Pinterest was launched as a closed beta in March of 2010 although didn’t see explosive growth until late 2011, gaining an especially strong following with the female demographic. So what is the pull that is alluring people to Pinterest? I would assume it’s the ease of use, the Twitter/Facebook integration combined with the sense of exclusivity provided by the signup process being “invite” only. While the actual process isn’t really invite only, the appeal of “requesting an invite” seems to trick the masses into thinking it is.
Users on Pinterest are able to share images and videos of practically anything and everything you can think of, which allows for sharing and re-pinning of likely images set to appeal to the curious web activist. In November 2011 Pinterest had around 3.6 million unique visitors which is astronomical growth considering they came up from out of nowhere. Popular images being shared seems to be a hit and people are repining and sharing millions of images a day. The question then begs, how can I leverage Pinterest for my business?
I have compiled a list of 7 great ways to use Pinterest to help grow your brand and will outline them in hopes that they can help grow your business with the proper implementation.
1. Have A Graphical Appeal:
Pinterest may not be for every business out there, first of all you should have a ton of imagery available to your brand to begin with, otherwise your pins will be irrelevant and won’t help build your brand. Industries that work well with the Pinterest format will be photography companies, wedding companies, furniture companies and pretty much any type of niche industry that relates to woman’s needs. Seeing that the demographic is mainly female, having a product or service that is mainly targeted towards women is a big plus.
2. Connect your physical presence with your online presence:
Helping your followers understand the presence of your business and where you are physically located will help garner additional trust in your brand as well as helping those who are in your local community looking for your business. Make sure you make it clear as to which area you are looking to target and you will reap the benefits.
3. Use other social nets to feed Pinterest:
Making sure your brand is socially connected on all fronts is key for Pinterest marketing, leveraging Facebook traffic and Twitter followers to help share your Pinterest “pins” will take you a long way in growing your Pinterest account and helping to increase traffic flowing to your business.
4. Launch daily pins to grow your account:
Having a regularly updated pin board will help grow your Pinterest follower count and even better will help grow engagement which means more traffic for your brand. By providing daily updates you will build more awareness and in hopes that users come back looking for future updates.
5. Promote more than products:
While it may be easy for your brand to post pictures related to your products or services, it is highly recommended that you take an active undertaking in approaching alternative means of sharing through other products and images even if they don’t relate to your brand. If you keep it interesting with new advice, tips, tricks and even products from other companies, you will find more traffic coming to your page and this will help grow your brand and raise awareness.
6. Follow the big guys:
An approach I have known as the Twitter method that works wonders; follow one of the bigger brands on Pinterest and pretty soon their following will start to see your activity and hopefully refollow you. In a kind of follow the leader setting, you can drive up your following pretty fast just by utilizing the major players on Pinterest.
7. Target keywords relevant to your brand:
Pinterest is one of those services that just works and they allow you to add content to each of your boards. This is a great opportunity to include some keywords you are targeting so that if users search for something they will find your board and hopefully click your links to find out more about you.
Overall Pinterest can be easily leveraged if you tackle it in a smart, sophisticated approach that isn’t too salesy and provides some actual benefit to your followers. Try it out, see if it works for your business and let me know how it goes in the comments below. Best of luck to your Pinterest marketing success.
About The Author
Pinterest excites me – through the various iterations of social blogging platforms (like Tumblr), these channels are slowly becoming adopted into the mainstream, which means you can actually use them to generate traffic, leads, and revenue.
I wonder how many t-shirts I can sell directly or indirectly via Pinterest?