You’ve heard about how effective Pinterest can be in helping you grow your small business and drive traffic to your website, but perhaps you have yet to get started, or perhaps you have a Pinterest account, but you haven’t done much with it yet. Don’t worry, though. Getting started with Pinterest is easy, and it’s fun, too. With its boundless opportunities for creative expression, Pinterest is an excellent tool to connect with customers and prospects, grow your online audience, and strengthen your branding efforts.
Get Started Right
To get started, you really should take some time to explore Pinterest and to learn about who is there and why they use it. Then imagine your ideal customer. What kinds of pin boards does she have? What kind of content interests her? Taking this information into consideration, set up pin boards which your ideal customer will want to follow. After you’ve set up your boards, you’re ready to begin pinning and re-pinning. Follow interesting people and boards, and learn from them. Like other people’s pins, and comment on them. It’s called social media for a reason, so make an effort to be social.
Create High Quality Visual Content
To engage people on Pinterest, you’ll want to create and pin high quality visual content that lends itself well to being shared, whether photographs, videos, illustrations, or infographics. Pinterest is a social media platform on which creativity and expressiveness are encouraged and rewarded, so make sure your visual content, in whatever form, skillfully combines stand-out aesthetic value with usefulness, whether educational value, entertainment value, or both. Make sure your content is something special that people will want to pin to their own boards and share with others. Strive to repin content that you find unique, intriguing, and interesting to your audience.
Have a Sound Pinning Strategy
Figure out a pinning strategy based on your goals on Pinterest and the subjects of your pin boards, and be open to honing and developing your strategy as you go. You might want to create a pin board that gives customers and prospects an in-depth, behind the scenes look at your business. You might have great success with a special pin board to which your customers can contribute their own creativity, insights, and fun. Do you have thought-provoking observations about your field? Share your thoughts, and create captivating graphics to accompany them. Whatever you do, be creative. Don’t pin too much content that’s purely promotional. Seek instead to entertain, educate, and inform, with your own unique style.
Consider Markers of Engagement
How do you know you’re doing well and reaching people on Pinterest? Follow boards and users that interest you, then interact, engage, and repin content from other users as appropriate. As you build up content on your own boards, people will follow them, individually or all of your boards together. Follows and repins are good indicators of how well you’re connecting with other people about their passions, so you’ll want to create high-impact visual content that encourages both repins and follows. You’ll also want to integrate Pinterest with your other online platforms such as your blog and other social media channels. It’s easy to do, and it makes your business’ content even more visible and shareable across the online landscape.
As with other social media platforms, you need to be consistent with your efforts on Pinterest to reap rewards. Take time to learn your way around the platform and to create content that will resonate with your audience. Pin, repin, and interact with people on a regular basis. Success with Pinterest won’t happen overnight any more than with any other platform, but if you leverage creativity and consistency, you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by the extent to which Pinterest can amp up your brand recognition and your online visibility.
If you have any questions, our team would be more than happy to help. Call us today at (215)-393-9787.
