12 Reasons for Pinterest and How to Get the Best Out of it

When it comes to branding, there's no way around social media. Creating a Facebook account is a first step. One of the next should be Pinterest, in my opinion. Why is that? A Shareaholic study from 2014 compared the eight biggest social networks and their traffic. According to the report, Pinterest's traffic grew 48% within only three months. Indeed, this increase may have a great influence on brand creation. Just think of digital marketing for products like books, journals, antiques, and services. Pinterest is a social media platform, primarily relying on the impact of images. For more than four years photos have been uploaded, presented as pins, shared, and stored in pinboards. With more than 70 million users and counting, Pinterest is a serious competitor. Push your brand forward with Pinterest marketing.

Good Reasons to Start Pinterest Marketing

In the following, I'll give you 12 good reasons and tricks why your company should have its own Pinterest page and the importance of Pinterest marketing. For a better understanding: Imagine Pinterest as an online pinboard where you pin photos that you want to share with others. Therefore, an image is called pin. You can follow others, and they can follow you. If you follow others, you'll see their pins, and your followers will see your pins. Does this sound familiar to you? Twitter and Facebook do exactly the same.

1. Getting Started with Pinterest

In Pinterest, you can create a profile for your company, add a logo and profile picture. Whenever you pin an image, your profile picture will be displayed as well, and you'll draw attention. You can also add a short company description and a link to the company's website, Twitter and Facebook account on your profile. If you carry on other activities or offer diverse products, it would be advisable to create a separate Pinterest page for each area. This attracts even more attention than only one profile would.

2. Increase the Reach of Your Website

Pinterest provides a share button allowing your visitors to share graphics and images on your website. The more often they do this; the bigger is the chance that Pinterest users will visit your Pinterest profile and then your website. Hence, take advantage and implement a Pinterest share button in your website. Don't worry if you don't know how to create share buttons. Pinterest guides you through all necessary settings. You can easily create a button on the Widget Builder website.

3. Do Market Research

Pinterest gives you a good market overview and shows you what users are most interested in. As a vendor of products for men, you might have the impression that the vast majority of Pinterest users is female, but you shouldn't forget that most women have a husband or partner. Female users may also have a wide circle of friends they share their content with. This ensures that "male products" will find the right target group. The way Pinterest users structure their pinboards and the content they pin, tell a lot about their consumer mentality. This may not work from the beginning, but you'll get better each time.

4. Attract New Customers

Once one of your pins becomes popular in the boards, you'll get a decent amount of traffic, no matter if users repin the concerned pin or not. You can compare this to a huge freeway billboard that can be hardly passed without taking notice of you. It will last for a long time. If users share your pin and repin it, chances are that you'll attract new customers. Keep at it and pin consistently good product images and descriptions, and you'll benefit one day and get new customers.

5. Become an Authority

As Pinterest lets you research the market, you can respond to it. This, combined with a good image quality and a meaningful description, allows you to give users and customers exactly what they want. Of course, it will take some time to get there, but it's a first step to becoming an authority in your line of business.

6. Free Marketing With the Help of Your Followers

Surely, none of us would mind free marketing, and that's what Pinterest offers. Pinterest makes use of the power of followers and images, just like Instagram and Facebook do. The more interesting an image is, the better are the chances that it will be shared by your followers. This kind of marketing only requires a bit of time, good images, and meaningful descriptions. Remember that consistency is the key. It won't work if you don't keep at it and publish pins regularly.

7. Customer Loyalty Through Sweepstakes

Contests and sweepstakes can improve customer loyalty. You could, for example, initiate a photo contest and reward the best photo with your logo in it. This may, indeed, result in a worldwide pinning of images with your logo, which would dramatically increase your popularity. Chances are that many users will see your logo and that your brand "burns" into the minds of potential customers. You may be in doubt, but it's worth a try.

8. Increase Product Popularity

Pinterest is often linked to other social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., so you can expect increasing product popularity with each pin. In marketing theory, increased product popularity leads to more customers.

9. Does Pinterest Boost Sales?

Spreading your pins in Pinterest can boost your sales and increase the turnover. I'd recommend you to create a category for each product range. This ensures that your products reach the right target group. Don't forget to tell your customers about your company's goals, your expectations, and mission. In short: Promote yourself.

10. Long-Lasting Pins

According to WebpageFX, the average lifespan of a Pinterest pin is three and a half months. That's about 1,600 times longer than the average lifespan of a Facebook post. If users share your pin, its lifespan will even increase. Unlike Twitter, posts don't have to be retweeted again and again to increase the reach of your website. Pinning only once is totally fine. You'll not only theoretically increase your popularity but also save a lot of time. According to Wisemetrics.com, a tweet reaches its peak after 24 minutes and then "dies". A Facebook post "survives" 90 minutes, whereas a pin has a relatively long life expectancy with three and a half months.

11. A Good SEO Strategy

The way Pinterest works makes keywords more important. For example, if you google keywords, you'll often find Pinterest pages in the upper half of the search results with pinboards containing products related to the keywords or the keywords. You should invest enough time in the search for the right keywords. It will surely pay off.

12. (Almost) Free Sales Promotion With Little Effort

Your advantage is that you don't have to hire anyone who does the pinning for you. Get a great image, describe it nicely, and add a couple of keywords. That's marketing which costs you almost nothing. "Almost" because Pinterest is all about sharing images, so you should only use the best of the best and therefore consider getting a professional photographer. The better the image is, the higher is the chance that it will be shared lots of times.

Conclusion

Pinterest is a great marketing platform for companies. There's no other social media network that does so much for your company with only little input. The lifespan of a pin is relatively high and the reach is better due to the links to other platforms. With a bit of effort and consistent publishing of product images, you'll achieve more on Pinterest than on any other social media network, so appointing a Pinterest manager would become beneficial in the long run.

Related Links

• Facebook and Pinterest are the King and Queen of Social Referrals [REPORT] - Shareaholic
• Create a Pinterest button for your hompage
• Why Pinterest is 1,680 Times Better than Facebook

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