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Pinterest is one of the most active social media networks with over 450 million monthly active users. That’s more than Twitter and Snapchat combined. It’s also one of the fastest-growing platforms, with the number of users increasing by around 100 million users year on year. With such a large user base, it is unsurprising that many businesses use Pinterest strategy as a tool to drive traffic to their website or attract buyers.
Around 50% of U.S. users frequently shop on Pinterest, while 89% of global Pinterest users use the platform for purchase inspiration. Pinterest is a fantastic marketing opportunity for you’re business and today we’ll be showing you how you can get the most from an effective Pinterest strategy.
Table of Contents
How Pinterest Hashtags Drive Search Traffic
Lately, there’s been a whirlwind of chatter and a tad of head-scratching in the Pinterest marketing circle about the whole hashtag hullabaloo. Cast your mind back to 2020, when suddenly, hashtags on Pinterest became about as useful as a chocolate teapot – yep, they weren’t clickable anymore.
Fast forward to not too long ago, and voilà, clickable hashtags made a grand comeback!
This plot twist came around the time Pinterest decided to weave in some magic from their collage-creating gem, Shuffles. Since Shuffles dances to the beat of hashtags, Pinterest rejigged things to make Shuffles hashtags the bridges back to its app. But here’s my thoughts (you can take it or leave it): even with hashtags back in the spotlight, I’m steering clear of using them as keyword stand-ins.
Why? Because in the vibrant search world of Pinterest, there’s always more than one way to standout and attract your ideal audience. So, let’s keep our eyes peeled and our strategies sharp, without putting all our eggs in the hashtag basket.
How to Stand Out With Fresh Pins
Your audience is always looking for fresh content. By constantly posting new pins combined with hashtags to drive traffic to your new pins, you’ll keep presenting brand-new and interesting content to your audience.
You can also make use of social media scheduling tools to plan a content schedule in advance and post in the right time zones for certain audiences.
How to Manage Pinterest Boards
Well-managed Pinterest boards are vital to drawing in your audience and directing them to content you want them to see.
You’ll want to arrange your boards to represent the different topic areas that are important to your audience and represent what your company offers.
We’ve spoken before about how to use Pinterest sections to subdivide your pins within a board. Effectively managing your boards and their sections makes your content easy to find and easy to read.
The Lifetime of a Pin
One of the primary benefits of marketing through Pintests is the long lifetime of a single pin.
The lifetime of a Tweet is usually measured in seconds, a Facebook post might be hours, but a well-placed pin might still be generating clicks after 30-days.
Research shows that, while a pin gets around 70% of its clicks in the first two days, it can continue to generate traffic for more than a month. Additionally, data from companies like Sephora indicate that their Pinterest fans spend around 15 times more than their Facebook followers.
25 Do’s And Don’ts For Your Pinterest Strategy
Now that we’ve given you a better understanding of why Pinterest marketing is so important, here are 25 easy-to-implement Do’s And Don’ts for your Pinterest marketing strategy.
Do’s of Pinterest strategy
- Update your profile – Always fill out your Pinterest profile with your company logo and relevant keywords to drive traffic and brand awareness.
- Start with five boards – When it comes to content marketing, a good place to start is creating five boards and filling them with around ten pins each.
- Have a secret planning board – A secret board can only be seen by you and makes an excellent space to stash content you plan to use for future pins.
- Upgrade your cover photo – Your cover photo will often be the first thing you customers see. So make sure it’s one that properly reflects your business.
- Engage with your audience – Once your boards start getting traffic, reach out to your new visitors. Send thank you messages to re-pinners, suggest new content to people who’ve liked your posts, and create group conversations to encourage further interaction.
- Cross-promote – Follow your competitors. Learn from what they are doing. If an opportunity presents itself, reach out to them with cross-promotion ideas to access a wider audience.
- Join a community board – Community boards are communal spaces with multiple creators. Find one that is relevant to your business and ask to join. Posting there will spread your content to a wider audience.
- Use your Analytics – We’ve already spoken about how to use Pinterest Analytics and how it’s a rich fund of data you can use to sharpen your content marketing strategy.
- Use Rich Pins – It might require you to brush up on your embedding skills, but rich pins are a great way to including important information right on a pin itself and making them more user-friendly.
- Only use great images – Image quality is everything when it comes to Pinterest, so only use high-quality images.
- Use Keywords – Keywords are what Pinterest uses to index its search results, so the right keywords drive traffic to your boards.
- Keep it fresh – Always be posting new and interesting pins, complete with the relevant hashtags.
- Use other platforms – Don’t silo your marketing efforts, always cross-promote your new pins across all the other social media platforms you’re on.
Don’ts of a Pinterest Strategy
- Avoid low-quality images – Pinterest is a visual medium and the best way to lose an audience on Pinterest is to post poor quality images.
- Choose the right community boards – Only join community boards with a good number of members and that have active moderators.
- Don’t be limited to your own content – Keep your boards dynamic by posting a good mixture of content
- Don’t be limited by time zone – Your Pinterest boards will draw a global audience, so scheduling your pins in advance means you can post in multiple time zones.
- Don’t hide your profile – Make your profile as visible as possible with good quality images and relevant keywords.
- Don’t publish half-finished boards – Only make a board public when you’ve filled it with a reasonable amount of content.
- Don’t neglect the ‘Pin it’ button – Add a ‘Pin it’ social sharing button to your website.
- Don’t go overboard on the hashtags – Only use the most relevant hashtags on your pins to make sure they are reaching the correct audience.
- Keep your content relevant – Don’t pin everything you see. Choose quality over quantity and keep your content relevant and organized.
- Don’t flood a single board – Use multiple boards and multiple sections to keep your content well organized and accessible.
What is the main purpose of Pinterest?
Pinterest is a search engine for things you may like, with such diverse categories as fashion, photography and quotes. For your strategy to be successful in reaching out to new users, it’s helpful to understand the dynamics of using Pinterest.
How do people use Pinterest?
Pinterest works on a feed principle – click ‘next’ in the bottom right corner of your screen and you’ll see people’s pins from every category show up on your home page. As you scroll down through posts, explore by typing into the box at the top if it displays what you’re researching; this will bring up similar pins that might interest you.
Refresh often – Understanding how often pinners refresh will help determine when is best to put new content out there.
How do businesses use Pinterest for marketing?
Businesses use pinterest to curate their content so that it can be discovered in a different way. They get more excited when they see success stories of higher engagement and shares on the visual search platform compared to traditional avenues of social media marketing.
A brand should think about Pinterest as for the community members rather than the creative directors designing pins. Brands just need to show up, create awesome content, and then start exploring how people are engaging with the content so they can tap into what’s working for them.
How do you become successful on Pinterest?
In order to be successful on pinterest, you will need to start by critically reviewing your content. You want to make sure it is aligned with the wants and needs of your target audience.
You’ll also want to consider incorporating Pinterest into all aspects of your marketing strategy including – but not limited to – organic keyword search optimization, paid targeting, increasing conversions from site visitors who are already engaged with product pages and emails that link back to pinned content.
Keep in mind that pins are seen for a brief moment and should offer a brief summary of what they’re about without being too wordy.