulletin board” that allows users to post (pin) images or videos from the web to their own (and others’) boards and explore Pinterest.
Once a Pinterest account is created, virtual boards created within the account can be categorized and descriptions can be added by the user as reminders of why an image or video was saved. Many (but not all) images/pins link the Pinterest user to the website source for easy access at a later time. The account owner-user can invite others to pin content of interest related to the forum, or can restrict it to personal use only.
One media writer describes Pinterest as a “database” of intent. An individual often uses their Pinterest board to collect ideas, specifically visual images, of something desired. For example, he may want to see images of wedding dresses (a popular topic on Pinterest). Pictures of interest can be “pinned” to the board.
Many website images now include a Pin It widget on their pages that allows a visitor to pin content from that web page. And users can upload pins of their own content: the amazing dessert, an image of a newly completed oil painting, or images of a new line of winter fashion accessories.
How does marketing come into this?
As a business promoter, your goal is to increase viewer traffic to your social networking site. Once there, it’s up to your web content to influence visitors to make purchases. Pinterest is now seen as an extension of an individual or business website and has been credited with increasing page views by up to 29 percent.
Etsy’s increasingly popular online marketplace is considered one of the top-performing brands on Pinterest, increasing Etsy’s revenue by 9.4% in 2013. Why the interest? It’s the photos!
People love pictures in ads for Do It Yourself (DIY) projects, and they post them with crafts, instructions, and recipes. Viewers want images on all platforms. Brands must embed images on Pinterest and all social media sites used for marketing.
where to start
• Knowledge: Start by building your knowledge base about the types of interests and potential customers who might use Pinterest.
• Pinterest has more than 70 million “sers. That’s a huge potential customer/consumer base.
• Female users repin (pin images found on the web and in Pinterest searches) on their own boards more often than men, but have fewer followers.
• The three most popular categories on Pinterest are DIY & Crafts, Hair & Beauty, and Design.
• The most popular categories on Pinterest are babies, beauty, crafts, fashion, fitness, food, home decor, kids, pets, and travel. Seasonal themes are also very popular: holidays, changing seasons, current events.
• The use of categories differs a lot between men and women: women focus on fewer categories while men distribute their pins. Additionally, the top five categories of women account for more than 56 percent of all their activity on Pinterest; the top five categories of men are below 40 percent.
• Male users prefer the photography, art, design and home decor categories.
• The time of day for pinning may be important. In the United States, the best time of day to dial is between 2 pm and 4 pm (Eastern Time); the best time of night is between 8 pm and 1 am (Eastern Time).
Do extensive research online. Look at some of the popular retail sites and note their use of PinIt widgets. Search the Internet for topics in one of the most popular categories. Your search will likely return links from Pinterest. Click and view the theme on the Pinterest site and study the content, layout, and look.
Create a Pinterest account and get verified through the business section of the site. You can set your Pinterest boards to private, tweaking them until you think you have them ready to display. Then “change the display state and start monitoring your PinIt results.
You’ll have access to some exciting business development tools, including analytics. Use the analytics tool to view pin activity data on your website and Pinterest boards. Analytics can help you better understand what pinners like (“Most Repinned vs. Most Clicked”). Personalize and fine-tune your pins to get more conversions.
Your customers are browsing your site for items to pin and re-pin to other Pinterest boards. You need to focus on creating content that reflects the passions of your customers. Pinterest users often share content that has educational value and practicality for them. How can you align your content with customer interests?
Preparing your Pinterest content
• Website Assessment – Is your website pin-friendly, up-to-date, and rich in current content, especially with quality images? Get your website in good shape.
• Content organization: Organize all your Pinterest boards by topic to make it easier for other users to find and explore specific content.
• Mark Photos: Mark (add your logo) in one corner of each image you pin to your board. Researchers have noted that the large watermarks on the images are deviations from Pinner.
• Shopper-friendly content: More than most social networking sites, Pinterest is about shopping. Each board must
Shopper-friendly content – More than most social media sites, Pinterest is about shopping. Each board should be designed and filled with content with “buyer friendly” in mind. Describe the product or service and use only clear, quality images.
• Join the Community: As you spend time each day updating and reviewing your social networks, interact with people in the communities: post and answer questions and comment on each other’s content.
• Repin: When it comes directly to Pinterest, invite others to repin content on your board. Re-pinning your account brings your account to the attention of the person you are re-pinning (that person receives a notification and/or email). The person you are reproaching may also return the favor.
• No broken backlinks: Make sure your links on Pinterest have a correct backlink to your websites, Facebook or Twitter. Fix broken backlinks!
clear image
Let’s clarify the images. There are a few key things to know about posting images and videos on Pinterest:
• Branded images (on Pinterest) are more likely to receive a repin if the image does not contain a face: 23 percent more likely. By the way, a study showed that Pinterest has 4.25 times more images without faces.
• Color: Images with a lot of color are preferred. Red, orange, and brown images are twice as likely to complain; blue images are less likely. Medium light images will redraft 20 times more than mostly black images, eight times more than white images.
• Background and Texture: Influence the repaint options. Pinsters prefer images with less than 30 percent background; the abandon rate was two to four times for images containing 40 percent or more background content. Smooth textures are preferred over rough textures, getting up to 17 times more repins.
• Image Size – According to studies, taller images and vertical images are more repaintable. Smaller images and infographics get more clicks because they are harder to read on the Pinterest site. An infographic headline is key to getting more clicks.
• Traffic response: You can control traffic response by including a specific call-to-action on your bookmark’s landing page.
keeping your presence
A large company with its own marketing group or consultants can spend a considerable amount of time studying ROI analyses, putting up the most professional photos and copy, and updating content almost every day.
The smallest business person should plan to spend at least two hours a day monitoring comments, responding to comments (where appropriate), and updating content. This is a fairly small investment of time and effort for potentially good results.
Over time, the comments and the number of visitors will begin to show which areas of your content are effective, such as which products are ignored and which are purchased. On the contrary, they may reveal a lack of interest and a limited number of purchases.
If your traffic is still slow, evaluate every aspect: text, design, images, links, everything. You may want or need to consult with an online marketing specialist or web/media designer for help updating your content.
It’s easy to overwhelm viewers with information, and oversaturation is just as ineffective in marketing as too little valuable content. Again, feedback will let you know what works and what doesn’t.
One more thing about those numbers: Marketers can buy likes and tweets to inflate the number of legitimate likes and tweets from viewers. Those high numbers you envy may not necessarily be an accurate representation of who actually follows a brand. More importantly, they do not accurately represent purchases related to that brand.