Pinterest, a photo sharing platform, Launched in 2010 with an invitation only beta version. The website allows users to create/bookmark image, data, URL based on their interest as pins and boards. Boards are nothing but categories in which you can pin (just like green board we have in our office).
Pinterest is now the 3rd largest social networking platform in US. You can’t really ignore popularity of a social platform with more than 10 million active users as per Appdata. Most digital agencies recommend Pinterest as one of the social marketing channels to their clients. Here are few tips which will help you use Pinterest as a marketing tool for your business.
1: Create your account, verify and add Pinterest buttons to your website and blog.
The best thing to get things done is get started. Create your Pinterest account, complete your profile with address and link to your website. Verify as a website owner by simply putting a Meta tag in your head section of the index page or uploading a verification file in your website root folder.
There are 2 advantages of getting your Pinterest account verified:
a: This assures Pinterest that you are an authorized person or the owner of the website which you are trying to link to your Pinterest page and you also get a get a checkmark next to your website link on the profile page.
b: Analytics are always important to track success of your marketing efforts. By verifying your website you get access to Pinterest analytics data.
Once that is done you can add link of your Pinterest page on your website.
2: Research, what your audience like to read/pin | Research Boards which are doing good
It’s important to know your audience before you start engaging with them. Do your research to understand your target audience. Search for boards in your industry which are doing very well and their activities.
Another way is to look what your competitors are doing (Good Competitors and not spammers). It will be worth spending time on understanding their strategy, content types, and their followers. If you do this homework well, then trust me, your life will me much easier.
3: Start creating Boards and Pins
Creating boards like I mentioned before is nothing but creating categories. Now, based on your nature of business, the strategy of creating boards may be different. A person or organization in product industry may have a very different strategy compared to someone in a service industry.
Product Industry with a shopping website can use Pinterest as showcase. You can create categories and add products with description, price tags and link back every page to the page on your website.
If you are in service industry then you may have to play a very neutral game initially. This means that the boards should be like go-to-source for information on your industry and not just your service centric. The simple reason is, that no 3rd person would like to re-pin or follow a board until or unless you are an authority or have a relationship with them. For example, if you are in search engine optimization industry then the better way to start things would to create generic boards like Google Updates or MOZ and pin URL’s from the authority websites to get followers and re-pins. Once you start getting some followers, you can start pinning your own blog URL’s in those boards.
4: @Tags, #Tags:
@,# Tags are the lifeline to your pins. These are your connectors to unknown audience. #Tags are used to assign keyword to a piece of information and allows it to be found again by users. @Tags are used to address specific users.
5: Engage – Follow, comment, re-pin and say thanks:
Follow the authority people in your industry, engage with them, re-pin them and say thanks whenever they follow back or re-pin. This will help you grow your circle and followers. Comment on the posts you like and reply back on comments on your post. This will help you engage more with the audience. This will be an ongoing process where engagement is the key.
Conclusion – Ever since I have known Pinterest, I strongly believe that it has a potential to reach large target audience and get referral traffic to websites. These recommendations are based on my experience and I welcome suggestions or tactics which have worked for some for you.
Aditya Khanna is a digital marketing and SEO professional. He provides strategic digital marketing consultancy at an agency called eDynamic in India, Gurgaon. He has a master is degree in marketing and passionate about helping small and large businesses using digital services.
Let me know guys if you have any questions for me. Cheers 🙂