This guide to Pinterest for Business will help you get started on Pinterest for local businesses in 2013. Your brand/small business can make the most out of Pinterest with this ultimate guide. I will quickly brief out what Pinterest is, who uses Pinterest and how business can make the most out of Pinterest. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that allows users to organize and share all the beautiful things they find on the web. You can create your own pin boards based on your interest and hobbies. You can even browse other people pin boards. Suppose if you’re a fitness freak, you can collect motivational posters, fitness related images and creates pinboards such as motivation, daily workouts, as boards and manages them. You find something interesting in the web, you can pin them across your boards. You can repin other images from pin boards.
When you analyze pinboards users, 80% are women under the age 25-34.
Before we get started with Pinterest, you should know the Pinterest slang.
Pin – an image added to Pinterest.
Repin – Sharing a pin with the user’s followers.
Board – A set of pins usually organized by themes (travel, fashion, etc.)
Pin it button – You can embed the button on any website where it grabs the images from website and adds it one of your pinboards.
Anyone can open an account with Pinterest, it’s free. Visit Pinterest.com and create your account now. Then build a list of people to follow based on your interest. If suppose if you open a Pinterest account for your business or brand, follow people related to your niche. You can use the search bar to find ideas on the theme. Find new people to follow and organize more ideas for pin boards. You can allow more people (co-workers and fans) to contribute to one of your boards. You can even pin videos to your boards.
Why I suggest Pinterest for brands?
Because it has large number of users who spend more time on the site, later part of this article will deal about average time spend on Pinterest. You get targeted audience. When you take the average time spent on social sites, Pinterest leads the board with 15 minutes average, followed by YouTube and Facebook. Why Pinterest is so addictive? People fall in love with Pinterest design, lot of conversions for brands. Not every brand finds success on Pinterest. Only certain brands such as fashion business, businesses targeted for women’s can easily find success with Pinterest. As said earlier, women users are more on Pinterest, 80% of the pins on Pinterest are repining, whereas only 1.4% of tweets are Retweets. For business, Pinterest has some serious potential to drive referral traffic. It drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.
Why Should Businesses use pinterest?
Pinterest drives more referral traffic than most of the social networking sites. Millions of people use Pinterest as their relevant search engines. Your brand’s online presence is much important; Pinterest ranks pages below your website on Google search engines apart from Google places and Facebook pages. By this way, your brand can gain much popularity on Pinterest. Next way is Pinterest are visually attracting, your brand products and services can be easily shared and viewed by thousands of people that click the picture and are taken directly to your website.
Related: 10 B2B Strategies to Win with Pinterest
Step by Step Guide on How Business/Brands should get started with Pinterest
Do a market research on Pinterest; find out whether Pinterest is a good fit for your brand or business. Analyze who your target audience and find out who uses Pinterest more and find out whether the content is something people are searching for.
Related: 6 Exclusive Pinterest Tips for your Business
Once you’ve done creating your account, spend some time to complete your profile. Make sure you select your Pinterest username wisely. It appears in the URL of each pinboard you manage.
Fill up all the details on Pinterest, add your business Facebook page, twitter page, website URL, verify your website with Pinterest, and add description to your Pinterest page.
Once done, install the pin it button to your browser tool bar, so it will be easy to pin images to your boards directly when you find something interesting on the web. If you have Pinterest buttons on your website, you can pin it easily. WordPress blog owners can try out Pinterest WordPress plugins that lets users to easily pin images from your site.
Next step is once you login; Pinterest gives you 5 default pinboards which are pre-titled. Delete it completely and start creating pin boards which are meaningful related to your business. Avoid creating meaningless pinboards which will clutter your profile.
Keep your pins fresh and unique. A great place to start pinning is from your website. If your brand or service has a website, start pinning your own products first. Make sensible pinboards. If you’re wondering how to add, go to your website or any page, use pin it button which you installed in your browser toolbar. It automatically shows Pinterest pinboards to pin the website. You can create a new pin board if you need it at all. Don’t limit your pins to just your products and business. Show off your expertise with boards that teach your followers something new about your industry or trade.
Track whether people have pinned content from your website, such as picture of one can track if anyone has pinned content from your website, such as a picture of one of your products, by entering your name in the following URL: www.pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.
If your business or brands deal with product prices, when you pin your product, you can enter the price in the description box that makes your pin to automatically add a price banner to the photo.
If your pins are re-pinned or liked by people you will get an email notification from Pinterest. You can also see if your pin has been shared by looking below its description.
How Local Business can make use of Pinterest? As a Pinterest user, I love viewing a lot of pins related to travel and food. If you’re a local travel agency or restaurant owner, you can make the most out of Pinterest. For example: Pinterest is an excellent resource for people planning a vacation. When they find a destination worth visiting they can easily store links and photos of the destination to one of their pin boards. On the flip side places like the local tourism department, travel agencies can use Pinterest to promote their area and local businesses.
Related: 7 Effective Tips for Increasing Sales with Pinterest
From what I found, Pinterest is a gold mine for business related to travel, hotel, fashion accessories, shopping, food, restaurants, resorts etc. For magazines and newspapers, they can build pinboards to show their cover stories, art, highlight certain sections etc. Industries like food, bakeries, cafes, restaurants, grocery stores find more value in Pinterest. Whole Foods Market has pin boards featuring recipes and creative ways to cook with raw ingredients, a pin board for current foods in season, gardening tips and holiday ideas.
Fashion clothing, accessories has huge craze on Pinterest. Women create pinboards to pin pictures of their favorite styles clothing and accessories. Outfits and styles are repined by thousands of people increasing website traffic and even gaining revenue from people make an online purchase.
Follow some big names on the Pinterest to get a sense of how they’re using it. Whether they’re big companies or individuals with huge following watch and learn.
How to make the most of Pinterest?
Upload your own images; repining has less chance to go viral. Similarly how you consider SEO factor for blog images, use the same method with pinterest images. Add your keyword as image file name. Instead of 124w.jpg – name it keyword.jpg
Pin from variety of different sources as opposed to one specific site. Repining, liking, commenting all play a strong role on where your image will appear. After you upload an image, you should edit your pin to add your link. By default, Pinterest doesn’t add any link to uploaded pins. Don’t waste a great opportunity to drive traffic.
Learn how to use Pinterest to drive massive traffic to your blog.
Pinterest descriptions can use up to 500 chars, but a long description annoys many pinners who feel it messes up their Pinterest grid. Settle for a short caption using major keywords. You can use pin comments section to add more content. More engagement means more followers, more followers equals more power. So research Pinterest to see what catches your eye and compels you to engage with an image.
Make sure all your pinboards are keyword rich because they appear in the URL. For example: Places I love is worst. You can rename it to Miami beaches.
Pinterest is visual, so make sure your images are beautiful. Pinterest doesn’t limit the vertical size of the image, but the maximum horizontal size of the pic is 554px, anything wider than that will be resized. Limit your image length to 5000 pixels because people who scroll down are unlikely to scroll back up to repin or like it.
Pinterest for SEO
Most of the links on the Pinterest are no follow. But has a great value and strong signal in search engine algorithms. More repin means more links to your site, which brings more traffic since the repin keeps the original source link. Most of your pinboards are crawled by search engines and are shown up in search results. Whatever you title your board will be used as part of the Pinterest URL. So use keyword in both title and your description.
Related: 9 Helpful Optimization tips for Pinterest
Some stats before I end this article – Descriptions about 200 chars long are most repinnable. Pins about food are most repinnable. Also images about design are very repinnable.
Pinterest is one of the fast growing social media websites, it is used to share various images, pictures, infographics and pin videos. As a picture is equal to a thousand words, more and more people are using pinterest in promoting their business and services. It is a best practice in getting more business and expanding business relations.
Sure thing that Pinterest is not just for pictures alone., we should make full use of it. The post does some help for me, thanks for sharing!