In this weeks guide, Christina Barker, Manager of Dolphin Outsourcing Ltd, will be talking about Pinterest for business use. Pinterest is not a highly spoken about platform, but it can help businesses, especially if you are a product-based business.
Do you use Pinterest currently? Do you use it for your business or for personal use?
Watch the video or read the transcript below to find out more.
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There are a few reasons why people will use Pinterest and the main one is to gather ideas together. There may be a product coming up or an event that you want to plan. From this, they want to be able to make purchases. If you're posting to Pinterest, you're going to gain exposure to those new customers, you'll also make an impact on your online presence and therefore make more sales. That's what we all want.
Just a quick fact for you, there are currently 478 million active users on Pinterest, and that is a lot for you to get your business in front of.
If you're new to Pinterest, it's a visual discovery engine, sort of search engine, full of ideas and inspiration. When you see something that you like, you basically pin it (save) to a board that stays on your profile, and then you just save it for later on. So these boards are usually a collection of something that has a common theme. So you can add your friends and people that inspire you and also see what they have pinned as well, so you can be quite noisy with it. A lot of people tend to use it for personal reasons, as I've said. From recipes to home inspiration, there will always be something on Pinterest that will catch your eye. I mean, if you don't have a Pinterest board or a Dream Home board, who even are you, it's definitely something I've got.
Some people actually have their own business items pinned on their personal accounts. I don't recommend doing that, but some people do have that. It is better than not having them on there at all, but what you want to do is keep those two separate so you can then see all the insights on those pins alone. You want to know how each one is doing, so if you have been doing it this way, then I would encourage you to think about creating a business account instead. You can always repin those things to your personal page as well. As long as the original content is from a business page you can pin that onto your personal page as well. It's a little bit like you do on Facebook, where you have your personal page, you've got your business page and you post on a business page and then you can paste that over to your personal page. So it's a similar concept to that.
Pinterest is free to use, so it's a great marketing tool, especially if you're new to business and you don't have a lot of money for marketing. It's a really good tool to have. However, it does have a small loophole that people don't seem to be aware of, so I will mention this. Any content that you post grants Pinterest and its users a worldwide licence to use, reproduce and loads more on the platform. So in other words, if you're posting content on Pinterest, they can show it to people and others can save it, which is the point of the platform, but you need to ensure that you have the right to use that content. So make sure that it is your own content that you are using. You don't want to get into trouble with any copyright businesses and things like that.
So when you set up your account, you need to ensure that you have your business logo and your cover page uploaded. Ideally, this should be the same as the ones that you use on your other social media platforms. So you've got that brand consistency throughout. You also want to make sure you add a description on your main page and a link to your website or your main sales link, wherever you want people to go to. If you don't add that, what's the point of having the page? You want people to be able to go and find out what you do, what you're about and get some sales. If you haven't got that, make sure that's on there.
When you are uploading your pins, you want to make sure that you're adding all the information that people may need to know. So what is the description of the item, the price and the link to purchase the said item? If someone is interested in buying it, you've got to make sure all that information is on there. If you're just uploading a load of photos, how you're going to turn it into sales? All of these pins will need to be posted to relevant boards as well so it's easy for people to find. Don't just upload loads of things and put them into one board. If you think of it a bit like an online shop because effectively that is what it is. You wouldn't want to go to a clothes website, for example, and see that all the clothes were on the main page, there in no order at all, they've got no descriptions on them, no prices etc. You go on there and you expect them to be in categories, don't you, so dresses, jeans, etc, and you also expect all the information on there. You don't want to just see the picture and then you go, Oh!, that's a nice pair of jeans, how much is that? How can I get that? You expect information to be on there, what material it's made of, the colour, the size and options, all the information that you want on there needs to be on that ready for someone to purchase.
When it comes to images for your pins, you'll see there's quite a variety on the platform already. You'll see some longer images and some shorter images and people can do what they want on it but the longer images do work quite well because they stay on mobile screens for longer and increase the viewing time. So obviously, you're scrolling down and the longer they are, the more chance you've got of someone seeing them. Longer pins are always recommended. You can pin directly from your website but manually if you're going to do stuff like that, then you want to try and make them longer and make it interesting. Pinterest will automatically change the width to suit them, but you can make them longer if you wish. The main thing is that the photo is of good quality, you want to make sure it's really good quality. No one wants to see blurry or distorted photos, they'll actually be less likely to click on it, so ensure that all your pins, anything that you put on Pinterest, is clear and inviting.
The last thing that you want to be doing is checking those insights, and I do bang on about them all the time, but it's something that you should be doing with your business is looking at how things are progressing as well. On Pinterest, they'll give you an overview of impressions, engagements, total audience and your engaged audience as well. Loads of information there for you to look at. You'll often find that Pinterest has high reach as well, so even if people aren't pinning your actual pins, you'll find that they're most certainly seeing them, which leads to brand awareness and then for them to return at a later date. They can also follow you as well, if they don't want to pin you they can just follow you and see your things later on.
Finally, like other platforms, you can use adverts to push your pins further and get more sales that way.
So I hope that you found this information helpful. I'd also love to hear all your feedback. If you would like any help or training on Pinterest for your business. please get in touch with us on the usual channels and we will be happy to assist you.
Until next time, goodbye.
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