What is Pinterest?
I love how people say, “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Pinterest by now.” I’m here to tell you to come out of from under your crawl space (or where ever you’ve been to avoid even hearing about Pinterest!) and take a moment to think about how Pinterest can be a way for your company to get found by more customers.
Need some proof? Take a look at these stats:
- Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular social network in the U.S. in terms of traffic. (Experian)
- With over 11 million unique monthly visitors (and counting), Pinterest became the fastest standalone website to eclipse the 10 million per month mark ever. (PR Daily)
- Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and Linkedin COMBINED.
Pinterest gives your products and services the opportunity to be found online. The use of SEO-rich keywords in the board and pin descriptions enable Pinterest boards to be indexed on a Google search.(Click here to Tweet this!)
Add in the eye-catching, emotionally-connected images in the news feed, and you have the foundation for developing your company’s Visual Branding Strategy (check out the Visual Branding post here).
As a daily user of Pinterest, it didn’t take me long to see that more people are following specific boards rather than hitting the Follow All button. This Pinterest behavior pattern is actually a good thing! When it comes to getting found on Pinterest, your boards are the first place you want to spend your time when you’re trying to grow your reach.
There are several default board names like Dream Home or Favorite Places that you can use but unless you sell home products or help people plan a vacation, these don’t really work. Think about how you can use your company’s keywords for your board titles that will represent your business. What words do people use when they search for your company on Google?
How do the names of your boards tell your company’s story?
Of course you want to setup boards for your company’s products and services but be creative with the rest of your boards topics. Think about developing boards with these ideas:
- Highlight client projects
- How are your products made
- Causes or charities your company supports
- Feature your company’s hometown
- Find articles about breaking news and product updates for your industry – if there are several categories for your niche, create several boards to give each category its own highlighted area
I realize there’s a lot of information online about how to create pin-worthy images. This post is about how to use your boards to help you get found.
Follow these simple tricks and you should start to see your followers increase.
1. Add a category to your boards!
At this point, Pinterest doesn’t have a category for everything so try to get as close as you can. I have boards for Facebook and their changes, Twitter and the Bird and of course, a popular board named Social Media with a Strategy.
Each of these boards is based around a social media program but the closest category Pinterest offers is ‘technology.’ I use technology to categorize my social media boards so when people are searching within that category, my boards come up to pinner who are not already following me.
2. Use your key-word rich descriptions.
Pinterest has an internal search functions where pinners can search for pins, boards and people. You have a place to add in a description about the board’s topics so use it!
Let people know what they can find on your board and the types of pins you’ll be adding. Plus, those descriptive words will help others find your boards when they run a search for something that you’re pinning.
3. Move your top boards to the first two rows.
You have just a few minutes to catch someone’s attention when they click on your profile. Move your top boards that best represent your company to the first two rows and the most important ones to the center.
Our eyes are trained to look at the center of the page before we start to read right to left. Make sure your top boards that best tell your story are front and center.
3. Fill your boards out.
The new design allows us to see not just a cover image but 4 smaller images on the bottom row. Make sure you pin at least 5 pins to fill out the images on the board.
4. Don’t forget the cover image!
Use an eye-catching image or something with cool text on it to represent your board’s cover. To set your board’s cover, mouse-over the board and you’ll see the words ‘change cover’ come up. Click on that button and use the arrows to search through your images that you’ve already pinned to that board. You’re able to move the image around to make sure a certain word or part of an image is locked in place. Hit save when you’re happy with the new cover.
And change your covers at least once a month. There’s nothing worse than seeing something on a cover that you want to pin but when you click on the board, it’s under about 400 other pins. I usually give up (and others will too) and you’ve lost a chance for someone to share your pins.
Are you using Pinterest and created a cool board? Leave your board name in the comments so we can check it out and follow you!
