Did you know that Pinterest isn’t only good for pinning wedding planning ideas, cute craft projects, and recipes? Pinterest can also be a powerful tool to promote your business. As the fourth most popular social media platform in the United States, the app can be a great way for you to reach a broad audience seeking inspiring ideas that you can convert into conversions. Many users utilize Pinterest’s sophisticated visual search engine in preparation for a purchase, or a means to gather information for their saved ‘boards.’
How can you maximize Pinterest for your business? Here are some simple steps to get you started.
Create a Pinterest for Business Profile.
Pinterest offers a Pinterest for Business profile that will help you optimize your content to reach the greatest amount of potential new customers possible. A Pinterest for Business profile is free to make – you can get started right here.
Make sure your Pinterest profile accurately and succinctly reflects your brand image.
Making a Pinterest for Business profile is easy. However, tweaking and customizing that profile to ensure that it’s fully optimized is another task. When users visit your profile, you want to be able to immediately and clearly communicate your brand’s content and messaging.
You can achieve this by first and foremost making sure that your homepage is aesthetically pleasing and coherent. Upload your brand’s logo for the profile picture widget, and an eye-catching cover banner to match. You can link your business’ website URL, and include a short blurb about what your brand has to offer in the description bar. Eventually, you’ll use boards to organize different categories of your brand’s merchandise or services, and including your best boards in the featured section will quickly communicate to consumers what content your business has to offer.
Get set up with Pinterest Analytics.
You can utilize Pinterest analytics to zero in on useful tracking information that will help you optimize your Pinterest business profile even further. With Pinterest Analytics, you can track which pieces of content are being pinned directly from your website, what kind of users are visiting your profile, numbers of clicks, and other valuable information.
Start sharing optimized, inspiring, and actionable pins.
The most successful pins on Pinterest are ones that are eye-catching, the perfect size,
and easy to interact with from a user standpoint. All pins on the website have the same standardized width, and unlimited length. When creating pins for your brand, you should try to shoot for a size around 736×1102 to make sure that the image doesn’t show up too pixelated when you upload it.
Pinterest’s data analytics have shown that the most successful pins are those that inspire and prompt users to learn more about the image. Make sure your images are clean, aesthetically pleasing, and engaging.
Include a Pin It button on your website.
This is a great and easy way to facilitate traffic to and from your website and Pinterest. You can include a Pin It button to your website to allow users to save products or ideas from your website to their Pinterest boards, which in turn can be shared by users on Pinterest who will click on the pin and visit your website, potentially giving you valuable traffic and even a conversion.
WordPress has a Pinterest Pin It Hover button plugin that you can add to your website. You can also directly add the Pin It button to images on your websites to bring interaction to your Pinterest account and business.
Create diverse, creative content.
Pinterest isn’t all about pictures. In fact, analytics have shown that popular pins are ones that teach users inspiring information, or are more engaging than a simple photo. For example, you can create recipes, playlists, reading lists, or gift guides to catch users’ attention. The ‘instructographic,’ a term coined by Pinterest, is perhaps the best example of this, made possible by Pinterest’s unlimited image length feature. This is a form of infographic that has a DIY how-to-nature, and is one of the most popular categories on Pinterest.
Post your pins at the optimal time.
You can leverage your Pinterest analytics to figure out when the best time to post content will be for you, because every brand’s target demographic is different. However, in general, the best times to post are on Fridays, Saturdays and Saturdays, and in the evening – around 8 PM to 11 PM, according to Oberlo. Work hours are less popular on Pinterest, most likely because users tend to use it on the weekends to plan projects or gather pins for their boards.