Using Pinterest for Online Growth
This still leaves us with one problem though. If your board is about great interior design ideas and your company sells furniture and decorative items, then it’s going to be very easy for you to include images of your products that people can click through to buy. But if you sell life insurance and your board is about ‘fun family days out’ then you still won’t be able to easily sell directly through the board. So how do you make sales from that?
Overall, your objective here is not going to be to sell directly. Instead, the aim will be to raise awareness for your brand and to build trust and authority. The hope is that your audience will come to think of you as an expert about families and life insurance and as such, they will follow your links when they do want to find out more about getting a policy.
This of course is not as direct a way to sell but in the long term it can be a lot more effective as you’re building a long-term relationship and as you’re establishing yourself as a thought leader in your field. At the same time, you need to think about the comments that you’re adding to your pictures. This is your opportunity to directly link the image back to your site and to promote your product.
For instance, if you’re uploading images of people doing home workouts to provide inspiration and ideas to your followers, then you can sell through those images by adding a note at the bottom explaining that they can find more similar moves in your eBook at THIS link. The great thing about Pinterest is that it really does leverage the viral power of social networks.
If your board is really delivering great value, then this fact alone will be enough to ensure that it grows naturally. People will repin your pins, they will comment, and they will discover what you’re posting through the search button. If you’re offering new content, if you’re staying on topic and if you’re providing real value by offering a genuine service of some kind, then people will gradually gravitate towards your brand and you’ll build your following.
But that is not to say that there aren’t also other things you can do to further accelerate your progress.
Here are some ways you can grow your following more quickly:
Post Regularly: The more regularly you post, the more often your images will be found in searches. At the same time, they’ll also come up in homefeeds more often, which means other users will be more likely to repin them and thereby share them with their audiences giving you more exposure.
Choose Your Tags Careful as on Twitter, choosing the right hashtags is one of the most important ingredients when it comes to gaining maximum exposure for your images. The tags will dictate which searches bring up your images and this means that they’ll be directly responsible for the number of people finding your brand.
When choosing your tags, make sure that you think about the types of things that commonly get searched for on the platform. Remember the kinds of things people use Pinterest for and remember that the audience is 85% female. Remember to that people are looking for images. ‘How to’ isn’t as applicable here (‘life hack’ is a more suitable string).
Write Comments: If you upload an image without any comment then you give it no context. This means you won’t be getting the very most from it, simply because people won’t know what you’re trying to say with the image. If it’s a bodyweight exercise, then explain how to do the exercise!
If it’s a decoration for the home, then explain how people can use it, what it’s made from and where it can be bought. Make sure to link your brand to the image, otherwise people might just appreciate the image but never engage with your profile as the person who uploaded it!
Interact with Others: On social media, reciprocity is a very underrated tool. This is still a social network and therefore, it should be used as a communication tool. The more you talk to people, the more likely they will be to check out your profile and to look at your boards. So, make sure that you’re interacting, following, repining and more. If nothing else, this helps to build good will as you’ll be helping those users to promote themselves too!
Integrate Your Website: One of the most important ways for you to spread your brand across Pinterest and to get found by more people be to properly link your website and your Pinterest account. There are a few ways that you should do this. One is by adding a link on your homepage to your Pinterest account.
This way, someone who lands on your website for the first time and decides that they like your content, can decide that they want to follow you on social media as well and can then decide to check out your Pinterest and follow your account or your boards.
Another tip be to use ‘Shareabolic’ or a similar social sharing tool on your website. If you have a WordPress site, then these can be installed very easily, and they will then allow people to quickly and easily ‘Pin’ an article that they found interesting along with an image. This then means there will be more people sharing your images and you’ll gain more exposure as a result.
Cross Pollinate: You should also make sure that you occasionally try to cross pollinate between your social media channels. If you have a very successful Twitter account for instance, then occasionally tweet about the ‘inspiring boards’ you’re creating at Pinterest. Likewise, you can share your pins to Facebook for people to see. Do this occasionally to help grow all your accounts at once.
Think About Pinterest When You Create Content: If you’ve heard of ‘clickbait’ then you’ll know how a lot of website owners are now creating content specifically to encourage shares on Facebook. This is content that uses an obtuse title in order to make people curious and to encourage more clicks as a result. It’s frustrating but it works and sites like Buzzfeed have built their business off the back of it.
So, the point is, that thinking about how you’re going to share you content before you create it is a good move. The same goes for marketing on Pinterest. If you’re going to make an article successful on Pinterest, then what does it need?
Simple: it needs a great image that will make the article more compelling (this will also help when other people share your images and your pages). Make sure that you are creating unique images for your site and that they’re designed in such a way as to really sell the content of your article or blog post and to encourage people to follow the URL.
Some things that can work well are tips that can be portrayed through a single image, memes or inspirational quotes. Note as well that certain images automatically attract more attention than others – we are psychologically hardwired for instance to notice pictures of faces!
To learn how to fully use Pinterest to grow your online presence, I use the following:
Irving
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