Tag: pinterest

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Social Media

Using Pinterest for Blogging

Practically every time I read a blog post, I see a Pinterest button somewhere that gives me the option to pin the post.

I started to wonder why Pinterest is so closely connected to blogging.

It’s likely because Pinterest is useful for education. Users create boards to save things like inspirational quotes, recipes, home decor ideas, blogs, and even future purchases. It makes sense that helpful blog posts are an excellent choice for pinning.

If you’re not already blogging for your business, there are plenty of reasons to get started.

All of these things translate to more potential for your audience to discover you, higher potential for better ranking in the search engines, and ultimately the potential for more revenue.

If you want to get started blogging or you’re already doing it, let’s take a closer look at how to use Pinterest for blogging.

Set Up A Pinterest Business Account

This is a free account. Unlike the personal account, you’ll get access to Pinterest analytics to give you detailed information about how your pins are performing. The Pinterest business account also gives you the option to apply for rich pins, which is an upgrade from the standard pin. There are five types of rich pins – movie, place, recipe, products, app, an article. The article rich pin is the most effective option for blogging. Article rich pins provide tools that allow you to add a larger logo image, and it has lines promote your post as well as a link to your website.

Using Pinterest for blogging allows you to promote posts, product offers, send traffic to your blog, and ultimately engage with your followers.

Getting Started

When considering how to leverage Pinterest for your blog, think about how you want your users to find your account and what you believe they want to see. Pinterest should be a compliment to your blog and reflect your brand.

Create And Name A Board After Your Blog

It’s crucial to keep things consistent with how you name your boards. It helps not only SEO but organization and readers. Both search engines and readers will have an easier time finding your blog on Pinterest if it has a similar name. Use your blog board to highlight posts that don’t fit into other categories as well as making Roundup pins for a week’s worth of posts.

When you pin to this board, group your posts that are similar to one another to keep things organized. For instance, if someone wants to find posts about protein powder, they should be able to find that in the supplements section of your board or something similar.

Ideally, your pin should have one to two sentences about your post in the description, such as a quote from the blog, a featured image, and a link back to your website. Pinterest business handles the link back to your website for you

Structure A Winning Pin

Pinterest says pins that earn high engagement are optimized, branded, well written, and, most importantly, structured the right way.

Optimized

Describe your blog post or use a quote that tells pinners what they will gain from the pin.

Branded

Include your logo and ensure the featured photo has to do with the product or service you offer. This way, users will know its your brand they’re looking at before they even open the pin.

Well Written

Always include a call to action. Even something like click this link to see more will do the trick. Use sensory-related words to connect with users emotionally.

Structured The Right Way

Pay attention to Pinterest aspect ratios for photos, and make sure you’re taking advantage of the linkable options on standard pins to increase your traffic.

Check The SEO On Your End

Make sure your Pinterest account is set for public search within your privacy settings so that search engines can find the account.

Remain consistent when it comes to titles of your pens, boards, and blog posts. Keeping consistency makes it easier for Google to understand Pinterest.

Use as many relevant keywords as possible when naming your boards. Provide all text for Featured images in your pens to tell the search engines what your image is. Describe it using keywords if and when possible.

Create Related Pinterest Boards

As you create different boards, categorize them by your blog post categories. You can also make new boards that relate to other areas of your audience’s interest. Think about what your buyer Persona would be interested in seeing and make boards accordingly.

Going back to our protein powder example, you should create boards that have to do with other areas of health and fitness, such as cardio, nutrition, and accessories. These can include recipes, tools for working out, etc.

Create A Staff Board

This provides a wonderful opportunity for fostering emotional connection, so you may wish to consider creating a staff board. This helps you to show the faces behind your brand. Seeing those faces will help consumers feel more like they know the business, which makes them more likely to follow.

Create a staff pin with a headshot as the featured image of the employee. Use a short bio that’s engaging for the descriptions and have each employee link to their favorite or newest blog posts to get you more traffic.

Ensure Your Blog Is Pinnable

Using Pinterest means your blog has to be pinnable. You need to have buttons with the Pinterest logo that allow users to pin a blog post from your website. This will enable viewers to explore your blog, find posts they want to read later, and save them to their Pinterest account to find later. This gives you more traffic on your blog and Pinterest.

Engage With Your Followers

To keep your profile welcoming and active, interact with followers to make your Pinterest more targeted towards your audience. Follow new followers back. Conduct a little market research by looking through their pens and board. This can help you make targeted content later.

Repin posts that have to do with your blog. If you see that one of your followers has an awesome pin that would fit well into one of your categories, engage with it. Like, comment, and repin. Repinning is essentially the same as retweeting or reposting it in general. Users can save up on their page or to one of their boards.

Take time to follow influencers and Industry leaders as well. Doing so demonstrates your interest, support, and knowledge of the industry to make your Pinterest look credible. Repinning influencers’ posts allows you to begin building a community around your industry

Include Interesting Visuals

Your images must entice the reader to open the pin. Choose photos that are in the correct aspect ratio of either 2:3 or 4:5. If you’re cropping things manually, you should have a width of 650 and a height of 975 pixels.

Images are the most crucial part of a pin, so they have to fit Pinterest as much as possible to catch a reader’s eye. You can use templates from Canva and other services to help you get started on the right foot.

Post To Pinterest On A Regular Schedule

Keep to a schedule as you post on Pinterest. You don’t have to make it as consistent as you do on your other social channels, but it does need to be repetitive. Research suggests that Pinterest posts get the highest amount of traction between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Because you don’t need to be as frequent with pinning, you have more time to make sure the pens you do post are of the highest possible quality. Use your Pinterest account to focus on quality rather than quantity, and your frequency goals don’t need to stress you out.

You can use Pinterest for your blog as a resource for showing off your new posts or create a bridge between e-commerce and blogging. Regardless of which path you choose, Pinterest remains a powerful distribution channel for your content, and ignoring it means missing out on an opportunity.

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Social Media

Pinterest’s New Complete the Look Tool

Pinterest has launched a new visual search tool known as “Complete the Look” that recommends relevant home decor and fashion categories based on the context of an image. For instance, if a user searches for a mountain scene Pin, the platform will recommend products found in similar images, such as camping gear, hats, and so on. Pinterest’s visual search tools compete with Amazon StyleSnap and Google Assistant’s Lens.

Why This Matters to Businesses

Pinterest has focused its efforts on its ecommerce features for a while now, since they introduced shoppable pins. The new visual search tool is another aspect of ecommerce for the social platform. With this technology, the platform can recommend home decor and fashion products based on attributes and context of everything within an image a user saves or searches for. As such, brands have the potential to gain more exposure on the platform because more of their Pins will appear through visual search.

Eric Kim and Eileen Li, part of the Pinterest visual search team write, “Complete the Look takes context like an outfit, body type, season, indoors vs. outdoors, various pieces of furniture, and the overall aesthetics of a room to power taste-based recommendations across visual search technology.”

A report from November 2018 revealed that 78% of Pinterest users who engaged with home decor Pins on a weekly basis made a purchase based on the content brands shared. When it comes to fashion Pins, 83% of users who engaged with them made a purchase.

A recent report from eMarketer shows Pinterest is the most popular platform for product discovery, with 47% of users going to the network to find new products. Only 15% of Facebook users and 11% of Instagram users use those platforms to discover new products.

All that said, Pinterest has yet to release details about when the Complete the Look visual searches will be made available to users. At this time, the tool is being tested internally. It will eventually become available within Pinterest’s recommendation tools. When the tool is released to the public, I will update this post with the relevant information regarding the roll out.

Ecommerce brands can use this tool as a virtual stylist. Users can submit a photo of location, for instance, and Complete the Look will help find relevant outfits for them to buy. This would be particularly helpful for people who are traveling to a place they’ve never been, such as another country where the weather is significantly different from the climate they are used to.

Language is Limited

Pinterest released a paper detailing the technology behind the new visual search option. In that paper, we see the phrase, “the overall aesthetics of a room” which is a vague phrase that shows up just how poor our language options are when it comes to something intangible. Yes, we can say a table is a table and a rug is a rug, but it is difficult to impossible to detail why it adds to the overall look and feel of a room.

That’s the point of visual search. It makes it easier to express ourselves through images in areas where language is limited, or subjective. That’s where Complete the Look makes its mark with interpretation of images.

Let’s say I search with an image that has a pair of shoes. In most situations, I either way to know what brand they are, or where to buy them. But, let’s pretend I already own those shoes. In that case, I’d want to see other items that could go well with the shoes. And that’s where the Complete the Look tool will be useful to Pinterest users.

Pinterest’s Visual Search Evolution

Pinterest began providing visual search tools in 2017 with Lens. The service powers hundreds of millions of searches every month. We’ve also seen the introduction of complete automation for Shop the Look for buying Pinned items, and personalized results for Lens Your Look, along with new Catalogs tool that lets anyone upload and convert their entire store catalog into shoppable Pins and a Related Products feature that will appear under product Pins.

The Complete the Look option is an extension of Shop the Look pins, which identifies specific items within any Pin image and connects users to purchase pages for each of the relevant pins. With Complete the Look, the visual search engine will take into account all the products you’ve searched for in the past and provide recommendations based on relative trends and various other factors.

With Shop the Look, users can buy what they see. Complete the Look, on the other hand, crops the main product from the image, searching the scene of the image instead.

It’s harder to train an algorithm to identify the topic of a photo than it is to train it to understand the meaning of text. This development goes deep into using images to drive online conversation. Pinterest splits imagery into two categories: scene images (selfies, street photos, etc.) and product images (a single image on a plain background). Ecommerce generally focuses on product images, but with this technology will be able to build a stronger Pinterest presence by turning scene images into a curated list of product recommendations.

More Happenings at Pinterest

In March, Pinterest hired Jeremy King as the head of the engineering team. He served as both the former CTO of Walmart and the VP of Engineering at eBay, which brings a considerable amount of e-commerce experience. I, for one, am interested to see what this means for the future of Pinterest ecommerce – and I expect good things to keep coming.

Pinterest also announced a new Shopping category in the Pinterest Marketing Partner program. They also said the program is now known as “Pinterest Partners” rather than “Pinterest Marketing Partner.”

Are you a brand that’s excited about the potential this new feature will bring to your marketing and revenue? Do you plan on using it once it is released? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Social Media

5 Ways to Use Pinterest to Strengthen Your Brand

Many businesses think of platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn in relation to marketing products and services. The reality is that consumers today are incredibly visual, and these sites alone may no longer be enough to keep their interest.

Enter Pinterest.

While it started out as more of a personal indexing site where people swapped recipes and craft ideas, it’s far from only that today. Pinterest has veritably exploded, attracting viewership (sharer-ship?) from all over the world.

That’s exactly what makes it such a compelling choice for businesses who rely on heavily visual content (like video or images). Using Pinterest can strengthen your brand and improve brand awareness, too.

Here’s the secret to Pinterest success!

What’s Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social media platform that relies heavily on visual content. Users can create “boards” with themes and then save content they find on the web to their Pinterest accounts. The boards operate similar to an index or file folder. It’s easy to go back, skim the photos, and click through until you get back to the main article or blog post you originally “pinned.”

There is a social aspect to Pinterest, too. You don’t necessarily need to search the broad web for a topic. The Pinterest platform is effectively a search engine, giving you the ability to browse the items others have already found and saved. From there you can add them to your own boards. Boards can be public or private based on how you set them up from within your profile.

As a business owner, it’s important to not only pin your own content, but to share related content from others as well. You’ll also want to make sure your website has social share buttons so visitors who like what they see can “pin” your pages to their own boards right from your website.

Complete Your Profile

Once you’ve created a business account, take some time to complete your entire profile. Update your logo or photo, make sure your username makes you happy, and write something short but engaging for your “About You” section. The more detail you include, the easier it will be for people to get to know you and your brand. This is a great place to throw in a couple of your main keywords so you’re easy to search.

Once you’re done with the “About You” section, Pinterest will ask you to confirm your website. This is critical as it confirms and proves you are actually related to the business you claim to own. You’ll need to paste a short piece of coding into your website’s index page. Pinterest will give you instructions, but you can also ask your web developer to handle this step for you.

(Extra hint: you can also embed Pinterest images on your website using this embed guide. This is really useful for driving traffic to your Pinterest page).

Setting Up Your Boards

While your business account will be an ongoing project, one of your first goals should be to set up boards for each of your product or service categories. Think outside the box, though. Let’s say you sell t-shirts. Set up boards for shirts for men, women, children, babies, and even unisex designs. Then, create different boards for different themes – shirts for readers, artists, sports enthusiasts, etc.

How deeply you drill down into a specific niche is entirely up to you. You may find different boards get attention throughout the year. Baseball season may mean you’re pinning new designs to style boards for men, women, and children, or sports. You might even find it’s time to break out a separate “baseball” board.

You don’t have to sell a product to be successful on Pinterest; services can do very well here, too! Don’t be afraid to flex your services in the same way.

Are you a graphic designer? Create different boards for the types of work you’ve done, uploading samples of your business cards, pamphlets, or website layouts. Are you a photographer? Create separate boards for school photos, maternity photo shoots, and wedding photography.

Consider the SEO Impact

You can sometimes upload images directly to Pinterest instead of grabbing pins from outside websites. No matter what method you’re using to populate your board, you should always consider how what you share impacts search engine optimization (SEO).

Remember: the end goal is traffic to your website, phone calls, and purchases. You don’t want to drive traffic elsewhere unless you have to.

Make sure you write descriptions for each item pinned, complete with details about what the person is seeing and how they can find out more information. Don’t be afraid to plug in a related keyword, but only do this if it fits into your text naturally. Don’t forget to include a URL to the related page on your website.

Partner with a Strong Designer

You may have a great graphic designer on your team already. If not, consider hiring someone to take professional photos or create stunning visuals for your website and social platforms. Brands doing well on Pinterest typically have amazing, eye-catching photos pinned.

This means overhauling what’s found on your website as well as what you might pin independently. Show your products, events, staff at work, or samples of your finished pieces. Certain photo styles work better than others. For example, lifestyle photos do really well on Pinterest; so do photos of completed crafts. This doesn’t mean you can’t show your products, but it means you need to stage your photos so they don’t scream “catalog” or “sales pitch.”

Don’t Forget to Engage

Pinterest’s feed is different than the feed on either Facebook or Twitter.  Business owners tend to shy away from engagement here more than on other sites, usually because they don’t understand how to approach it.

(If this is you, hey – we want to help! Hit this link to find out more).

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to spend hours per day on Pinterest to get real results from it. Instead, just set aside a short block of time to visit people who share your original pins. Thank them! Follow people in related niches, create a few non-branded boards and repin other people’s content, and ask your customers to pin content related to their purchases. Consistent effort in this area will bring results.

Pinterest is a really fun platform that lends itself really well to many different content styles. Millions of people turn to the platform daily for ideas and inspiration. Will they find you there? If not, you may just be doing your brand a disservice.

Categories
Social Media

Social Marketing 101: Utilizing Pinterest

At first glance, Pinterest may seem like just a platform for stay-at-home-moms, crafters, and foodies, but the truth is that it’s a rather diverse platform where people can peruse and “pin” their favorite pieces of content on their own “boards.” These boards serve as indexes for future reference, which can make them a powerful marketing method for businesses in specific niches.

While it’s true that Pinterest isn’t as large or as popular as Facebook, the reality is that more than half of today’s millennial population is using Pinterest. These numbers include more than 68 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54. To ignore those numbers is to miss an excellent opportunity to reach out and connect.

Is Pinterest Really Right for My Niche?

Here’s the complicated answer to this question: yes and no, but almost always yes, all at the same time. If your head is spinning, hang in there. We’ll explain.

Many people see Pinterest as an excellent tool for cooking industries, crafters, and fitness gurus, but not for B2B businesses. The reality is that some companies will have to work a lot harder on Pinterest than others.

If your market research doesn’t show that your primary audience uses Pinterest, then, by all means, focus your social media efforts on other platforms first. You can always come back and visit Pinterest later.

Just know that the fact that your primary audience isn’t there doesn’t mean you have no audience at all. Businesses in niches that aren’t categorized as “hot topics” on Pinterest can do quite well on the platform because they don’t have much active competition.

How to Better Utilize Pinterest

You have an audience of approximately 200 million people at your fingertips; the average user spends around 14 minutes at a time on the platform. That is a significant amount of time for you to grab your piece of the pie.

To get started, first make sure you’ve created a business account. If you began with a personal account, convert it into a business profile first. Don’t have an account at all? Head to Pinterest for Business, join, and create a properly optimized profile.

Making sure you are using a real business profile matters; it gives you access to analytics that empowers you to ensure you’re making an impact over time. You’ll be able to see how many repins you receive and how many times people have visited your profile.

Optimize Your Website

Start by optimizing your website. You need to make sure your site is optimized to promote your involvement on Pinterest. Make sure you’ve added the plug-ins necessary for your website visitors to pin the pages they love to their boards without having to look for you on the platform.

By allowing pins, you make it fluid and comfortable for your visitors to save your valuable information on their platform of choice. They are more likely to be re-exposed to it and are more likely to revisit you in the future.

Get In There and Socialize

Be social, not one-sided. You have to give to receive. Look for industry-related content that isn’t necessarily from a direct competitor and start pinning the content shared by other people. People love the interaction on Pinterest and visitors will be more likely to share and follow your boards if they see them as informative and not just promotional.

Make It Interesting and Unique

Create new, unique content. Yes, many users scroll through Pinterest and pin based on the photos they like. You need to hold your business to the highest standard possible by making sure the content your pins lead to is helpful and useful.

You should be reaching for this goal when you are creating content anyway, but it is especially important if you are going to start sharing on this particular platform. No one likes clicking on a pin only to land on a page that turns out to have no real value and an ugly layout.

Use Branded Boards

Create branded boards. Yes, you should be sharing other people’s content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some nicely branded boards within your profile.

Let’s say you are a restaurant owner. You should have separate branded boards for your different menus (lunch, dinner, appetizers, and specialty drinks) to start off. This approach provides beneficial information to your audience that might convince them to visit.

As a fashion brand, you should have separate branded boards for various clothing lines or perhaps times of the year. Think about boards for back-to-school ideas, casual work attire, business casual, business professional, holiday, or wedding outfits.

Organizing your content into collections makes it easier for visitors who land on your profile page to browse and ultimately follow their favorites.  Even as a lawyer, you can create separate boards for family law, real estate law, personal injury, and property damage.

Aesthetics Matter

Aesthetics are critical on Pinterest; this is where businesses find themselves stymied with where to go next. Make sure every piece of content you create has a Pinterest-worthy image attached to it.

As for what your images should look like, they need to be clear, colorful, and perhaps even branded. Text should be short and sweet, easy to read, and worded with clarity to identify the nature of the pin. People are drawn to great images, but they also need to be able to quickly identify what they are looking at when they later go back through their albums.

Be Engaging

Encourage engagement. Pinterest likes to encourage people who pin certain things to upload photos of themselves trying them out. For example, if you post a mocha mint coffee recipe, Pinterest may ask anyone who pins the recipe to share a photo of the finished result. Watch for this type of engagement, make sure you acknowledge and thank people who share and be mindful of their comments (especially if they ended up not liking the recipe or had trouble finding an ingredient).

Post Consistently

Be consistent in your posting schedule. Just as with every other social platform, consistency is critical. You can’t post 20 times in one day and then abandon your boards for a month; your fans need to see regular posts on a consistent basis, or they won’t identify with and remember you. That’s the point.

Pinterest is an excellent place for entrepreneurs and business owners to connect, network, and add another layer to their professional portfolios. Just keep in mind that Pinterest doesn’t necessarily cater to the individual so much as it caters to groups of people while encouraging networking in the form of sharing.

If you need a hand integrating Pinterest marketing into your overall campaign, or if you really aren’t sure which platforms are best for your business, let’s talk about it. Reach out to a Sachs specialist at this link!

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