You’ve probably read plenty of articles telling you why you need to make Pinterest part of your social media strategy, but knowing that you need it and understanding how to use it are two very different things. If you’ve just started on the platform, you may feel as though you’re pinning plenty but haven’t gotten much interest in return. With these tips, you’ll get a better handle on how to make Pinterest work for you as a social media channel and as a planning tool.
Become an Expert at Content Curation
Your Pinterest boards are your company’s art and idea galleries. Without proper content curation, you aren’t giving your fellow pinners and casual visitors much to help you define your brand and further your reach. One key to better content curation is creating more boards instead of trying to make one board be all things to all people. Creating new boards costs you nothing and takes no more time than posting to your current board, but your Pinterest presence will instantly become more engaging to your visitors because each board you create touches directly on their interests.
The pins you post aren’t always just for your own products; you want boards that are broad enough to give you room to post aspirational images, photos of your hard-working staff members or pictures of your products in use by your current customers. Keep the focus of your boards narrow enough to appeal to a target market yet broad enough to give you room to grow them.
Be Easy to Find with Keywords
The best-looking boards on Pinterest don’t mean anything if visitors can’t find them. Good curation is part of the solution, but to make your pins easier to find, make sure your marketing team invests some time in captions and keywords. When someone searches for images on Pinterest, your captions steer them in your direction when they accurately describe your pins using important keywords. In many ways, the same things that lead to SEO success in general also work for success on Pinterest. Be accurate, authentic and honest in your product descriptions, and you’ll get traffic from highly motivated buyers who already know what they want and only need to be matched with the company that delivers it. Watermarking your images with your company name and URL is also a great idea; it makes you easy to find the first time and lets new visitors find you no matter how many times your content gets re-pinned.
Be Useful to Your Visitors
Your Pinterest presence should be more than just a collection of advertisements. It’s your chance to connect with visitors and tell them a story or illustrate a concept using pictures. Think about creating a Tips and Tricks board to show how your customers can get the most from your products and services. Let your visitors see what inspired your latest product line or sparked a change to your business; maybe they’ll also find inspiration there and will re-pin your information to a wider audience. Create separate boards for different categories and product lines to make it easier for customers to get what they need. For example, if you sell home cleaning products, you might have separate sections for earth-friendly products and cleaning ideas, kitchen and household cleaners, heavy-duty cleaning tips and special solutions for unique concerns such as post-flood cleaning.
Follow and Get Followed
The rule for Pinterest is the same as it is for any social media network: To get more interest, you have to show interest in others. Be a part of the community by re-pinning and commenting on others’ pins. Make your suppliers and customers a part of your social web of activity. All social media works best when you socialize on it, so be actively involved.
Put Analytics to Work
Until you know what generates the most interest, you can’t match your success stories or avoid your lackluster Pinterest campaigns. Pinterest analytics let you track incoming pins, see where you’re being re-pinned and how people interact with your pins. Your marketing company can make the most of this data and find the common ground between your biggest successes to make them repeatable. Noting when your followers are most active on Pinterest can tell you when you should do your own pinning for maximum impact.
Pinterest is an incredibly valuable tool for marketers, but it can take time to build a following. With these tips for following others, creating useful boards and letting analytics guide your future choices, you’ll soon be pinning like a pro.
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