What Can I Do With Pinterest ?— Part 3

Published in

Inside Revenue

9 min readNov 24, 2017

The Advanced Guide

In Part 2 we spoke about how Pinterest can help you hit your companies revenue targets through increasing active engagement with your customers, promoting your business through pins as well as increasing sales through Pinterest. If you missed this article you can click here to read “What Can I Do With Pinterest — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”.

In this article we want to show you what to watch out for when using Pinterest. We have compiled our list of best practices for Pinterest as well as common mistakes made on Pinterest for you to go through. These are meant as guidelines to follow to help you get the most out of Pinterest.

“We are now living in the age of the customer, where the customer is in control not the seller” — Jill Rowley (Member of Board, Affinio) (Partner, Sales for Life) @jill_rowley

What Should I Watch Out For For When Using Pinterest?

In this article I will cover:

#1 Best Practices For Pinterest

#2 Common Mistakes Made On Pinterest

So lets dive straight in…

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#1 Best Practices For Using Pinterest For Business

Through looking through alot of the benefits and features of Pinterest I have found many things that every marketer should be aware of when looking to market on Pinterest. The following is some insights that I have gathered:

Making Your Offerings More Visible
In order to become more discoverable on Pinterest, you should always pay attention to the captions that your choose to use when pinning content from your site or repinning it from somewhere else. You need to be able to explain to your customers why the pin is useful, add a link to your website, and include a call-to-action wherever possible.

Making Your Website Pinterest Friendly
In order to make it easier for users to pin articles and images from your website using a Pinterest browser extensions, you should add a Pin It button to your website so that they can easily save ideas and products to Pinterest. Here you are also able to add a Follow button to your webpage so that your customers can easily find you on the platform. Additionally there are other widgets that you are able to include on your site such as a pin, profile and board features for easy access. Optimizing your website to allow Rich Pins in order to keep your pins updated automatically will minimize your work on the platform.

Creating Appealing Content
Following the general social media rule of thumb regarding content, you want your business’ Pinterest profile to be a mix of both original and curated content — with an emphasis placed on content from your website. By ensuring that they are helpful, compelling and actionable, people will easily be able to discover, share and save your ideas.

Feature compelling images that people will want to share
Try text overlays to help people browse and discover faster
Create detailed descriptions of your content
Consider adding lists or how-to’s in the text overlays
Tasteful branding goes a long way on Pinterest
Have a clear call to action
If you need help finding, editing, or resizing images for Pinterest, check out Hootsuite’s Enhance app.

Knowing The Image Requirements
Like with any social media post, your content needs to be noticed in order to be engaged with. Because of the predominantly mobile nature of Pinterest, feeds are organized into columns in order to maximize on the vertical style pin. These images have an aspect ration of 2:3 and 1:2.8, where they should be at least 600 pixels wide. If you are ever unsure of the sizes required, there is an excellent free tool called Canva to ease your design efforts with predefined templates available for all social media platforms. Pinterest however, does not recognize background images, images embedded in iFrames or within Flash websites.

Studying Pinterest’s Categories
Users on Pinterest often search the network by it’s available categories. By studying these categories and determining which of these are applicable for your brand, you can easily find where your content would be best fit. Always categorize your pins and board to reflect their appropriate categories to ensure success.

Pinning Valuable Content
By ensuring that your content provides value to your audience, you are all set to head for being on top of the pinned lists. Infographics are easy ways of conveying your knowledge in a creative way that will appeal to your audience’s interests.

Pinning About Clients And Partners
Pinterest is an excellent tool to acknowledge not only your customers, but your partners as well. By finding new and unique ways to incorporate your most valued audience in your content, they will feel that you are appreciative of them in ways your competition is not.

Pinning As A Team
Whether you encourage your customers, partners or employees to collaborate with you to expand your brand’s reach on the platform, Pinterest’s @mention capabilities and Group Boards feature can help you create great advocates for your brand. This is a great way to add personality to your brand.

Creating Theme Boards
Whether it’s a holiday, project commencement, product release or large promotion, you are able to create theme boards for the big reveal. This allows you to create one place in which to group your various content pieces on the topic in order to present them in organized and collective means.

Paying Attention To The Analytics
As with any strategy, you need to do regular checks to ensure that your content is refined in terms of your strategy. Pinterest Analytics allows you to see which content types are getting the most likes, comments, shares and repins in order to assist you in optimizing your strategy for success. You can easily gather new data about your audience such as who they are, what they like, and what devices they use to Pin your content. Pinterest Analytics also shows how the Pin It button is performing on your website — and whether it’s directing referral traffic or not.

Connecting To Other Networks
You can connect your Pinterest account to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Gmail and Yahoo accounts, and can choose to log in with Facebook and/or Twitter (instead of typing in your email and password) as well. Connecting to your Gmail and Yahoo accounts allows you to find and connect with your contacts who already have Pinterest accounts, and when you connect to your other social networks, they’ll be displayed on your profile so pinners can easily find you elsewhere on the Web.

Using The Pinterest Bookmarklet Or Browser Add-On
Pinterest offers both a bookmarklet (a button that you can drag to your browser’s bookmarks bar, which, when clicked, allows you to pin content from the websites you visit to your Pinterest boards) and a browser add-on for Google Chrome. The browser add-on appears as a small Pinterest logo next to the search/address bar, and works similarly to the bookmarklet.

Adding A Pinterest Board Widget To Your Website
This is a great way to let visitors to your website know that you’re active on Pinterest. Just choose the board you want to share, paste the URL into the widget maker, choose the size you want, and click the “Build It!” button. Then, embed the code on your website somewhere visitors will see it.

Adding The “Pin It” Button To Your Website
The Pin It button allows Pinterest users to easily pin your content to their boards directly from your website. Adding the Pin it button to your website makes it simpler to share content from your website.

Watching Your Percentages
In general, 40 percent of your boards should be motivational and inspiring, 40 percent should be instructional and educational, and only 20 percent should be directly about your brand (things like announcements, contests, etc.) Although it’s important to see what works with your audience by looking at your analytics page, and adapt your strategy that way, too.

Webinar taken from Pinterest for Business’ official YouTube channel

“Problems are nothing but wake-up calls for creativity” — Gerhard Gschwadtner (Founder and CEO, Selling Power) @gerhard20

#2 Common Mistakes Made On Pinterest

Mistakes are made by marketers on any and every platform, which could lead to setbacks in your overall marketing success. Although the most common mistakes made by marketers are made by those who are not familiar with the platform’s capabilities, or by those who think that they should be focusing primarily on their products and services rather than on interactive engagement with their customers.

1. Pinning Only Your Products
On Pinterest, as with any other social media platform, the constant sales pitch is counter-intuitive to making more sales. Without engaging with your market and creating open dialogues, you will not only lose followers, but also lose their interest.

2. Not Including A Price
Pins with prices get 36% more likes than pins with no prices, it is therefore important to find a creative way to include your pricing in your product pins. A great way to ensure that these are constantly updated is with the use of Rich Pins.

3. Not Pinning Engaging Content
As previously mentioned, pushing the constant sales pitch is not the best way for your brand to start out on Pinterest. By creating engaging content pieces such as contests and promotions, your followers will not only be encouraged to participate more with your brand on the platform, but will begin to build brand trust with you.

4. Not Linking To Product Pages
You will be missing out on amazing opportunity if your brand is not linking your product pins to a product landing page. This is one of the most common mistakes that marketers make when creating product pins, something that you can easily avoid making.

5. Not Describing Images
Pinning images without including descriptions is a big no-no. By not including these, your pins will not show up in a Pinterest search, and your pins will certainly not be optimized to meet your SEO needs.

6. Using Bad Images
Being an extremely visual platform, using bad images should not even form part of your vocabulary. Your brand will be competing with some of the world’s best creative minds, and any sub-par pin will ensure your marketing failure on the platform. High-quality and creative imagery is key to your success on Pinterest and are more likely to attract more followers to your profile.

7. Not Using Pinterest Analytics
Analytics, especially platform specific analytics, forms the foundation of any social media site’s insight and optimization process. These free tools allow you to make your pins and boards more effective.

8. Abandoning The Profile
Analytics, especially platform specific analytics, forms the foundation of any If at first you do not succeed, try and try again. Too often, brands join social media sites and at the first sign of low results, abandon their efforts. This can result in a huge loss of potential opportunity on these platforms as most failures on such sites are attributed to the lack of knowledge surrounding them.

Being a platform known to drive increased brand and product consideration, Pinterest presents marketers with incredible opportunities to not only increase traffic to their brand’s sites, but increase their customer engagement levels and online or offline purchases.

Pinterest has seen some great success by marketing teams wishing to increase everything from brand awareness to customer sign ups. Reece’s launched a campaign to increase their brand consideration during the football season. They saw great success with with close to 90% of their target audience responding favorably to their pins.

Read the full story here

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Pinterest is a dynamic marketing tool that is being under used by most brands in the world right now. It is a fresh market with many valuable assets and great functionality.

Thank you for reading our guides on Pinterest. We are working to bring you insights into how to measure your success on Pinterest. Stay tuned to our publication, Inside Revenue, for the release of these articles and more.