Most of us have always seen Pinterest as a platform to go to for inspiration, design ideas, make fashion and travel scrapbooks. Things have changed. In the past year, Pinterest has changed and has become a great platform to utilise for various brands across industries with Pinterest for Business, with analytics which is easy to understand and make use of.
There are over 200 million monthly Pinterest users globally and the platform often acts as the source of gathering information before making a purchase. With image search on the rise, Pinterest is the only social media platform to offer visual search. Also, in times like that of a pandemic when brands are looking for cost-effective marketing tools, Pinterest makes for a great tool for not just brand awareness but also for SEO.
With so many users ready to consume content on a daily basis, here are 05 things your business needs to know to be on Pinterest.
Pin it right
The ground rule of using Pinterest right is – pinning the images right. Here’s what each image should have:
- Title
- Description
- Link
Without a link, pinning is of no use. It is a great platform to bring traffic to your website vs any other social media platform.
Go for the business profile
While a personal profile has almost the same features, having a business profile is important for businesses to gain access to insights and analytics to learn what is working and what is not working for them.
03 things to do once you have a business profile:
- Claim your website: Pinterest gives you a code that has to be implemented on your website and verified in order to showcase your business website on Pinterest.
- Merge and Enable social media channels: The platform gives you an option to merge Instagram, Etsy, YouTube and your RSS feed. Once you enable Instagram, you can opt for auto-sharing of all Instagram posts on Pinterest under a separate board. (Voila! Easy cross promotion)
- Tune your home feed: Edit your preferences in order to draw the right inspiration for your own content.
Use Analytics
What makes a great Pinterest Business Strategy? The Analytics! The moment you know which insight and metric is for you, you can work on it to enhance your content.
Here are the top metrics to look at apart from save, clicks and top pins:
- Impressions: the no. of impressions tell you the reach of your content. Every impression is equal to one view. It indicates the number of times your content has appeared in search results, home feed and also under different category searches.
- Engagement: One engagement is equal to an action taken by a user on your pin; it can be a save, a closeup, click or swipe.
- Top boards: Giving a comparison of your content’s performance since your profile’s inception, this is a good metric to look at and learn from to define benchmarks.
- Audience Insights: Right from age, gender and location; this dashboard also helps you understand which device is being used the most by your users which helps you identify the category of the profiles interacting with your content.
What’s the best part? You can download all this data in the form of a csv report!
What makes a good pin?
While a good visual tops the chart, here are a few must-dos’ for you to make a good pin:
- Go for vertical images: Much like Instagram, Pinterest also is used by mobile users more. Around 85% of pinners are on mobile around the world, making it important for businesses to have images that are vertical in nature.
- Be descriptive in what you write
- Use text overlays to make it stand put
- Plan ahead for content around significant days and festivals
- Pin something – every day!
- Use SEO keywords in your board title, description and that of pins too
Last but not the least,
Categorise your content into boards
If your brand is an e-commerce, beauty/lifestyle or even a food blog; then you must categorise your boards basis what your audience might be looking for. It helps in creating seasonal guides, having a content strategy in hand so as to have gain the maximum engagement out of it.
Get pinning, today!
(written by Megha Shrimali – Social Media & Content Head at Pixelated Egg Digital Ventures)