Pinterest for busi­nesses

Since launching its new range of ad­vert­ising options, Instagram has recently enjoyed a great deal of attention in the world of marketing. With all this hype, it’s easy to forget that there’s another major player quietly con­tend­ing with the photo sharing platform: Pinterest. The network boasts over 100 million re­gistered users worldwide - a number that just keeps growing. The virtual pinboard is an in­ter­est­ing social media platform for in­di­vidu­al users and busi­nesses alike, and can be used to attract potential customers, whatever your service, product, or brand might be. Pinterest can be used as part of a com­pre­hens­ive social marketing media strategy in order to help busi­nesses promote targeted content on a wide-ranging platform and therefore expand their outreach to attract potential customers. This com­pre­hens­ive in­tro­duc­tion presents Pinterest’s most important features and functions and gives tips on how to find the right strategy for your curating your corporate online presence using Pinterest.

In addition to gen­er­at­ing traffic, Pinterest can be a powerful tool for creating and marketing your brand. Expanding your outreach with pins means you are also in­dir­ectly growing brand awareness. Pinterest is therefore useful for promoting products or offers or to extending an image campaign, with the platform itself fostering stronger ties to customers and improving customer retention. Business owners are in­creas­ingly starting to real­izeise the potential of dis­play­ing two separate sides to their business: a pro­fes­sion­al side, and a more human, emotional side. This model fa­cil­it­ates the opening up of a dialogue and a mutual in­ter­ac­tion between customer and company.

Specific com­mu­nic­a­tion goals such as brand awareness, customer retention, and curating a par­tic­u­lar image should always be con­sidered as just part of your long-term digital com­mu­nic­a­tions strategy, and your actions on Pinterest should also reflect your ultimate goals. Only after you’ve defined a social media strategy and set an ap­pro­pri­ate style guide that spans your company’s com­mu­nic­a­tions platforms, should you begin to develop a plan spe­cific­ally for your Pinterest activity and en­gage­ments. In­tel­li­gent in­ter­ac­tions with other channels is of central im­port­ance for a cohesive com­mu­nic­a­tions strategy, which entails well-planned net­work­ing, primarily with your own web presence and the company website or blog, as well as with other social media channels.

First, choose a suitable profile picture for your Pinterest business account; prefer­ably, one that is clear, distinct and iden­ti­fi­ably related to your brand. The majority of busi­nesses use their company logo as it is the most in­form­at­ive and easily re­cog­niz­able image as­so­ci­ated with your company. Beneath the 200 x 200 pixels image, you can add a short de­scrip­tion, which you can use to introduce the brand and briefly indicate the focus and in­spir­a­tion of the Pinterest account and what users can expect to find there.

Although the search function is also one of Pinterest‘s key features, marketers should remain focused on the news feed. To build up your company’s outreach, you need to ask yourself how it can appear in user’s news feeds.

You can create a new pinboard using the ‘Create a board’ button on your profile.

To start, you just need to enter your desired name and choose the most ap­pro­pri­ate category, and then you can choose to add a short de­scrip­tion. As an online marketer, it’s important to include relevant keywords here, as this will naturally make your board easier to find via the Pinterest search. If the board is as­so­ci­ated with a specific region, you can also link the board to a map. 

It is also possible to invite specific users and contacts to follow your profile or pinboards via email. Further optional settings include adding a cover photo and setting the board to private, so that it is not visible to the public. After setting up a profile, the tempta­tion to start putting together your first boards straight away can be strong. As a company, however, you need to apply strategy and common sense and first consider how you want to create and manage the pinboards.

When starting out, it’s sometimes useful to have a loose col­lec­tion of material. For this, you can create a ‘secret’ board and collect and organise ap­pro­pri­ate content. In addition to images from your company website, you can also pin media from other sources.

Any Pinterest user can upload photos with a URL to the source site. However, for your success, it’s crucial that the image and URL are com­pat­ible. To fuel high ex­pect­a­tions and then let users down by using spec­tac­u­lar pictures and a mis­lead­ing URL will ul­ti­mately damage your repu­ta­tion. It’s also possible to pin videos. This is par­tic­u­larly useful if, for example, you are running an active YouTube channel that you can specify as a source. In this case, separate video boards are also well worth con­sid­er­ing.

Users also have the option to create Rich Pins, which contain more in­form­a­tion than regular pins. The six types of Rich Pins that are currently available are:

• Apps
• Films
• Recipes
• Articles
• Products
• Locations

Pinterest has to approve a Rich Pin before it can be im­ple­men­ted. After embedding the cor­res­pond­ing meta-tags on your website, you request Pinterest to publish your Rich Pins.

Once you’ve taken all the pre­par­at­ory steps, it’s time to get active on the platform. As on other social networks, community man­age­ment is crucial for success; that is to increase the outreach of your pins and generate more followers. The first step is usually to connect with popular users. Pinterest has a great number of in­flu­en­cers, whose profiles and pinboards have specific themes and a high follower count. You need to first identify these users and, if possible, convert them into your own followers. The easiest way is to do this is to follow them yourself, repin their images, and like their boards. Across social media, it’s typical for busi­nesses to engage in re­cip­roc­al, mutually be­ne­fi­cial in­ter­ac­tions, such as ex­chan­ging likes and following each other – Pinterest is no exception.

Doing this will help you gain attention and even­tu­ally your follower count and the amount of re-pins should increase. Another way to be noticed by other users is Pinterest’s tagging function, which is a method of creating links using the @ symbol. When a user is tagged, for example, in a caption, they receive a no­ti­fic­a­tion, thus making it easier for that user to find your profile. Even when repinning posts of third parties, it’s possible to mention users by name, which again attracts attention.

Pinterest is also currently trialing sponsored posts. Busi­nesses based in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom now have the option to use Promoted Pins, which enables you to buy spots to ar­ti­fi­cially boost the outreach of in­di­vidu­al pins. For most companies, however, daily community man­age­ment is the crucial factor for building a Pinterest following for your business and in­creas­ing the outreach of your pins.

Mon­it­or­ing the success rate of your posts is a central topic in online marketing – naturally, no suc­cess­ful business will invest time or money into a marketing strategy without first carefully con­sid­er­ing each step to ensure maximum ef­fect­ive­ness. As with any social media platform, using Pinterest for business requires regular main­ten­ance of your chosen content strategy. For this, you can get the right ana­lyt­ic­al tools and business insights directly from Pinterest. Users with Pinterest business accounts have automatic access to the ‘Pinterest Analytics’ section, where you can find the following stat­ist­ics:

• Pinterest profile: here you can see up to date numbers relating to pins and repins, allowing you to determine the most suc­cess­ful pins and pinboards. Profile data can reveal which posts have the desired effect, and which are less suc­cess­ful. It’s also possible to glean a good deal of in­form­a­tion from the numbers relating to views, clicks, repins and like data.

• Target groups (user data): in this area, you can learn more about the type of people who follow your pinboards. In addition to typical demo­graph­ic data such as country, city, language, and gender, you can find out exactly how users interact with the company and what else they are in­ter­ested in. The most important questions to consider in this area include: what other profiles do users follow? What do their own pinboards look like? And which of their themes could po­ten­tially be relevant for your own strategy?

• Activity on your company website: the analysis of referral traffic is of par­tic­u­lar interest to marketers. The number of clicks indicates how many users access your website via Pinterest and which pins and pinboards generate these visitors. You also have access to an analysis of the Pinterest search and a list of your so-called power pins, which are the posts that have generated the most en­gage­ments.

In order to have sustained, long-term success with Pinterest, you need to have time, patience, and most im­port­antly, a wide range of high quality image and video content. Similarly, Instagram can be used to increase sales and brand awareness using high quality images, but while Instagram profiles tend to have a more personal and unique twist, Pinterest is generally used for curating galleries of pro­fes­sion­al, high quality product images. Fur­ther­more, with Pinterest, you can attract customers to your online store directly; each in­di­vidu­al pin has the potential to lead users to your website or web store – thus gen­er­at­ing valuable traffic. With Instagram, on the other hand, it’s only possible to create CTAs and links to your website with promoted posts, i.e. paid ad formats. Find out more on this topic in our guide, Pinterest and Instagram: comparing two image-sharing networks.