Why we had a talk about Pinterest for Business
A while back, it came up in discussion at one of our meet-ups that none of us knew a great deal about Pinterest. A lot of us had dabbled in it personally but none of us felt we were using it effectively for our businesses and there was probably some scope to do so. So last night Pinterest and marketing expert Darren Lock of Populo Marketing gave us a very insightful session on it at our Tunbridge Wells monthly meet-up.
It turned out that Darren is an absolutely mine of information about marketing, apps and tools and how they all work together and here’s a summary of his talk on using Pinterest for business….
1. A very interesting fact as to why you should be using Pinterest for your business…
Pinterest generates more traffic to websites than all of the other social media platforms combined. And google loves it.
Because of the way it works, it’s a great place for “evergreen” content i.e. content that remains relevant and doesn’t expire because your “pins” (the Pinterest equivalent of posts) can come up in search results at any time. Compare this to other forms of social media where your posts just disappear down someone’s feed and it immediately starts to stand out.
2. What is Pinterest and the basics of how it works…
A social media/search engine platform – If you’ve not already had a play on there, Pinterest is an image-based social media/search engine platform. You can search using keywords and it brings up images with accompanying text. If you click on that image it takes you to an external website. 70% of Pinterest users are female.
Personal vs business account – You can have either a personal or business account (you can convert your personal to a business one). The main difference being that a business account gives you access to analytics so that you can see how your pins are performing.
Boards – You can create up to 500 boards (if you have the time and energy!), which are effectively ways of sorting your individual pins into categories.
How people use it – Other people people can find your pins using keywords in the search bar. They can then like them, comment on them, and repin to add them to their own boards (the Pinterest equivalent of sharing and potentially “going viral”). If a user clicks on the pinned image or link in the accompanying blurb, it takes take them where you want them to go (i.e. a specific page or product on your website. Users can follow you as a user, or follow your individual boards so that they see when you have added new pins to them.
You can use your own and others’ images – You can pin your own images or other images that are relevant to your audience, and add them to the appropriate boards to categorise them. If you pin content from other sources it will link to the original source meaning that you are not claiming ownership or breaching copyright.
Pin regularly – Darren said that the key to Pinterest success is to pin to your boards regularly rather than have the occasional splurge where you pin lots and and then do nothing for a week/month/year (delete as appropriate!). So ideally you would add a quick pin to your main boards every day or on the same day every week. These can be scheduled via a 3rd party app or tool (see more below).
Image sizing and dimensions – Pinterest likes portrait sized images (as opposed to square or landscape). The ideal size is 600×900 px or a 2:3 ratio. Canva has a pre-sized template to help you.
There is a tool called relaythat which will resize images and produce a set in the right sizes for eg. Pinterest, Insta and Facebook from the same post. It currently costs $25 pcm though but could be useful and be worth the investment if you post a lot to different platforms.
3. Basic set up of your boards
While you can have up to 500 in theory, Darren advised to having 6 core boards, and then no more than 20-30 overall to make it manageable. The core boards (which may vary depending on your business) could be:
- About me – pins link to your about me blogs and the background to how and why you do what you do
- Behind the scenes
- Testimonials – use e.g. Canva to type up your testimonials and turn them into images that you can then post
- Products and services
- Resources e.g. apps you use, materials, information that your followers might find useful and that fit with your brand
- Quotes – love em or hate em, quotes work well on Pinterest. Generate them on your own branded background and style using e.g. Canva or the Wordswag phone app
- Seasonal – create a board relating to each event / season and add relevant pins to it 2 months before the actual event to give it time to generate traction.
Other boards – This will then entirely depend on your business/brand and the interests of your target audience.
4. How to Pin to your boards
Get the Pinterest Safari / Chrome extension on your browser – This little button means that you can pin easily from any website while you are on it (it’s very handy). When you’re on any website, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, and you see an image you want to pin, click on that little button. It brings up a pop up, asks you to choose the image you want to pin, then select which of your boards you want to add it to, allows you to amend the accompanying text and away you go. Simples.
5. Add Rich Pins to your website
What is a rich pin? Well, this means that if you pin a particular e.g. product, blog or recipe from your website, it automatically pulls the information and e.g. price, ingredients and method and/ or star rating etc (whatever you choose) into the comments alongside the image in the pin.
How to do this – it depends what platform your website is and how techy you are – WordPress has various plugins, Shopify apparently does (I need to explore this myself) or you can ask your website developer to set it up for you.
The technical terms for this are apparently “open graph” and “schema markup” should you have the urge to google it or pretend that you know what you’re talking about when asking your website developer!
*Update* after much googling and youtube-ing and a little bit of swearing, I’ve finally figured out how add rich pins for my Shopify website. Basically go to your own website and any product page and copy the url (website address for that product page). Then go to the Pinterest Validator Debugger, paste your url into the box with “.oembed” at the end (including the full stop at the start) and click apply. And apparently it should be working within the hour (that was 10 mins ago so it isn’t yet).
6. Top tips for effective pins
Here are a few of Darren’s tips on making your pins effective:
- The starting point should always be to generate and have good content on your website. If your website doesn’t convert traffic into customers then getting people to it via Pinterest is a waste of your time and energy.
- Use good quality images that stand out and that are the right dimensions (ideally portrait orientation with a 2:3 ratio). If they’re your own, make them consistent with your brand
- Make the most of keywords in your title that are relevant to the pin and likely to be searched for by your target audience
- Have a purpose and call to action in every pin – whether that’s to visit your website, ask users to repin it / comment on it / sign up to your newsletter etc.
6. Scheduling pins and combining your social media
If you want to make your life easier you may want to consider scheduling pins rather than physically doing it every day.
Tailwind is a tool authorised by Pinterest that is specifically designed to manage your “pinning” with a scheduling tool. It also has a Chrome extension for your browser toolbar to make life easier. It currently costs about £15 per month but youc an sign up for a free trial via their website if you want to give it a go.
Buffer is another social media scheduler that allows you to schedule and post to various other platforms including Pinterest, Facebook and Insta. That also costs £15 per month but as it works across most other social media platforms may work out more straightforward and cost effective overall.
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a tool to help you integrate various apps and tools and get them to talk to one another. Using that you can link Instagram to Pinterest so that when you make an insta post it will add it automatically to Pinterest. You can fine-tune it further by telling IFTTT to pick up on certain hashtags and redirect any post with e.g. #receipe to your Recipe board on Pinterest and any with e.g. #shoes to your Shoe board on Pinterest. Nifty hey?!
What next?
Well, as someone who finds Facebook increasingly less effective for my business I’m going to spend a couple of months trying out Pinterest and see what happens. Fortunately I have a teenage son who is about to start the summer holidays and wants some money so I’ll be paying him to review and tidy up my boards and get the core ones set up for me while I investigate adding “rich pins” to my website and plan some content. So watch this space. I’ll blog about my progress and the results in a couple of months’ time.
Useful links
If you’d like to receive invitations to our events and receive the occasional email with news and event tips, click here to sign up to hear from us.
If you’d like to find out more about Darren Lock and Populo Marketing, click here to visit his website.