How to use Pinterest for business

Tips and tricks to make the time your business spends on Pinterest more effective

Pinterest is a fantastic platform for increasing awareness of your products and services and inspiring people to interact with your brand.

To be as effective as possible on the platform, take a look at these five tips below on how to use Pinterest for business:

1. Get verified

Whether you already have a Pinterest business profile, or are thinking about setting one up – it’s important to get your account verified.

The reason for doing so, is that you can only access Pinterest’s analytics functionality for your profile once you are verified.

Pinterest analytics allows you to see a wide range of metrics, which you can use to tailor your future content – from impressions, through to clicks, likes, re-pins, audience type and more.

Get your business page verified by adding the Pinterest icon to your website, linking to your Pinterest profile and following these instructions.

2. Get on the waiting list for Promoted Pins

Promoted Pins will allow you to advertise your Pinterest Pins to a tailored audience, by interest, keyword search, the types of boards they follow etc.

At the time of writing (December 8^th 2015), Promoted Pins are not yet available in the UK – so to be one of the first to hear about them and implement them, click this link to add your name to the waiting list. Promoted Pins will act as an effective tool to help monetise the platform for your business.

3. Implement Rich Pins

Rich Pins automatically display the title, price and stock level of products listed on your eCommerce website.

They are a fantastic tool to drive people with purchase intent directly to your site, increasing the potential for them to convert – rather than dropping off your site, or even never visiting it at all and staying within Pinterest itself.

Pinterest has also launched the Buy Now button, a little blue button that appears next to products you list, allowing users to purchase without ever leaving the Pinterest app. Currently however, that’s only available in the US – so for now, Rich Pins are a must.

Plus – with Rich Pins, traffic is driven to your site itself, increasing the chance of cross-purchase and more interaction with your branded content, whereas the Buy Now button (when it arrives in the UK) may see this traffic and the benefits that brings dwindle slightly.

Find out how to implement Rich Pins (Developer instructions), here.

4. Use Pinterest’s messaging tool

Pinterest allows you to message users who are following your brand page.

This is a great tool to take engagement with your content further, following up with people who have pinned your product pins recently. You can follow up with a sales message e.g. ‘thanks for following us and pinning our [INSERT PRODUCT] – we have a sale on at the moment you might like to check out at [INSERT SALE URL]’.

To do so:

• Click on the Pin icon in the top right of your screen
• Click on ‘messages’
• Click ‘New message’
• Start typing the person’s name you want to send a message to

5. Find people interested in your type of content and follow them

Want to build awareness and an engaged community on Pinterest? Of course you do!

Let’s take a gardening brand as an example. To build their following and awareness, one method is:

• Do a search in Pinterest’s search bar for ‘my dream garden’ / ‘gardening ideas’ ‘my garden’
• Follow all relevant users and boards

In an instant, these people will be alerted that the gardening brand has followed them and hopefully check out some of their products and engage with their content in the future. Nice!

6. Use hashtags in your Pin descriptions to make your content more discoverable

Pinterest will group together similar content, so use short and helpful Pin descriptions and include a couple of relevant hashtags in the description too.

This will help your Pins and Boards be more discoverable in Pinterest and therefore increase awareness of your brand and the effectiveness of the platform for your business.

What about Pinterest for service businesses?

If you’re a service business – think about the visual content you can post that will build goodwill and trust in your brand.

Think about:

• Infographics
• Behind the scenes shots of your staff at work
• Competitions where people have to find clues to win a discounted / free service that you offer
• Pinterest boards with images and titles of your latest blog posts – linking back to your website

There we have it, our top tips on how to use Pinterest for business. The world is your oyster on Pinterest. Get involved and get Pinning!

For more information on social media strategy that’s tied to your brand objectives, get in touch with GOAT.

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Thanks for reading and sharing!