How to Use Pinterest For Your Business

Pinterest is a very powerful tool for sharing business content with existing and potential clients. Read on to learn how to leverage Pinterest for your business.

If you haven’t used Pinterest at all yet, you might start with our blog posts How to Use Pinterest for Personal Use and How to Pin on Pinterest.

Creating a Business Account

Pinterest can be hugely useful to a business: imagine that all those people browsing Pinterest, looking for inspiration, seeing YOUR products or services?

As a business, the way you use Pinterest will differ slightly from a personal user in that you will be pinning your own pins more than you will pin other peoples content. In fact, as a business, you don’t need to pin anything from other pinners. From a business perspective, Pinterest isn’t a social media network, it is a search engine, and you want people to find YOUR pins and click through to YOUR website. And, you don’t even need followers to achieve this: you need good pins that appear in search results!

You will pin links to your website represented by images you choose for your products/services, with keyword-rich titles and descriptions, so that you appear in Pinterest search results.

First, you need to create a Business Pinterest account. You can do this by creating a new account, linking a business account to your existing personal account, or converting your personal account into a business one. This article from Pinterest explains the steps. The benefits of doing this include direct visible linking to your website in all your pins (pinned by you, or others) and access to analytics to help you to develop your pinning strategy, and to determine the effectiveness of individual pins. As a business, you are looking for saves AND click-throughs to your website from your pins.

Adding Content

Then, you need to start pinning your own content: your landing pages, your products, your tutorials etc.

Decide which content you want to pin, then create eye-catching pinnable images optimized to best perform on Pinterest (currently portrait images with a 2:3 aspect ratio) for this content, and ensure that image titles and descriptions are keyword rich.

To make it easy, make sure that you have sharing options enabled on your website, using the native options or adding additional functionality by way of a product such as Social Warfare or Shareaholic. Please give us a call if you’d like to discuss the best options for you based on your website. Using a product like these gives you more control over the way in which others can pin your content, including images, titles, and descriptions used to maximize the use of keywords and displaying your brand.

You can then pin your content from your website in the ways described in our blog post How to Pin on Pinterest.

Or, you can create pins directly in Pinterest.

Select create pin, upload an image, give it a title and a keyword-rich description, specify the link (which page on your website you’d like people to click through to) and publish!

Strategy

You do need to develop a strategy for pinning your content as a business. Pinterest prioritizes fresh pins (that is, new pins, even if linking to old content – a different image, a different description etc.), so you should be pinning consistently over time. Each piece of content (landing page, product) can have multiple pins associated with it, such as pinning the same article on several of your Boards. This allows you to get your content in front of more people, and to assess the effectiveness of different pin designs.

Make sure that you leave time between each pin of the same content though, five days is reasonable, to avoid Pinterest identifying you as spam.

Remember, the aim is to get people to click through to your website, so designing Pins with eye-catching images and a clear call-to-action is a priority.

Using Pinterest as a business can seem quite overwhelming to begin with, so please do give us a call and we can arrange an appointment to discuss how to leverage Pinterest as a small business and how to develop a pinning strategy that works for you.