The Ultimate Guide To The Visual Search Engine : Pinterest
This unsual social media network, Pinterest, is the ultimate destination for millions of marketers, sellers, artists & more. Below is a list of DO’S for your Pinterest marketing strategy to get you started right.
1. Complete your profile
The first thing which everyone should focus on doing on any social network planning to leverage the opportunity of it is to
a) Describe their business in the most simpler terms which everyone finds easy to understand
b) Upload a profile picture, which can be the company’s logo or a your personal picture, Make sure it is presentable one and is not a selfie.
c) You can create as many boards as you want, Let’s say 10. You must have decent number of pins on each board, Let’s say 5–10..to start with. This will keep the boards more lively and active and will encourage the audience to explore your board more.
2. Use secret board to save content for future
Keeping everything planned for the future is always a good idea.
a) Curate the content you will need
b) Create a secret board
c) Pin an image to the same board
d) Now you can add original pins URL in the caption
By doing this, you can always turn back to this board and re-pin it publicly. Consider this as Pinterest’s own bookmarking technique.
3. Fantastic cover photo
When you are planning to start your journey on a top visual discovery engine like Pinterest, you must have a high-quality image as your cover photo and also one which explains quite a lot about your business. Pinterest also let’s you select which pin to use as your cover image. You can optimize it before making them as your cover picture on Pinterest for each board.
4. Engage with your Audience
In the beginning, you may not have a large audience but everyone starts just like that. The key to get more followers is to engage with them. You can directly message the users who have liked or re-pinned your pins and also start a group conversation to boost your engagement on Pinterest.
5. Follow your competitors
Do you competitor analysis and follow them all on Pinterest. By doing this you can keep a tab on the current market trends. You should always have your competitors as your promoters because cross-promoting each other will give you and your competitor a broad audience.
6. Share blog posts
If you come across any interesting blogs, You can re-purpose them as an infographic or a PPT and share it. It is actually sharing the same content but through a more visually appealing and short format.
PS. Don’t forget to give credit to the author!
7. Join Community Board
You must have joined tried joining groups on facebook where you send a request to join groups that suits your business category. Where after they let you in, you post relevant and informative content ? Similarly, on Pinterest there are community boards which are collaborative boards managed by a single person who adds more creators to post on the board. You can find boards that fall in a similar category as your business does and send requests to join such community boards. By doing this you will expand your reach to a large audience.
8. Leverage Pinterest Analytics
There has to be a tool using which you can measure your efforts and there is where you can make the most out of Pinterest analytics which lets you know what your audience likes and what not.
9. Include Rich Product Pin to your site
Rich pins are those pins which show real-time information that is in sync with the web-page it is linked to. Rich pins are seo-centric aspect of Pinterest. You just to have a basic know-how of schema.org, embedding and Open Graph, using which you can pull metadata from the web-page that they link to. Apart from the time-saver aspect of rich pins, there is an interesting benefit that is once you create a pin on pinterest for one of your web-pages and make it a rich pin, sometime later when you change the data on that web-page, the rich pin automatically alters the old data on its description to a new data which you just updated on your web-page.
10. Focus on image quality
Pinterest marketing strategy is not complete without focussing on the visual appeal of whatever image that you are posting. The image has to be in the right size and should be interesting because the engagement it will bring is proportionate to how interesting the image looks.
11. Use keywords in your descriptions
Pinterest offers SEO properties heavily when used in the right way. Just like how one does a proper keyword analysis before preparing content for their webpage, the right keywords must be used in the description of a Pinterest Pin so as to reach the right audience.
12. Use different images to link back to your site
You may have an old blog post with old pictures on it and you may want to use a fresh image for your Pinterest or the image on your blog or web-page might not be pinnable or of a different resolution. You can simply fix this by uploading a Pinterest friendly image by clicking on the plus sign on your Pinterest page and select Pin.
13. Pin regularly
Once you are adopting Pinterest as one of your online marketing tool, you should make an habbit of pinning regularly. That will not only expand your reach on the platform but will give direct benefit to the pages you link in with your Pins. You can schedule your posts by using social media sharing tools or by manually using the schedule post tool provide by Pinterest.
14. Cross-promote across platforms
Even though you are hard-core Pinterest believer but never forget to take advantage of other powerful social networks like Twitter.com, Reddit.com, Facebook.com, Instagram.com, etc to grow your followers. Most importantly, no matter how much ever social networks you are leveraging to expand your reach, make sure you are posting relevant content related with your brand.
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