Some strategies to benefit from the use of Pinterest for your business
With over a 200 million users on the platform every month, Pinterest is not really classified as one of the social media giant such as Facebook, but it still is a very important social media platform that has a deep penetration in some valuable demographics.
More than half of the United States millennials make use of Pinterest, for example. But it is not all about just the younger people who are into saving their valuable ideas on the Pinterest network: 68% of the all the women from the United States who fall in the middle of ages 25 and 55 also use Pinterest.
And what is also true about the network is that it has more female followers compared to the males, almost 40% of the new users happen to be men.
If you still do not have a strong plan and a strategy in place on how you are going to be using the Pinterest platform as a big part when it comes to your business, you will be missing on some very key opportunities that would have otherwise allowed you to reach new potential consumers.
Why should you be using Pinterest for your business?
People end up using Pinterest for their own different reasons compared to the use of social networks such as Instagram and Facebook. Pinterest happens to be a social network on which people are seeking out inspiration, and specifically looking for ideas regarding new products that they can buy.
This means that they are actually excited to view the posts coming from the brands on their feeds. As per the eMarketerm team, Facebook is the only platform that performs better than Pinterest when it comes to having a big influence on the United States based users of social media and their decisions regarding purchases.
More than 2/3rds of the pinners say that they have actually discovered a latest product or a brand on the Pinterest platform. And an amazingly high number of (93%of the pinners to be precise, which makes it almost the entire universe of Pinterest users) them make use of the network in planning their purchases.
And it is not restricted to mere planning, more than half of the pinners have really ended up purchasing after looking at a pin that is promoted, and 2/3rds take a look at their saved pins when they are shopping at real brick and mortar stores.
An overview of Pinterest for Business
Given that Pinterest is a bit different when compared to the other social media networks, so before we start talking about how you should be using Pinterest for your business, we are going to provide a quick overview of some of the key terminology used with Pinterets.
Pins
A Pin is just simply a video or an image which somebody decides to save on Pinterest. When it comes to the businesses, the link is of more importance compared to the image by itself. Every pin has a link that point back to the initial source, hence Pinterest can prove to be a wonderful source of referred traffic.
Boards
Users of Pinterest (who are also known as pinners) do save a ton of stuff – an astonishingly 100 billions of pins till date. For them to be able to stay organized with their pins, they can sort the pins they own into collections of what are called boards. Pinners are allowed to either follow your whole account, or they can choose to follow some particular boards that are of more interest to them. Then, the pins that you save shall be appearing on their feed.
Feed
A feed in Pinterest is exactly the same as the feeds you get from other social media networks – it is a collection of the links and the content from the boards and the users who the pinner is following.
Add buttons to save on your website
If you really want the people to take some action, you have to make it simpler for them so that they will do it. Since the addition of a button for saving on your site makes it easier for people to actually Pin the content on your site with a single click, even though they may not have the browser button from Pinterest installed, there should be no surprises there that doing just that can lead to quintupling of the amount of the content that the pinners will save at your website.
You also choose to make use of the automatic buttons – this will lead to the creation of clickable Save buttons for Pinterest users that will start appearing on all the images on your website – or buttons that hover, which shall show only when somebody hovers the mouse over those images. Or, you also have the choice of adding the Save button of Pinterest only to some particular image on the website.
Be consistent in pinning
The recommendation from Pinterest is that you do Pin something with the frequency of at least one in a day, and that too during the peak hours – which they have found to be the weekends and the evenings for the brands based out of the United States. Pinterest has also highlighted that consistency is the key – if you are planning on posting a high volume of posts over the coming week, you are better off by dividing them into small chunks and post some of them every day instead of trying to post all of them at once.
If you are in the process of creating Pins that will be coinciding with some holiday that is upcoming, a season , or an event, then you are better off in starting to post them around 45 days well in advance.
Stay focused on just great visuals
Pinterest happens to be a medium that is highly visual, so it is totally worth your efforts in creating high quality images. You pictures should be very clear, well composed, well lit and the important thing is that they should be in focus. However, if you do not have the time or the skills in order to create images on your own, it is very easy to find plenty of stock picture sites with very good quality pictures that you can put to use.