Our top tips on using Pinterest for small businesses | Heart Internet Blog – Focusing on all aspects of the web

During its relatively short time as a social media channel, Pinterest has become highly valuable for small businesses by presenting further opportunities to engage with customers, present your brand and drive traffic. This is why we’ve written these top tips to help you get more out of your Pinterest account or, if you don’t have one yet, to encourage you to start pinning your great content.

We have been pinning for over a year and continue to use our page to showcase content from across our activities and to celebrate the amazing content that we find on Pinterest. Feel free to visit our page for content inspiration and be sure to click follow on your favourite boards.

Interact with people

Getting involved with the community on Pinterest is great for your business. It has the obvious benefits of driving more traffic to your site and increasing your chances of receiving positive word of mouth and new customers. Beyond this, it will keep you informed of developments in your industry and give you content that can spark new ideas. To engage with the community, commenting and liking other pinners’ posts is a good plan. Make sure this is targeted though, as you don’t want to spend your time trying to interact with those who aren’t interested in you or your business. Take a quality over quantity approach where you have meaningful conversations with those that like you and want to hear from you.

Joining collaborative boards is another great way to engage with people on Pinterest. You may find that you receive quite a few requests to join these boards once you are getting involved with the Pinterest community on a regular basis. If you aren’t receiving many invitations, though, or the ones that you’re getting aren’t close enough to your niche, there’s no harm in finding the ideal boards that you would like to be involved with and asking people if you can become a contributor. Look for boards that you have a genuine interest in, that are relevant to your business and contain pinners that you believe it would be valuable to engage with.

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Define your goals

Pinterest can bring different benefits for different small businesses, so it’s a good idea to start by considering what you really want to get out of your efforts on this channel. This can stop you spending a huge amount of time trying to reach goals that aren’t ideal for your business.

What are my main business goals?

Your Pinterest goals should contribute in a logical way to your main business goals. Look at these bigger goals and start to consider where Pinterest can have the most positive impact for you. When you’re creating these goals, try to make them as measurable and clear as possible because not only will this make it easier to achieve them but it will also help you to see how you’re doing along the way and to make sensible decisions about how to make any adjustments.

If you don’t have your business goals defined yet, some good examples include…

– Expanding your team- Increasing brand awareness- Driving more traffic to your site- Increasing sales

How will this sit within my social media marketing?

Think about the function of your Pinterest page within the mix of your current social media channels. If some of your other channels are already meeting or exceeding your overall business goals, it may not be necessary to try to achieve these goals using Pinterest as well. Look at your goals and see where Pinterest can bring the most benefit for your business. For example, if you’re looking to drive more traffic to your site, Pinterest can be an excellent tool for this and the way that you use the channel should adopt this as its main focus in this case.

Of the Pinterest goals that I have created, which are the most important?

This helps with time management and will show where you should put in the most time and effort and where small updates and changes will meet the needs of your business.

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Follow people strategically

Pinterest contains a search function that can help you find new followers. When using this function, the key is to target your searches as much as possible as this will bring you followers that are genuinely interested in your industry and, therefore, are more likely to become interested in you. You want to look for followers who are likely to pay attention to your Pinterest activity, that you want to pay attention to and that you can interact with in a mutually beneficial way.

Engage in cross-promotion

Another great way to improve your performance on Pinterest is to draw upon your existing marketing to promote your page. For example, if you have a monthly newsletter, include a story relating to Pinterest to get people interested not only in the channel but in your page as well. Including ‘Pinterest’ buttons on your site also means that more people will become aware of your page and adding ‘Pin it’ buttons to your site’s visual content makes it easy for people to pin your content and share it with their followers. Running competitions can be highly effective in helping you to gain new followers and interact with people on Pinterest as well. For instance, if you run a clothing company, why not run a competition asking people to pin their favourite items from the previous season?

Use analytics

It always helps to have a clear picture of the results that your efforts on Pinterest are generating and, luckily, there are lots of different ways available that can help with this. A good place to start is with Pinterest’s own web analytics, which gives you useful data including your number of repinners, clicks on your site, reach and visitors. It’s also worth using a couple extra tools, though.

Postris (formerly Repinly) is an excellent tool that shows your most popular pinners, boards and individual pins. This makes it a decent source for finding new people to follow and it also contains a pie chart presenting the topics that are currently most popular across all of Pinterest if you are looking for new content ideas.

Using Google Analytics can also show you a range of highly valuable data including how much traffic Pinterest is driving through to your site, how much in sales is being made from this traffic, how much the order values are on average, how many transactions you are receiving and what your conversion rate is. Depending on your needs, using a combination of these tools will help you to see opportunities to improve your use of Pinterest, meet and exceed the goals you have set yourself for this channel.

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For excellent visual content, visit our Pinterest page.

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