If you’ve ever chanced upon Pinterest or dropped by out of curiosity, you could be forgiven for concluding it’s mainly a place for housewives to share cute pictures of furnishings and fashions.
But consider the following facts.
• The platform currently boasts over 70 million active users
• 80% of users are female and 20% of American women are on Pinterest.
• 75% of traffic comes through mobile apps.
• Pinterest receives 2.5 billion page views per month.
If your client is targeting the female consumer, you should be tapping into the power of Pinterest to attract and engage users and build brand awareness and loyalty.
How It Works
Pinterest offers members a way to ‘pin’ images on boards they create at the Pinterest site. Users can create themes on topics such as weddings or home furnishings and add images of products they like. Other users can follow these users and ‘re-pin’ the images on their own boards. Being so heavily focused on products and being so visual makes it ideal for marketers of physical products especially in the home and fashion industries.
Starting with Pinterest
Getting started with Pinterest is as easy as opening an account and adding “Pin This” buttons to your sites.
Be sure to open a Business Pinterest Account, which offers such features as analytics and rich pins. You should apply standard SEO techniques such as using your business name for your Pinterest URL (if it’s still available). Shorten the name if it’s too long.
Add some keywords to your “About” section to help is show up in searches, and off course in include the URL of your site for a (nofollow) link. You only have 200 characters to work with, though.
Your next task is to setup some boards to pin your images to. Again, use relevant keywords for the names and descriptions. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and think about what they’ll be searching for.
Be sure to create some relevant hash tags in a pin post to help tell people what your pins are about. You can add three per pin post.
Paid Options
Pinterest is scheduled to launch promoted pins soon. This will allow advertisers to buy ads that look just like regular pins except with a “Promoted Pin” tag. Using this system will let advertisers reach the entire Pinterest user group rather than just followers. Reports suggest that CPM or CPC options will be available.
A Bright Future
Consider that 70% of people on Pinterest are there in search of get inspiration on what to buy and you’ll see what a powerhouse this site can be. It’s the perfect platform to promote visual brands in fields such as fashion, food, beauty, and lifestyle. Moreover, the network is still relatively untapped compared to Facebook. That makes for some amazing opportunities for internet marketers with flair and savvy.
