Pinterest “is a place to discover ideas for all your projects and interests, hand-picked by people like you.”
With more than 75 million active users and a largely female audience, Pinterest is attracting more attention from advertisers. Hence, the question: What is the best way for marketers to utilize Pinterest?
Lisa Hoover McGreevy — a professional writer specializing in corporate messaging, a data journalist in the Visually Marketplace, and a regular contributor to the Visually blog, highlights 5 ways that can enhance the business use of Pinterest:
- Create unusual pinboards — “Don’t limit yourself to the standard buzzwords for your industry when coming up with new pinboards. A bakery naturally needs pinboards for cupcakes, wedding cakes, and other baked goods. But more unusual topics, like the world’s oldest pastry recipes, campground baking, or ways to dress up products your customers purchase help you stand out from the crowd.”
- Develop visuals in languages other than English — “Recreate your most popular visual content in Spanish, German, or another predominant foreign language to embrace non-US or UK-based customers. Inspiring quotes, brief tutorials, and advertising taglines all make great pins that let your international customers know you care. Before pinning anything, run it past a native speaker of the language to make sure the wording is accurate. Online translation technology is still too buggy to be trusted with something as important as your branding.
- Ask people to show you things — “People love to talk about themselves, so ask customers to pin images of something related to your industry. A fitness club may ask followers to post pictures of favorite workout gear, while an office supply company might invite followers to share photos of their work spaces.”
- Tell a story — “Use a dedicated storyboard to unfold a tale over several days or weeks. Send your mascot on a journey around the major landmarks of your town or share a series of pins that demonstrate how a customer used your product to solve a problem.”
- Tell your story — “Is your whole office is helping build a Habitat for Humanity home? Are your developers engaged in a weekend hackathon ahead of your next software version release? Take and pin pictures along the way so customers can follow your progress and get a peek behind the curtain. Pinterest is a perfect format for telling captivating stories that keep followers coming back to see how those stories turns out.”
Click the image for some examples.
Be seen by those searching for you online by being represented
on the first page of major and local search engines.
Through a process of analyzing the inbound links into your site,
you can see if they look legitimate or not,
and if they are not then you can tell Google not to count them.
To really master social media marketing, it’s important to have both books, instead of
just one.