Pinterest has 70 million users and growing, according to Semiocast. Its popularity goes far beyond the U.S. market, with rapid growth internationally as well. When you’re looking into Internet properties well worth spending your marketing time and money on, Pinterest is a must-use site. In addition to an active and engaged user base, Pinterest supports businesses using their platform for marketing purposes with a number of built-in tools.
Photo by DesignBolts via Wikimedia Commons
Optimizing Your Profile
Your Pinterest profile is more than a way to tell potential customers what you have to offer. When crafted correctly, it’s also a powerful tool to improve your search engine rankings. Tailwind suggests working your target keywords into every aspect of your profile. This goes beyond the obvious choice of including it within your descriptive text. Your Pinterest profile URL is the first area to work with, whether you want to optimize for your brand name or your general keywords. Another uncommon SEO tip for your Pinterest profile involves the file name of your profile picture. This is retained when you upload the picture, so work your brand name and keywords into the name.
Repinning
One of the primary ways you interact with Pinterest users is through the repinning function. Users will repin the pins you add to the site, and you can create themed boards relating to your business that don’t exclusively promote your products alone. For example, if you have home decor products, create themed boards for living room ideas. Add interesting furniture options to complement your home decor products. Yahoo reports on Sephora’s successful usage of themed boards that pairs up its beauty products with user created DIY tutorials on how to get stunning looks.
You may run into some users who steal your content and put it on Pinterest as their own. You have a few ways of handling this issue. Pinterest has a web form making it easy to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to any users who steal your content and add it to Pinterest. If you don’t mind Pinterest users adding your products directly, ensure all of your photos are watermarked so you receive some traffic from it.
Take a look at popular pins and boards to find out what is trending across the site. Maybe there’s a popular color you can work into your product line, or perhaps top lists are taking the popularity lead on Pinterest. Work this data into your marketing campaigns to maximize your Pinterest traffic.
Put Effort Into Your Boards
You want to put as much effort into your boards as possible. This is the main way Pinterest users are going to see your pins until you begin building up a following that will repin you. When you get repinned by popular users, you essentially get a word of mouth recommendation from a trusted source. If you really want to catch some interest from Pinterest users, offer to give away promotional pins and other useful items.
Use Stats Tracking
Pinterest makes a fairly useful set of tracking tools for your boards and profile, but there are also third party tools that do the trick in much more detail, such as Tailwind and Postris. Intuit Quickbooks can be used as a complementary financial too to alleviate tracking sales and expenses. Use these tools to monitor your return on investment for the time and money you spend on the site.