Contrary to popular belief, Pinterest isn’t just for fun and passing time. It is more than just pinning things that you may find beautiful, creative, or interesting. Pinterest may also be used as a strategic marketing tool for personal branding and small businesses.
Stunning visuals can add an impactful extra element to content and give your marketing a boost. Pictures speak a thousand words, after all. Studies have shown that Pinterest has referral rates as high (and in some cases, even higher) than other sites such as Google, LinkedIn, and Youtube.
Here are some tips, tricks, and tools of the trade to help you be productive on Pinterest:
- For small businesses that have the intent to sell products online, it would be great to include price points on pins you create. In doing so, not only could you drive traffic to your selling platform (could be your very own website, or Ebay, or something similar), you would also be inspiring purchases as well.
- Use pins to bookmark different articles or blog content. Most articles online now have photos to support the text. By pinning the said images to some boards on Pinterest, not only would the images link back to the article, it could also serve as a bookmark for those who want to read your content at a later time. Add a “pin it for later” link at the end of your article for easy bookmarking.
- Screenshot a part of your Pinterest board and include it to your newsletters or email blasts. Set a click-through link to it as well that would lead to your Pinterest page where your email recipients would not just see what you took a screenshot of, but your other boards as well.
- Cross-promote your Pinterest pins on your other social media accounts. Since there is way too much interesting stuff on Pinterest, people may not even notice that even the brands they love have their own Pinterest accounts. It would be best to tweet or post on Facebook.
- Create a board with all your newest blog posts’ images in it. That way, everything will be collated in one place and your followers will not have a hard time rummaging through all your pins to get to your blog. Using the right keywords would help as well, so that your blog board would appear in search results. Every time you post a new blog entry, pin it right away to your board (don’t forget to add a brief summary and a link back to your post!).
There’s no doubt that Pinterest can be the land where productivity goes to die, but if you’re disciplined, it can be a very effective channel for growing your platform.