Pinterest – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Pinterest is a photo-sharing website, filled to the brim with all sorts of images: funny pictures, beautiful furniture, make-up tutorials, cute clothes, all sorts of things. If your business is selling things that can be pleasing to the eye, then Pinterest is a great way to get pictures of your products out there. But you’ve got to get noticed first, and like any other social media website, that’ll take some marketing strategy.

Unique Boards

On Pinterest, you organize your posts (which are known as pins) into categories known as boards. For instance, the average Pinterest user may have a board for funny pictures, a board for cute clothes, and a board for inspirational quotes. One way to make your boards stand out is by giving them unique names. Make your board stand out from the hordes of “cool stuff” and “things I like” and people will be more motivated to check them out.

There are two ways to “pin” to your boards: you can pin original content, or you can re-pin from someone else’s board. It certainly helps to re-pin from other people, but you’ll want to pin your own original content as well. When someone re-pins something, the original poster’s name shows up. So if someone sees something they like, and you were the one who originally pinned it, they may go check out your account.

Make Your Images Share-able

You’ll want people to re-pin from you as much as possible, so as to spread the name of your business. So you’ll want to make your images as share-able as possible. Some common mistakes many companies make that decrease the share-ability of their images are:

  • Watermarking your images: if you put a watermark or some other sort of trademark on your image, it becomes your exclusive property. While you may be doing this to protect your images from intellectual theft, you’re also blocking your images from being shared.
  • Including marketing pitches: the price of your products/services, the date of promotional events, or even the company logo (unless it’s subtle) should not be on any of your pins. Include that sort of information in the description.
  • Low quality images: Pinterest is a picture-based website, so only use extremely high quality shots. The ideal image should be about 600 or 800 pixels wide and 1000 pixels deep, with good resolution; people won’t pin anything blurry.

Efficient Descriptions

Each pin has a description to go along with it. You don’t want your descriptions to be too long (they’ll take up too much space and your customers won’t read them), but you also want to fill them with relevant keywords, so your images will pop up in searches more often. So you’ll need to be smart about how you phrase your descriptions.

If you want your pins to draw your Pinterest audience back to your main website, you could put your URL at the end of your description. However, there is a much more efficient way to do this. When you pin an image, there are two ways to do this: you can upload a pin, or you can add an image from a website. If you choose this option, you type in the URL of the page the image is from, and then when people click on your pin, it takes them back to that URL.

Interact with your Pinterest friends

When you first start pinning, you probably won’t get much traffic if you’re only posting a bunch of products. So start by gaining a following. Have a funny board, and a board for inspirational quotes, etc. Re-pin viral things and you’ll slowly start to gain attention. Follow the people that follow you; re-pin their stuff and they’ll re-pin yours. And as you gain followers, they’ll start looking at more than just the stuff you used to draw them in.