Let’s Start with your Company

 What does it sell? 

If it sells shoes, you should pin some of your top ten shoes onto the pinboard. If it sells services like Social Media Marketing, it’s beneficial to pin items like blogs you have written about social media or infographics. Another tactic is to pin a client list as well so people can see who you work with.

What Industry are you in? 

If you sell cameras, wouldn’t it make sense to have a board dedicated to photography? If you are a travel agent, why not board on places you always wanted to go to. For a B2B company, you can put up boards like office life or some people that you follow that influence your work. These items should be about the industry you are in, so if you sell shoes, a board on traveling places may not make a lot of sense unless it’s about walking and of course sells shoes.

 What is your brand’s lifestyle?

Are you funny? Stylish? Green? Organic? Some boards around those subjects can help show people what you are all about.

Once you’re set up... Start Pinning!

Start by cruising Pinterest itself to find content that you find interesting. You can filter it by a number of subjects like Photography or gardens and start pinning those items to your various boards.

After you have some pins on your boards, you can venture outside Pinterest and into the Internet. The easiest way to start pinning while you cruise the Internet is to install the pin it button in the toolbar of your web browser.

Once you find something you find interesting or reflects your brand or industry, you click on the Pin it button and then choose the image and the board you want to pin the image to. That’s it. Once you pin something to the board, all your followers will see it on your page.

Best Practices for Pinterest

Now that you have these boards up, what are some of the best ways to maintain them, and not have people think you are just marketing to them. One of our rules of thumb in digital marketing is market like you are at a cocktail party.

Market yourself like you’re at a cocktail party 

Don’t just start selling. Introduce yourself. Tell people who you are and yes what you may be selling, but hey if you just want to talk about travel, then let’s just talk about travel.

Rules of the Pinterest Road

• Pin equally to all boards. 
• Try to update your pinboards about once a week.
• Repin some items from you followers if it accurately reflects one of your boards.
• Use the icons! Use follow icons on your website so people can follow your brand. You can also install a “pin it” button similar to the Facebook-like button.
• Use engaging visuals. If it caught your eye, it’s probably going to catch someone else’s eye as well.
• Use other social media networks to announce your presence. Pinterest wouldn’t be up to 11 million people without Facebook, so leverage your Facebook and Twitter followers to let them know you are on Pinterest.

The holy grail in social media is going viral. You will read about stay at home moms you now have over 1 million subscribers because their content went viral on the Internet. Pinterest has all the right components for your content to go viral, meaning it’s shared with lots and lots of people very quickly. It’s not easy to go viral and there are different degrees of going viral. In fact, it’s probably going to take you and your company a long time to get to a point where you are able to go viral.

Here is what you need in order to go viral

You will need an audience. Pinterest has over 11 million members right now who are highly engaged, but you will need followers. If you don’t have a lot of followers the likelihood of your content going viral is very small.

Your content and images need to be interesting and original. If you make great content and a great image it’s more likely people will repin a great visual than a sub-par pixel. If you don’t have time to create a great visual, hire someone who can do work in Photoshop. There are plenty of young college kids out there who can turn this work out without breaking a sweat. You don’t need 1,000 repins to go viral. If you get 20 repins, you vastly increased your audience and reach. This might not be the biggest viral campaign in history, but it’s a start.

Every brand needs to be social. Facebook is still far and away from the leading social network and the one that directs the most traffic to other websites. If you are business to business you should also be on LinkedIn. However, if you are business to consumer or if you are business to business and especially if you have an eCommerce instance, you should have a Pinterest profile. The simple reason is in the traffic referrals Pinterest is generating are too large to be ignored and getting traffic to a website is one of the reasons social media is a very cost-effective way to do advertising.

"Traffic referrals Pinterest is generating are too large to be ignored"

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