Pinterest – HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

HOW TO: Use Pinterest For Business In 2013

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.

Pin Your Images With Pinterest Mobile App

Pinterest – An online shareable scrapbook, which is a collection of collections. Right from day to night, anything that is up to the interest of users is shared in terms of images by means of Pinterest. As we know well, Pinterest is now a massive social network revolving all around the web, with several millions of users crabbing their minutes and hours in front of PCs and laptops in the name of Pinterest. And now, the site has slowly headed steps into the mobile world also.

Yup! With Pinterest mobile app, Pinterest services can be straightly reached via mobile devices, which means users can access their Pinterest accounts on-the-go. Android users were longing for several years to have a Pinterest app, which was finally delivered by Pinterest in the Google Play store. It was in August this year, Pinterest offered apps for Android and iPad, while the company had long been into providing apps for iPhones. These apps can be downloaded by means of the Pinterest mobile apps page.

iPhone Pinterest App

It was in 2011, Pinterest released a dedicated iPhone app for Pinterest-iPhone users. Later in august 2012, the app was pretty decently upgraded and released. People noticed the speedy factor to be highly convincing when it is used with the iPhone 4S. The app allows you to do everything on the Pinterest website on your iPhones and offers a more than same experience as that of accessing the site via desktop or laptops. Your Pinterest account can be accessed only by a registered user and others can only simply browse images.

Pinterest is all about images and how come the images visibility in hand held devices? The August 2012 upgrade version of iPhone app has been created with an excellent image visibility and a two-column design for browsing, which lets you view more pins at once. The iPhone – Pinterest app is neatly focused and displays five buttons across the bottom of the screen and icons for Following, Explore, Camera, Activity and Profile. The ‘Following’ button allows you to browse recent pins of people you follow and ‘Explore’ displays a list of themed categories which you can browse. With ‘Camera’ option you can take a photo and pin it the same moment with your phone. This is an ultimate option is greatly time saving as you can take pictures at any time and directly upload it to your Pinterest profile.

Android Pinterest App

Pinterest Android app is the most awaited Pinterest application by android-ers worldwide. This app, designed exclusively for all android devices has so far received positive reviews from its users. Users find that this app has made pinning ultimately easy and speedy. It covers almost all of the basic functions available on the Pinterest official website. However, people find it difficult to edit or change the descriptions on image boards and edit the user profile within the app.

iPad Pinterest App

Launched in August 2012, iPad Pinterest app is similar to the context of pfficila iPhoen app, but differs in design and functionality. The iPad’s touch screen capability is widely mattered by iPad app, as it allows users to swipe the slide and view a list of available categories. It has a built-in web browser and integrated pin-it button, which makes pinning images to the pin board quite easy. This app falls with a single limitation of not allowing advanced editing for boards and hence feels a bit unbalanced.

Conclusion

Besides to the company offering official mobile apps for Android and Apple iOS devices, several mobile app development companies also offer Pinterest mobile apps for third party application development platforms (in addition to iOS and Android)

This article is written by Riya Sherin. She is a designer who has a love for creativity and enjoy experimenting with various techniques in web. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.

9 Helpful Optimization Tips For Pinterest

Pinterest is a social medium that brought back the notice-board-style information sharing technique to the digital age by allowing the users to PIN a content of their INTEREST on their profiles. This website that functions with an objective to connect the people globally through the content they show interest and like using a social media platform, was launched in the year 2010.

The rapid growth of Pinterest over the recent years has attracted many brands and marketers to use this platform to market their products. Photo content such as infographics, creative photography, product images and concepts are very much into circulation within Pinterest and are known to reach the common mass as well. So, for those of you who wish to optimize your Pinterest page for more visitors, better reach and increase page views, here are some helpful optimization tips for Pinterest.

1. Link your Pinterest Page to Your Social Networking page

The very first step in optimizing your Pinterest page is to link your Pinterest to some of the popular social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Once you have registered yourself in Pinterest, you have the option to log-in with your Facebook or Twitter address. Once done, just set up links to your social networking page using the radio buttons and all of your Pins from now on will be displayed on your timeline or the Twitter feed. This paves the way for further sharing of your content in the Social Media.

2. It’s all about “About”

Come up with and add a brief outline of what your page is all about and what you will be pinning in your profile on the about section. Make sure that you infuse in the right keywords, so that people can easily find you. For instance, if you’re pin board theme is all about landscape photography, brief something about your page with the right keywords. This will really help to add some extra links to your page apart from the social networking technique that we saw above.

3. Write relevant description about your pins

Pinterest allows its users to add a description about their pins that can last up to 500 characters. So, add a relevant description about your pin, giving all the necessary information and details regarding your pin with the right keywords.

4. Give proper file name to the images that you Pin

Whenever you upload a picture from your own library or collection, just make sure that you rename the file from “random.JPEG” (may be any file name) to a proper keyword rich file name that speaks about the image.

5. Make use of those Hash Tags

Pinterest now allows the usage of hash tags in the description part. So, add a hash tag in front of the desired keywords. But, be careful when adding a hash tag as there must not be any spacing between the characters and the hash tags. Also capitalize every initial letter of the word. So for instance, your hash tag inclusion should read somewhat like this – #GolfAccessories. Adding a hash tag in front of the keyboard allows your page to get easily indexed and recognized by the search engines as well as within Pinterest website.

6. Reduce Re-Pinning

Though re-pinning invokes a significant response, remember that they are content which already exist and which people may have already gone through several times. So, avoid re-pinning an existing content and try to come up with your unique content and pin them. Unique and offbeat content always attract visitors and views.

7. Add the Pin Button to your blog or website

Now, Pinterest offers two buttons called ‘Follow on Pinterest’ and ‘Pin It’ button similar to the like and share buttons. You can make use of these buttons by embedding them on your personal blog or website. ‘Follow on Pinterest’ allows the users to follow you on Pinterest website and the Pin It button will allow the users to pin your content on their profile, which in turn leads to a series of shares and pins. This greatly enhances and ensures the reach of your content. Learn how you can use Pinterest To Get Massive Traffic To Your Blog.

8. Create an individual board for each of your work

For instance, if your main focus is on photography, instead of compiling every picture into the same board, try creating a different board for each class of photography and name them with keyword rich phrases. This will allow people to reach what they want easily and will add to their convenience. Thus, a photography related profile can have several boards like Wildlife, landscape, macros, portraits and other similar boards. So, classify them and work individually.

9. Keep them Engaging

Staying active and engaging others constantly are the two vital things for Pinterest success. Re-pin, create new pins, comment, follow and share frequently to show your presence. Also remember that Pinterest is not all about self promotion or self advertisement, but a place to engage fellow users and interact. So, do comment on other’s pins, follow those who resemble your board theme, pin their content and include mentions and citing. To be simple, Get Pinteractive!

So, these were some of the tips to optimize your Pinterest page for further views and attract visitors. And if you have any other tips that you feel will help in optimizing a Pinterest page, feel free to share them on the comments below.

This article is written by Sharon Thomas. She is from TheCornerSuite, a site that offers savings and current information on getting internet through dish, as well as dish.com services. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.

Use Pinterest To Get Massive Traffic To Your Blog

Over the recent couple of years, Pinterest has received much attention over the exponential growth of visits it has received. Recently, it was reported that Pinterest has generated more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.

If you ever had any doubt over just how useful or popular Pinterest is, hop over to Pinterest’s Popular page and judge for yourself. Feel free to let me know what you think of them, when (and if) you could pull yourself away from the hundreds of beautiful pictures.

What Is Pinterest Really?

Launched as a beta-version in 2010, Pinterest is based on a very simple concept. Remember how you or your mother used to cut those lovely recipes or the inspiring home decoration ideas or the beautiful vacation destinations and pinned them on the pinboard? Well, Pinterest is the virtual version of this.

And because of the modern-day technology it is built on, Pinterest doubles up as a Social Media photo sharing website. Its users can create, manage and share theme-based images from recipes to crafts to home décor. So you can imagine the viral effect of this. Recent studies had shown that Pinterest attracts more female users and that more than half of its users are between 25 to 44 years of age.

Many websites had recorded an increased in traffic from just a few hours of pinning and re-pinning images in Pinterest. If you wish to learn how to drive massive traffic to your blog, check out the following tips.

Tip # 1: Quality Images

Just like how quality posts builds blog’s SEO, quality images attracts attention and re-pins among Pinterest users. So create beautiful images and photos and add them to your blog and Pinterest account. If possible, use your own pictures and make it look as amazing and inspiring as you can. There are loads of photo enhancing tools that are easily available these days.

Tip # 2: Add Pinterest Sharing Plugin

There are lots of plugins that you can put onto your WordPress blog eg Pinterest “Pin It” Button. This simple to install plugin adds a button on your posts that allows your visitors to easily pin your contents to their Pinterest account. It’s customizable giving you flexibility to pre-determine the image to pin or to allow your visitors to select the images themselves. You can also choose the pages to add the button to as well as the location eg above/below content or on post excerpts.

Tip #3: Run Contests

Ah, contests and giveaways. Everyone loves them. Run one every now and then to create buzz. You don’t have to get really expensive prizes. Perhaps some blog badges or DIY crafts (especially if yours is a crafts blog) or vouchers will do. In return, ask them to re-pin your pins or become followers.

Tip #4: Analyzing and Monitoring

It’s not enough to just link the images between your blog and Pinterest, you would need to monitor the traffic that’s being generated. There’s Google Analytics and PinReach that can do the job. You want to analyze your stats and see which pins are your most popular. What kind of images drive traffic and you may want to post more of these kind of images e.g. between wide-angle and macro shots.

Tip #5: Share Pins On Facebook and Twitter

You probably are aware that Pinterest allows its users to share their pins on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Make full use of this as it allows your pins to be viewed and subsequently shared by a larger community. Note: free advertisement here!

At the same time, you can also “remind” your Facebook friends and Twitter followers that you are on Pinterest. Get them to check out your pins and more often than not, they will end up at your blog.

Pinterest is a simple yet powerful tool in generating traffic to your blog. It does not require rocket science to figure out how to do that. But it does need some good strategies. I do hope that the above tips would help in promoting your blog through Pinterest!

7 Effective Tips For Increasing Sales With Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing phenomena in Social Media, and is currently believed to be receiving even more unique visitors than established social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as vastly out performing the surprisingly under adopted Google+. Its functionality is along the lines of a microblogging site like Tumblr, however it is more geared toward highlighting and sharing things the user has found and organizing them than to generating new content. It has rich commenting and reposing (or repinning) functionality to allow for plenty of interactivity, and as such, is full of marketing potential. Here are some tips for incorporating Pinterest into your social media promotion and sales strategies.

1. Become really familiar with Pinterest and its features, and immerse yourself in the Pintrest user experience.

While it can seem like yet another thing to update if you already use all of the other big platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn for promotion, to really get the most out of Pinterest you have to get into its internal culture, much like you have to do with Twitter. Make pinning things as much a part of your usual online habits as tweeting, and you’ll be going in the right direction. Put as much effort into making sure people see your pins as you do into getting likes for your Facebook page. Basically, learn Pintrest and adopt it as just as big a part of your strategy as the stuff you are already habitually utilizing.

2. Integrate it with your blog in every way possible.

For many businesses, especially those selling online such as ebook businesses and affiliate marketing plans, the blog is the central funnel driving potential customers into the ultimate sales process. For this reason, everything you do in social media should drive your users to your blog, and this is no different with Pintrest. Pin anything new from your blog, and use tools that allow you to do things like share Pintrest comments live on your blog too. Naturally you should also make it easy for visitors to pin your blog posts, videos and images too with a button.

3. Encourage social shares of your pins on other networks.

People browsing your pins can share them on other social networks very easily thanks to Pintrests ability to work with these platforms, so make sure you encourage your friends and fans to post your pins on Facebook, Twitter and their own blogs and Tumblrs.

4. Pin all kinds of content to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

Don’t make your pinboards all about promoting your business or any given products – it needs to offer other useful stuff too. As such, pin all kinds of things you find interesting, especially those relevant to your industry or sales niche. This will help visitors understand what you are about and view you as a subject matter authority.

5. Tie your Pintrest account to your Twitter account.

Linking up your social media accounts is what really enhances the power of all of your efforts, but Pintrest doesn’t let you link to a Facebook business “fan page”, only to a personal account. For business, you probably won’t want this, so you want to choose the option that lets you connect the new Pintrest account to your company Twitter instead.

6. Use a guest pin board to make your Pintrest more interactive for visitors.

Create a guest pin board and allow (and encourage) people to pin their own relevant things there. If people are slow on the uptake and you aren’t getting many pins from third parties, ask for them in a more interesting way, or run a competition for best pin of the week and promote it using your Twitter and Facebook accounts too. This is a clever way to do things as it makes your visitors feel more a part of what you are doing, and also leaves a lasting display for other visitors that shows you are not just there to push products.

7. Create a question board.

Use a Pintrest board to allow people to ask you and your business about a certain topic. Offering free advice or answers can be a great way to engage with customers and potentials, and being seen as knowledgeable and helpful is always going to warm people towards you as a business.

6 Simple Ways To Make Your Blog Pinterest Friendly

Pinterest is not just an interest sharing tool, but also a good traffic generator for blogs. According to an Infographic ‘Pinterest for Business‘, Pinterest traffic makes 27% more conversions than Facebook referral traffic. So when you want to see more people clicking on your ads, or more people following you on Social Media, or more people subscribing to your blog feed, you will need to consider Pinterest as a profitable resource. You can also track your site’s popularity “in and with” Pinterest.

There are two cases we can think of.

Number 1: People come to your blog because they see a pin from your blog on Pinterest.

Number 2: People pin your blog posts to their Pinterest profile.

These two actions are equally important for your success. You need to work on both the aspects of Pinterest Marketing of your blog.

We will focus on the second case in this post. Your goal is to gain more pins for your blog posts. Ready? Here are few tips to get started:

1. Include a Pin This button

Pinterest has a bunch of Goodies for making it simple to pin your interests. The most used goodie is the Pin It button. You actually don’t need to worry about this because most of the WordPress social sharing plugins already include Pin It button in their bunch. If you don’t have the button, you can add it easily.

2. Have a Pinterest friendly WordPress theme

If you want to use your current theme and don’t want to change that, then you can happily skip this part.

This part is quite interesting. People like posts to be organized into squares. If your blog is organizing blog posts in Pinterest style, you may have more user interactions on your blog.

3. Keep your featured image seductive!

People won’t just pin your images for no reason. Your featured image has to be attractive enough so that people repin and like it.

There are many ways to get attention for an image. You can either put a slogan or a cartoon which is related to your blog post. (For example, this post’s featured image shows what it represents.)

If you don’t want the featured image to be displayed on the pin, you can keep a pin in button to every image of your blog post. The Pinterest Image Pin plugin can help you for this task.

You can check this list for Copyright and Royalty free images.

4. Videos works the best!

Videos are good content type to pin when it comes to sharing an interest. If your blog has videos and you have a pinterest friendly blog, then you will see lot of people pinning and repinning your blog posts.

You can also boost traffic to your site with viral videos.

5. Infographics are the most shared type of photos

When it comes to research, people do not have enough time to read journals or lengthy survey data. So Infographics help you to get what you want in minutes. If you share useful Infographics on your blog, you have best chance to get more pins.

6. Have a Recent Pins Widget

There is a Pinterest RSS plugin which can display recent pins to your blog. I am actually not sure if this idea will make people follow you on Pinterest or not, but this is a good idea if you are an active Pinterest user and pin awesome stuffs regularly.

USEFUL:

Do you think we can improve this list? What are the other techniques you are using for making your blog Pinterest friendly?

IMAGE CREDIT: HONGKIAT

6 Exclusive Pinterest Tips for Your Business

Pinterest is currently the toast of the town in the social media world. Though it started off as an experimental online pinboard, Pinterest has grown from strength to strength in the last couple of years. Whether it’s the ability to track a site’s popularity or defining effective B2B strategies, Pinterest has struck a chord with businesses all over the world.

In case, you aren’t aware of how leading brands worldwide are making the most of Pinterest, take a look at some of these pages – Toys R Us, Coca Cola, Target etc. While Pinterest isn’t a one size fits all solution that would work perfectly for businesses of all sizes, you need to try it out for your business before you take a decision for/ against it.

While it’s still early days, there’s no doubt that Pinterest holds the potential to be a game changing social media network for businesses. It has grown at a scorching rate off late – over 4000 percent, and now boasts of 10 million unique visitors. Here are 8 exclusive tips to help businesses ride the Pinterest wave.

1. Highlight your offerings

A picture is worth a thousand words and Pinterest is all about pictures and videos. Pinterest pictures are a great way for a business to showcase their products and services through pictures, thereby leaving a positive impact on the viewers. When you’re ready to launch a new product or service, highlight it via your pinboard to gain traction.

2. Interaction

Every picture tells a story which can’t always be captured via words. Pinterest is fast emerging as an effective customer interaction tool using the visual media. You should encourage other users re-pin your items and proactively seek their feedback.

3. Community

Pinterest offers an innovative approach to community building. On one hand, users re-pin items which they like. On the other, businesses can lay a foundation to build a customer community with initiatives such as sweepstakes contests and promotional giveaways. Pinterest contests provide a simple yet effective mechanism for promoting your brand. Popular services like PublicMonkey can help you to improve your followers base on Pinterest. They use tried and tested methods for attaining high rankings for your brand. They help you to achieve quality followers and repins, so that you can increase your brand rating and provide highest quality services

4.PR (Public Relations)

While it’s no replacement for other classic and modern PR tools, Pinterest provides a unique storytelling approach for public relations. Pinterest images provide a great opportunity for your business to showcases your products and services in your own voice (via pictures) in front of millions of users.

5. Creativity

The best part about Pinterest is that it doesn’t limit your creativity. If you’ve got a great idea for your business, brainstorm it and come up with out of the box pictures and videos and pin these on your Pinterest board.

6. Traffic

Though Pinterest is all about images, it’s been smartly designed to adhere to SEO guidelines. As a business, you can pin your product and add then chose SEO optimized keywords along with adding your website link to gain additional traffic. Therefore, Pinterest passively provides high quality backlinks when a user back link to your products.

This article is written by Roger Collings. He is the Managing Director of RDC Communications Ltd and a telecoms consultant specialising in business VoIP.

Track Your Site’s Popularity “In and With” Pinterest

When it comes to Social Media Marketing, most of the bloggers are mostly obsessed in getting to know their site’s popularity in each of the big social network out there. If you a Social Media freak, you might have noticed that Pinterest, though launched two years back or so, has now been making revolution by generating millions and millions of visits each day. Thanks to Facebook for it’s Timeline integration. Earlier we shared 10 B2B Strategies To Win With Pinterest. Now here is a ultra cool tip that will help you to track how much people “Pin” images from your site and in turn how much it drives traffic to your site.

If you might have noticed, Pinterest has a ultra cool URL format that will help you to see how much “Pins” are made from a particular site. If you type the following URL “http://pinterest.com/source/website.com” in the address bar and hit Enter, the page will load showing the list of “Pins” made by various users of Pinterest, from your website.

A Look Into A Sample

As of now, hitting the URL “http://pinterest.com/source/axleration.com” will show all the “Pins” made by the Pinterest users right from the Axleration site. Take a look at the image below. You can see that the URL section reads “http://pinterest.com/source/axleration.com/” and below lie the list of “Pins” made from the Axleration site. You can scroll the whole way down and you can take a look at all the “Pins” made from the site with the “Pin It” button that Pinterst provides for “Pinning” images and videos from any site.

Few Tips Worth Knowing While Using This Tool

You can use this tool to track the number of visits you get from Pinterest and get to know the your site’s presence in the world of Pinterest.

A few things to keep in mind while you use this tool :

With this tool, you can see only the original “Pins” made by the users. It neglects the number of “Repins” made by the users. To know the number of “Repins” too, you ought to click the image and below lies the “Repins” count.
Pinterest neglects the “www” section of the domain name. Typing the domain name with the “www” section would give a 404 error, which in turn does not revert you with the “Pins” made from your site.
This tool’s algorithm gives a different result when you search for a particular subdomain. If you search for “Pins” from http://pinterest.com/source/subdomain.maindomain.com“, it could vary from the results of the original site, that’s http://pinterest.com/source/website.com“. So, do check for each subdomain to know more about your site’s presence on Pinterest.

With these tips in your mind, you can make sure to get know your site’s online presence on Pinterest and how much it has been driving traffic to your site. Also, make sure to follow those users who have “Pinned” content from your website, to get to know more about them. Sharing is caring, right? Go ahead and check out those users and friend them.

10 B2B Strategies To Win With Pinterest

Pinterest is probably the hottest social network for all things visual. The successful social photo sharing site is not just a time waster but a great tool for researching, bookmarking, brainstorming, collaborating, sharing, promoting and networking – all through vibrant, eye-catching images. Pinterest has been heavily used by businesses selling makeup, fabrics, fashion items as well as other products and services that can be promoted via great visuals. But when it comes to b2b marketing the full potential of Pinterest as a powerful online strategy tool has been somewhat overlooked. So here are 10 B2B Pinterest tricks you didn’t know:

1. Pinterest Boards : Since Pinterest boasts a constantly growing user base and surprising referral traffic numbers it should be used in b2b marketing – and it can be used, even if your business is seemingly far away from vibrant colours and expressive imagery. What you have to do is find visuals where there aren’t any: create Pinterest boards of your staff members, prim in their uniforms and suits, then mix it up with off-duty Pinterest boards of party goer shots taken at your last corporate hang-out. Great visuals, great sense of business culture – more traffic to your corporate site!

2. Infographics : You should use Infographics to showcase important data – it looks really good on Pinterest, portraying you as a serious expert in your field.

3. Use Your Blog : If you haven’t got a blog yet start it now, and don’t forget to include show-stopping images that you can always pin later. If you are lucky, your blog pins (together with the links you paste into descriptions) can go viral and your hard work and consistency will pay off.

4. Excel Charts : If you have any data that you can put into Excel charts, it’s wise to make use of those on Pinterest. If you think about it long enough, any information can be made visual – just take the creative approach this time and really let loose.

5. Pinning : Pinning mottos, inspirational quotations and motivational words of wisdom can be a great way to promote your business on Pinterest. You can take pictures of plaques you have in the office or find inspiration online; as long as it’s visual, intelligent, catchy and refers back to your business, it will do a lot of good.

6. Inspiration : You know how editors of fashion magazines get their inspiration from films, music, unusual colour combinations, street signs and even garbage bags? They put all these inspirational images onto ‘mood boards’ which later help them shape upcoming magazine issues. Who said that as an executive of a serious business company you can’t be inspired by cool images of the most unexpected objects? Use those ‘mood boards’ to show your Pinterest followers that even hard core professionals have a creative streak.

7. Corporate Humour : If you love corporate humour, you can share funny images or quotes with your Pinterest contacts. It may show a more vulnerable side of you, and users can relate to you more on a personal level.

8. Pin Book Covers : To show your expertise in what you do, you can pin book covers or images from outstanding articles related to your industry. Definitely create pin boards of any books or white papers you or your staff members have created – it builds consumer confidence and shows you are passionate about your business.

9. Customer Boards : You can also create Pinterest boards of your customers using your products or services. The happy faces of satisfied clients can serve as testimony to the way you do your job and attract even more customers.

10. Link, Link and Link : Never leave a pin without a description that includes a link to your landing page or a solid call-to-action to hook customers. You never know which pin goes ballistic, so take your chance to write catchy descriptions, leaving customers wanting more every time, and link, link, link.

Creating Pinterest boards that are the best in your niche market, even if your business doesn’t naturally seem to be visual-driven, can be a great b2b online tool. Being consistent and working hard on Pinterest by liking and commenting on related accounts, promoting relevant content of partners, and linking your Pinterest account with other social networks can be a great b2b strategy in the fast changing media world.

This article is written by Hannah Crossfield. She works for B2B marketing are a leading provider in marketing collateral and have a buzzing on-line community.