Is your company visual and looking for a platform to connect with your community and show off your designs and advice? If so, Pinterest may be the platform for you. But before you go make an account, there are some basic things you need to know about the platform in order to attract the best possible audience.
Build a “Pin It” Button on Your Site
Let’s start with the basics. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking site that launched in 2010. It lets you categorize “Pins” onto personal “boards.” These boards can be either public or private and you can share them with your friends, which makes Pinterest a very social site.
Pro Tip: Most sites now offer a “Pin” option that lets you to pin their site to your board with one click. You can add this to your site to encourage Pinterest people to share your content.
Don’t Just Use Pinterest for Your Content
You shouldn’t use the site purely for your content. As always, follow the 80/20 rule—Pin your own content, but also re-Pin from others so you’re involved in the community and your profile seems more organic. It will help you get found and generate interest because when you re-Pin from other boards, the user is sent a notification. Then, that user will be likely to navigate to your profile, browse your boards, and follow you.
L.L. Bean
Pro Tip: In order for people to see your boards, they must have a Pinterest account. Otherwise, the screen is faded out and they won’t be able to access your boards. Therefore, it’s a good idea to have other methods for sharing your content outside of Pinterest (i.e. other social platforms, email marketing)
Make Your Pinterest Post as Attractive as Possible
When your followers see a Pin that they like, they can re-pin it to their own boards to save for later. Then, when they click on the Pin, they’re taken to the site it came from.
What was that? We’ll say it again: They have to click on the Pin before they’re brought to your site. Pinterest posts are visually driven, so you have only a moment to grab the user’s attention and entice them to click.
Contextually Relevant to Your Audience
Pinterest has a large base of female users aged 18 to 29. This demographic generally uses Pinterest as a wish list and idea generator to find things that they can use in their everyday lives such as:
- Recipes
- Home improvement
- Fashion
- DIY projects
So make sure your Pins will help users find what they’re looking for for their next project and that’s it’s relevant to your industry. Let users know that your profile is a good resource for their project by being contextually relevant. For example, if you’re a clothing design company, people aren’t going to go to your boards for home design.
Visually Attractive to Your Audience
Users are more likely to click on an image when it catches their eye and clearly shows what they’re interested in. To create a Pin that attracts users consider:
- Vertical images: These tend to do better because they stand out more than square images and are easier to see.
- Use text: Text in your image will let users skim through their feed and quickly find what they want.
- Use bright colors: Use bright colors to help your Pin pop out and appeal to the eye. Different colors create different feelings in people, so choose your colors wisely when choosing the feelings you want your images to radiate.
- Use Clear Images: The image in the Pin should be clear and professional-looking. Avoid pixelated images at all costs as it will appear unprofessional and lazy.
Choose Your Pins Wisely
When pinning, don’t pin whatever comes across your screen. Pinning random Pins to your boards can confuse your followers and flood their home page with Pins they’re not interested in seeing. For example, if you’re a chef, you don’t want to have your “Chocolate Desserts” board interspersed with recipes for pasta.
Make Your Boards Personal
By “personal” we don’t mean treat it like your personal Pinterest account. It’s important to remember that your company boards are for your business, not your personal use. So avoid having personal boards like “Kittens I’d Like to Adopt” unless your office does plan on adopting kittens (in which case it should say “Kittens We’d Like to Adopt”).
The point of Pinterest isn’t to push products, though it’s certainly a good side-effect, especially now that Pinterest has introduced buyable Pins for businesses. Personalize your boards to reflect your company’s ideals and culture. As such, it’s a good idea to create unique visuals that will catch a user’s attention.
Pin Whenever You Like
There’s no “right” day to post on Pinterest, but the most active times tend to be in the evening when people are off of work and at home relaxing. Scheduling your posts will make your account seem like it’s run by a machine—not a very attractive feature to such a personal social media platform.
Have Good Categorization
To get the most out of Pinterest, you need to make sure your boards are well-categorized and easy to navigate. Clearly label with boards a short description. Longer descriptions tend to get cut off and there’s no way to expand them.
Like Twitter and Facebook, you can add hashtags to your Pins. People use hashtags on Pinterest to personalize their Pins and allow them to be searched. Unfortunately, hashtags don’t seem to accomplish much in the long run because search results will include all the words and phrases you have searched for.
As you can see, I searched “Kittens I’d like to adopt,” and “I’d like to” came up as a searchable term. Not the best when it comes to having your Pin be found quickly.
Experiment with Promoting Pins
You can promote your Pins by paying for a campaign to target your desired audience. Promoted Pins are effectively ads that you pay for to reach your desired customers. All of the information included must be accurate and honest and have no:
- Promotional information
- Calls to action
- Price listings
- Sign up requests
Promoted Pins will also show up on feeds of users who don’t follow you, allowing your Pin to be seen more. Since Promoted Pins are relatively new to Pinterest, you will have to experiment to find the best promotion tactic for your business.