Pinterest Social Media Strategy
Today we wanted to look at some ways you can use Pinterest in your social media marketing strategy.
Looking at our monthly social media statistics, Pinterest has over 620,000 unique Australian visitors in the last month (June 2012), and has been seeing continued growth over the past several months. In fact Pinterest can be used as a marketing tool for a wide variety of businesses from online publishers through to physical and online retailers.
1. Selling on Pinterest
If you are a physical or online retailer, create different boards for each of your products or product categories. Show the price of your goods on Pinterest!
Include links back to your product and/ or buy pages. But don’t over do it and make every pin a sales link. Add some information and descriptive pictures to also explain and entice interest before focusing on the sale.
2. Use Unique Photography
As Pinterest is focused on the visual appeal, if you can use 100% unique photographs that you have taken this will bring something new to the network. Do realise there is a lot of recycled content on Pinterest, so if you can bring something new then your content will stand out from the rest.
Look at your Facebook, Flickr and Instagram photo albums for your own unique photos.
3. Forward think your Social Media Strategy
To get the most from photo specific social networks like Pinterest, this will involve planning and generating your content now for future use:
- What are you working on?
- What are you selling?
- What do you want your social networks to share?
The response to each of these questions needs to be answered with a picture!
4. Use your profile to promote your other Social Networking accounts
Pinterest lets your link your account with your Facebook and Twitter profiles. This is an important feature that opens up your Pinterest content to a much larger audience.
Make sure you also add your website link to your profile. The profile links on Pinterest are not NoFollow so this brings a possible SEO benefit to all your links listed.
5. Use Hashtags, Mention other users
Pinterest supports Hashtags like Twitter so hashtag your content with the most important keywords for increased visibility.
You can also mention other Pinterest users in your pin by @ mentioning them, again like you do on Twitter.
6. Use the About Section in your Profile
Use the About Section in your profile to describe who you are, what your business does and what you are selling.
7. Pin Videos
Pinterest allows you to Pin Videos. You can only do this from YouTube and Vimeo but considering there is not a lot of video content on Pinterest yet, you should try this content whilst it is still relatively fresh.
Simply get the URL link of your YouTube or Vimeo video (the full link, not a shortened version) and click ‘Add a Pin’.
8. Pin your Powerpoints via Slideshare, and Audio via SoundCloud
You are now also able to Pin your Slideshare content (great for powerpoints and PDFs etc), and audio content via SoundCloud.
Again, this content is very fresh on Pinterest so experiment with this new material whilst it is underutilised.
9. Consistently Share, Don’t Flood
If you have quality content ready to go up Pinterest, don’t flood the site with 10+ pictures per day.
Drip feed your content to maintain as consistent presence. The site doesn’t quite have the same level of engagement as Facebook, therefore don’t post so much content in one go.
10. Add the Pin It button to your website
Every share counts, and with the large amount of Australian Pinterest users it is well worth adding the Pin It button to your website or blog.
You can get the code from this link: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/ or alternatively you will find many WordPress plugins that can do the job.
We hope these tips help give you some new ideas about your Pinterest Social Media Strategy. The site is evolving quickly from a picture based network to a full on information hub. If you have any strategies – feel free to share them with us.