THREE TIPS TO USE PINTEREST TO HELP YOUR BUSINESS
Pinterest, a virtual visual bulletin board, is getting a lot of buzz these days—and for good reason. Attracting primarily women (68%) with average annual incomes of $100,000+, this social media site has shown itself to be a major source of referral traffic on the internet, outpacing YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. If you’re a business marketing to women, it’s time you take advantage of how Pinterest can increase traffic to your site and better target your products and services to your audiences. Here are three tips to get started:
1. Get on Pinterest. Using either a Facebook or a Twitter login, you can start a Pinterest account and give it your company name. Once you’ve got an account, you can create boards—categories of images that focus on a topic. Topics must be helpful and/or entertaining, highly visual, and must NOT be overtly about self-promotion. Consider topics such as seasonal must-haves, new products, finished projects, and industry trends (examples: see list at right). Spread the word about your page placing the free “follow me on Pinterest” button on your website.
2. Get “Pinned” to drive traffic to your site. Images from your website that visitors pin to Pinterest refer back to your website, driving traffic. In fact, you may not know it, but some of the images from your site may already appear on Pinterest. To find out, type this url in your browser:www.pinterest.com/source/yourcompanyurl.com.Discovering which images may already appear on Pinterest can inform you of how to shape your content in the future to be “pin-ready”. Don’t have an image on Pinterest yet? No problem! Start adding images to your website or blog relating to your business that are beautiful, cute, inspirational or instructional. Improve your odds by inserting a “Pin this” button next to your image. There’s a little code involved, but your developer should be able to do it in just a few minutes per image.
3. Use Pinterest as a focus group. Never before has there been such a simple way to get into the minds of your audiences! Visit Pinterest.com and type in a topic in the search related to your products or services, and you’ll see a huge visual collection that shows exactly what your target audiences find to be attractive, interesting and inspiring. Use what you see to inform the type of products you carry, predict trends, and even see which of your products are trending!
Tags: board ideas, focus group, marketing, Pinterest