Unless you have been hiding underneath a rock, I’m sure you have heard of Pinterest. You most likely have been using it for some time, but are you using it for your business? Many business owners don’t realize that Pinterest is not just a social platform to create boards and pin pictures of things that interest you. Pinterest actually drives millions of visits to websites every day and if you are not taking advantage of this for your business, you are missing out BIG TIME!
So what do you need to get started? First of all you need a Pinterest profile, BUT WAIT A MINUTE… we are not talking about your own personal profile. We are talking about an actual business profile for your company. They are created differently and each have different features so make sure you are using the correct one and try to use your company name as your username if possible. Here’s the direct link to create a business profile: https://business.pinterest.com/en.
Once you have created your profile and filled in all the basics such as your company name, your logo, company description, etc. you are now ready to confirm your website. This step requires a little bit of technical know-how so if you are not to comfortable with adding basic meta tags or uploading HTML files, you might want to let your web person do this or hire someone to take care of if for you. If you use WordPress want to take a stab at it on your own, here’s a quick video on how you can get it done…
So why is confirming your website important? Well for one, it will help you to rank your profile higher on Pinterest searches. Second, every time someone pins something from your website, your logo or profile pic will appear on the Pins (great for your company branding). And lastly, confirming your website allows you to have access to Pinterest Analytics which is a great tool to keep track of your traffic so you know where to make some improvements and find some traffic generating winners.
Another tip we recommend is using rich Pins. There are currently 6 types of rich pins that you can take advantage of to help your content rank better. These pins include additional textual content and extra information that help them stand out more which in turn drive more clicks. An example of a rich pin is a Product Pin. With Product Pins you are able to include pricing, availability, and purchase links. Yes, that is right, you can drive direct sells for your products directly from Pinterest.
The last tip we are going to talk about in this post is adding the Pin It Button to your website. Obviously the easier you make it for a visitor to share your content, the more likely they are to do it. And it goes without saying that creating quality content is crucial because no one really wants to share garbage, right? To add the Pin It Button there are several social sharing plugins that are available for platforms such as WordPress. These plugins are easy to install and include most of the popular social sharing sites and places buttons on either your site’s pages, posts, or both. If you are not using WordPress or prefer to do it manually, you can find directions directly from Pinterest here: https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/widgets/pin-it/
Hope you found these tips helpful and you put them to use immediately.
More tips coming soon!
