Pinterest is also one of the leading social networking sites today and it is a social media website with a difference as on this site users are allowed to organise and share images and even videos from across the Internet. Each image is called a pin and sees pins are organised into category boards like a cork board may be used in the family home. These cork boards can be customised and followed by other users as well as other users being able to repay your content onto their boards. Followers are encouraged and like Twitter there are very few restrictions on who can follow who. Check out Pinterest at http://pinterest.com.
Pinterest has recently introduced new ways to Pin for businesses.
Get to Know the New Pins
Pinterest is always hard at work trying and succeeding in expanding their functionality for businesses, from creating business accounts to marketing materials to help businesses get more from Pinterest.
The latest additions to Pinterest are the introduction of so called "rich pins". These include more information in each pinned image and contains the integration of the "Pin It" button with mobile apps.
There are three types of pins that now allow you to share more information: products, recipes, and movies. The additional information for pins in these categories is provided by specific websites.
Why Rich Pins Are So Valuable
Curious as to why you should care about the latest evolution in Pinterest pins? Here are some studies that should get you excited about what these rich pins can do for your business.
In May 2012, Shopify did a study that showed an average sales order of $80 from Pinterest referral traffic, compared to $40 from Facebook referral traffic. Pins with prices were also 16% more likely to get likes than those without.
In February 2013, Sephora found that Pinterest users spent 15 times more than Facebook users.
In February 2013, Business Insider noted that Pinterest now has 25 million users, many of whom are wealthy young females who love to shop.
The best part is that all of these studies were done before the introduction of rich pins, which makes it easy to assume that having additional information on pins will further increase these stats. If nothing else, they should certainly help increase traffic to the source domains of the images.
How to Get Rich Pins
If you would like Pinterest users to start sharing your products, recipes and movies with rich pins, you can make it happen! Pinterest has a developer’s page that covers the process by which you can enhance your own website with rich pins.
The details are too heavy for the scope of this book, but your web designer should be able to help you here.
Encourage Your Customers to Share Your Images
Even if you haven’t set up your business’s online store for rich pin functionality, you should still keep encouraging people to pin your content as it is proven to help with traffic and sales. So how do you encourage people to pin your images?
Run a Contest
Pinterest is slowly adding to their contest rules and regulations, which can be found on their Brand Guidelines page. Some of the rules stipulate that you can’t suggest Pinterest is in any way associated with your contest, require people to pin specific images, make people pin or repin your contest page or rules, count Pinterest activity (pinning, following or liking) as entries or count Pinterest activity as votes.
That said, you can run contests where you ask participants to pin their favorite images from your website. While you are still specifying they pin from your website, you aren’t telling them what to pin or repin—that’s the difference.
You can find some good examples and ideas of how to run Pinterest contests to increase the pins from your website on the PinLeague blog (http://blog.tailwindapp.com/pinterest-contest-guidelines/)
If you haven't yet seen Pinterest, then check out these examples
http://pinterest.com/ceicompliance/social-media/
http://pinterest.com/ceicompliance/steigenberger-nile-palace-luxor/
Pinterest has become a popular tool for users trying to plan weddings, decorate their homes and share recipes, among other activities.
Conceptualised by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, Pinterest was launched in 2009 and since then has experienced rapid growth. According to statistics released by ComScore in February 2012, Pinterest has more than 25.3 million unique monthly visitors and is now the third most popular social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter.
Pinterest has grown from roughly 1 million users in July 2011 to more than 25 million today and their member profile has a higher proportion of well heeled women than any other group. In May 2012, Pinterest raised $100 million more in funding, which now values the company at $2.5 billion. Not bad for a site in operation since only 2009 and yet to make a penny in revenue.
For brands everywhere now is certainly the time to start using Pinterest given its continued surge in numbers. Also, by comparison to Facebook, users consider Pinterest ‘cool,’ which is demonstrative of a gradual shift in attitudes over what is vogue in social networks. In terms of time spent on the increasingly popular image-centric pin board that figure is also rising, with users now spending on average a total of 89 minutes. Time to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon?
Many organisations without the insight of social media marketing strategists like let's talk so for me the still look at interest and failed to see how this graphic highlighting site can possibly be used to generate business in the mainstream. However creative and innovative early adopters such as designers, food, travel and the like would be well served to immediately sign up.
Pinterest tips
The site can be extremely useful for presentations or tutorials requiring staged or walk-through visual journeys such as recipe is, how to construct, anything by numbers etc. where you need to educate viewers step-by-step.
Pinterest boards can provide promotional and exclusive material for example a behind-the-scenes snapshot or special prize for a competition where the viewing is by invitation only.
Additional information or application of use for products can be listed here and if there are repetitive or common issues or challenges they can be made into case studies along with solutions.
Building customer loyalty through a fan base can be achieved by the pinning of handbags and skirts, shoes and wedding dresses directly or through fans, is a great way for retailers to socially market their goods, but even now companies that sell consulting packages or aircraft engines still don’t have Pinterest in their marketing plans. Should they?
If companies care about or spend money on any of the following, then whether they are consultants, manufacturing engines for aircraft or building satellites, the answer is definitely “yes”:
SEO: As we know a critical area online marketing and there are many theories about how the search engines score social media linking, connecting Pinterest can almost certainly help your efforts.
Content: if you have interesting, unique or engaging content that has served you well on other social media channels, why not just pin it on Pinterest where it can address a completely different social media crowd who are more visually focused than text based.
Design: Pinterest is, as we well know, visual so leverage the fact that huge numbers of graphic designers are represented here. Get the creative members of your team to search and browse and even pin their work to inspire them or even for you to find strategic partners.
Marketing: marketers also look to Pinterest for inspiration and all visually stunned CEOs will confess that they have been storyboarded to death. By leveraging this site storyboards can take on a new meaning and even a life of their own.
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How To Get followed
Pinterest’s search is predominantly the way people will find you, which would indicate that to be found you have to use keywords in the right places.
We will discuss keywords later however consider the fact that you have a picture of a bottle of wine with no caption or description. Any search for wine, claret, chardonnay, bottle, glass, cork, celebration or anything else linked to a wine bottle will actually not show your pin in the search results. By adding a simple descriptive and interesting caption with the addition of specific keywords or tags as some people will call them can rectify your lack of search appearances.
Fresh Content, Content, Content
As with all other social media sites, Pinterest rewards those who bring fresh and interesting content on a regular basis, new material being pinned is far more valuable than repainting somebody else's and it also keeps your followers interested.
TopTip #31 – Your Business Profile
You can promote and sell your products through pinterest and if you are serious about this then it is highly recommended that you set up your business account. Doing this would also help you establish your credibility and portray a sense of professionalism to your target customers.
TopTip #32 – Tools Are Important
Get higher chances of your products being noticed by using the tools available for this particular social networking site. Several tools can offer you a dashboard with its very own analytics and scheduler and even keep updated with the trending pins and boards which may interest you.
TopTip #33 – Measure Your Efficiency
When implementing a marketing strategy, it is a must to regularly check your analytics. Pinterest offers one as part of their features. You will be able to determine the volume of individuals who are pinning from your site and also determine the volume of how many viewed those which you have pinned.
TopTip #34 – Have A Pinnable Site
Help spread the news about your company and the products which you are offering by making your site pinnable. Through this, other individuals may start pinning from your company website.
TopTip #35 – Product Pins Work
Since there are three types of pins which you can use in Pinterest, make sure that you choose product pins. Since the photos in this networking site includes the price tag, once somebody repins your products, they will automatically be informed if there would be drops in its price.
TopTip #36 – Identify Your Target
Standard with all the other marketing strategy, you must know your target audience. You have to do the needed research work for you to figure this one out. By doing this, you’ll be able to create a strategy of your own which you can effectively implement once you use pinterest.
TopTip #37 – Have Some Fun
Aside from the great photos which Pinterest users enjoy, why not make things a lot more interesting by running a contest. This will make it more engaging and you will surely get likes and followers.
TopTip #38 – Info graphics Works Too
If you wish to increase the level of engagement as well as the volume of your followers, then you may want to consider creating info graphics. These educational pieces are definitely a plus factor. All you have to do is find the right tool to create a really effective and visually appealing one.
TopTip #39 – Engage With Others
You also have to comment, like and re-pinning the pins of others. Social media means you have to connect to the other members of the community. This applies to all platforms and not just in Pinterest.
TopTip #40 – Reality Check
Make sure that you check out your rivals. This will help you find new ways to improve your own products and make it stand out from the rest.
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