How To Succeed On Pinterest: Tips Taken From The Top Business Marketing Accounts

Pinterest is currently reaching the top of social media marketing world. Once being considered a platform for desperate housewives, young mothers and wedding planners, it has now become one of the most effective parts of a social media marketing strategy for small and medium-sized businesses. If you’re still missing an opportunity to drive more traffic to your site, blog, online store or promoting your product, we are ready to prove you’re wrong and teach you to work with this powerful marketing tool. 

Pinterest Pins is one of the most powerful marketing tools with 100 times higher spreading rate compared to tweets and a 1,6000x longer half-life compared to a Facebook post. Moreover, after Instagram has been purchased by Facebook, Pinterest has become a prime piece for business marketing. The best proof of its reliability is that Pinterest is now one of the most popular social networks among the adult users with over 28% of their presence on the platform. This service is a low-key, time consuming way to reach people and expand your target audience.

Make It Real

Pinterest strategy has also been a comparatively new topic for us, as this social network is still developing and we at Netpeak decided to conduct a detailed analysis of the most successful B2B Pinterest accounts to identify the key elements of Pinterest marketing success. In this post, we gave brought together the most effective tips that can be used by content marketers and business owners of all types. Apply them to your Pinterest marketing strategy and see how you can get a real business promotion with this social media network.

Pinterest marketing tips that work:

1. Pin consistently

Make a schedule to post regularly. Your pinning frequency may be coming from 2 to10 Pins per day. To promote your account and expand your target audience, you have to pin at least 5 times a day. Pinterest business accounts with 150+ engagement increase have revealed their best schedule frequency that is 5-3 pins per day.

2. Schedule Pins

This point is complementary to the previous one. It is important to remember that sometimes less is more on Pinterest. Spacing out your Pins makes it easier for your audience to see all of them and doesn’t overload the news feed. Making high quality Pins will increase your traffic, but you will get much better results if you will pay attention to timing. In this article, you will find all necessary information about the perfect time to make your posts.

3. Do use 5 + 5 + 2 formula when creating your first boards:

1. Make 5 boards for things your audience loves;
2. 5 boards for things your audience has a hard time finding;
3. 2 boards centered on your company.

Add several Pins to each board and you will have a good starting Pinterest account.

4. Create “Pin it for later” Pins

This tip has been proposed by Peg Fitzpatrick and Rebekah Radice and observed in the article focused on the current topic. Such type of pins allows you to work with Pins through read-it-later blogging tool. When sharing a new post, you can give your readers an option to read the post later (when they have time for it) by pinning it to a special “read-it-later” Pinterest board. This gives your audience a new and easy way to catch up with your content. How to do it:

1. After publishing a new article, pin an image from the new blog post.
2. Grab the URL for the Pin.
3. Share this URL along with the blog post as a way to “Pin It for Later.”

The reader then is supposed to add the post to one of his/her Pinterest boards and return to your content later. Such an option makes it easier for the target audience to reach your content because they do not depend on exact time of publication. As a result, the application of “Pin it for later” tip can rise the number of pins and clicks on your post.

5. Apply for Rich Pins for your website/blog

Types of Rich Pins:

1. Article Pins (headline, author, story description and link)
2. Product Pins (real-time pricing, availability and where to buy)
3. Recipe Pins (ingredients, cooking times and serving info)
4. Movie Pins (ratings, cast members and reviews)
5. Place Pins (address, phone number and map)

If you want to add Rich Pins that will drive you more traffic and activate your followers, try to use these tips within your Pinterest marketing strategy. These techniques have serious promoted the series of business accounts and we are sure that you will find the ones that will work for you.

6. Use properly sized images

While proper timing and relevant content define the average success of a Pinterest business profile, it is still a social network that is focused on visual component of the post. Therefore, the design of your images is like a wrapper to your candy: it has to make people want to “swallow” your post in one piece. One of the most effective strategies proposed by Pinterest’s business blog is Vertical Pins. The best aspect ratio (how the width and the height of an image relate to one another) for Pinterest images is 2:3 or 1:3.5, with a minimum width of 600 pixels.

How to create an image:

• From scratch- using Photoshop or GIMP
• Online editing - Canva (premade templates for Pinterest that are 735 pixels wide by 1,102 pixels tall (a 2:3 aspect ratio)

7. Create/Pin images with text

The attractiveness of your Pins has to be supported by properly composed text that will be clear and catchy. Try to be creative, use your imagination and combine it with the main topic of the post. To help you with the ideas, we have collected the most useful tips taken from the developed Pinterest accounts. Most valuable Tips for writing Pins’ descriptions:

1. Write some helpful details.
2. Use keywords.
3. Don't be afraid of longer texts: it’s Okay if your description is a couple sentences long.
4. Always support your Pins with a positive sentiment.
5. Give your readers something to do - if there is some action they can take, share the next steps and add useful links.
6. Don't forget to edit: correct capitalization and punctuation is important.
7. NO HASHTAGS - the absence or presence of hashtags don’t significantly impact Pins’ engagement rate.
8. NO Promo ( “50% Off” “Two for $19,99”, “Every fifth for free”.)
9. NO salesy calls to action (“Buy now”).
10. NO references to Pinterest functionality (“Click here to pin”).

Only about 75-100 characters will appear in grid view. But you can add up to 500 and people will see them when they click to see thee Pin close-up. More characters - more helpful details and more opportunities to show up in search results. Seek for new topics that will be both relevamt and unique to increase Pin's popularity.

8. Description & Boards rich with keywords

Short descriptions (100 characters or fewer) get more engagement than the long ones. However, the detailed descriptions with lots of keywords are valuable for being found via search, which can extend the life of a Pin. Keywords are good to use when creating a Pinterest board for your blog posts (“social media”, “marketing”, “SEO”). It makes it easier for your audience to find the content, and if the board itself will be optimized with the keywords/phrases you usually blog about, it will be really easy to operate.

9. Add links to Pins’ descriptions

The source of a Pin is clickable and if Rich Pins have been validated, the Rich Pin info also provides an easy place to click. Using shortened links is really effective. It makes the overall Pin overview more attractive. Pinterest makes these links bold in description. This can potentially add a small visually-compelling aspect to the Pin. The vast majority ( about 90%) of top Pins include shortened or full URL links.

Conclusion

The elaboration of effective social media marketing strategy is a complex process that requires serious attention and individual approach to all social media platforms. Pinterest is currently one of the most popular social channels with the focus on visual content that can seriously improve your rates and drive you more traffic (in case you know how to get maximum from this tool). If you want to get maximum of this opportunity to promote your business through Pinterest, in this post you will find all useful tips for improving your account that we have found and checked after the analysis of the most successful business Pinterest accounts. The following guidelines about content, imagery, text, timing and additional tools will upgrade your knowledge in the sphere of social media marketing and help your business grow. Remember, that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Pin:)