Pinterest Marketing Part-8
Advanced Techniques On Pinterest Marketing
The above is the basic approach that you should be taking to your Pinterest marketing and it explains how you’re going to go about providing value on a regular basis and growing your audience.
But if you want to step up your game, then you should look at using some of the advanced tools that Pinterest offers. Compared to other social media sites, the amount of tools and support that Pinterest offers specifically for businesses and marketers is really quite staggering, so it’s crucial that you start taking full advantage of this.
To get started with your business account, you need to visit this link: https://business.pinterest.com.
If you don’t already have a Pinterest account, then you just click ‘Join as a Business’ to get set up with your own business account.
If you do already have a Pinterest account, then thankfully there is the option to ‘Convert Now’ which lets you change your current account into a business account. This is completely free and takes a matter of seconds, so it’s worth doing (see above for more reasons why).
From here, you can then install a Pin It button easily to your page, you can get a ‘Follow Me’ button to add to your website too, or you can set up your analytics.
Using analytics is an incredibly good idea because it will allow you to see which of your articles and images are being shared on Pinterest and being interacted with. This is a hugely useful tool for assessing which of your content is performing the best and that helps you to refine your approach. Maybe your memes are getting the most shares? Maybe shorter articles perform better? Looking at these metrics lets you know. This is a very powerful feature that a lot of other social sites just can’t come close to!
We discussed the use of ‘rich article pins’ earlier but in fact, there are actually six types of rich pins. These include:
- App
- Movie
- Recipe
- Article
- Product
- Place
That means that you can provide additional information about your pin and set up your site so that when someone else shares your pin, the additional information will be there automatically.
Go to this link: https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/rich-pins/overview/ to apply for rich pins via the ‘validator’. From there, you then simply need to add some meta information to your website so that Pinterest can see what type of content you’ve shared.
Note: If you want to prevent your pages from showing as rich pins, you simply add the following line to the head section of your HTML:
<meta name="Pinterest-rich-pin" content="false" />
There’s also some code you can use to prevent your content from appearing as pins at all. This however is not a particularly useful tool for a marketer!
For marketers, one of the most interesting types of pin other than the rich article pin is the product pin. A product pin essentially enables you to show availability for an item and to show the pricing in real-time. If you don’t have the ‘Buy’ button on your pin, this is the next best thing for making it easy for people to buy your products and to learn more about them.
Again, you need meta content for this to work. This time the following markup:
<meta property="og:title" content="Name of your product" />
<meta property="og:type" content="product" />
<meta property="og:price:amount" content="1.00" />
<meta property="og:price:currency" content="USD" />
Pinterest has some useful utility for influencer marketing, thanks to its own ‘Pinterest Email’ feature, which was introduced in May 2013. This tool allows you to send your contacts on Pinterest a personalized message that might recommend a specific pin, or which can be used to open up a dialogue.
What makes this useful is that it means you can now get in touch with other users that are performing well on the site. In turn, this then means you can invite them to work together or can suggest particular partnerships. This can be beneficial for both brands and if you gradually approach more and more highly influential users, you can progress up the ladder to increase your rich.
You can also use this to turn prospects into buyers – send someone who is engaging with your content a pin that you think they’ll like, or that you think will solve an issue they’re having, and it could turn into a sale for you, or at least a new subscriber or follower!
If you want to go one step further with your website/Pinterest integration, then you should look into adding widgets. You can get widgets for both your Pinterest page and for your boards specifically. Either of these can then be added to the sidebar of your website, which will make your profile much more tempting for people to follow. Not only will your visitors be able to see that you’re on Pinterest but this way they’ll also be able to see the type of content you’re sharing and the kind of value you’re offering. This is also a great way to ensure that your website stays looking active if you’re busy and don’t have time to add new blog posts for instance.
As we mentioned previously, Pinterest is the perfect platform for launching a competition. The visual nature of Pinterest creates a fun opportunity for people to send in their ideas for interior design or novel uses for your products. Likewise, you can run contests where you award the most inspiring boards on the platform that solve a particular problem that you posit.
Either way, this is a great way to get more people engaging with your brand which can in turn also lead to more of your pins getting shared throughout social networks.
When running contests though, make sure that you adhere to the guidelines that Pinterest sets out for brands. You can find these here: https://business.pinterest.com/engb/brand-guidelines.
If you want to make your marketing strategy even more advanced then you should look at the ways you can leverage other tools and software to streamline your workflow. As we’ll see, utilizing the right apps and services can save you a lot of time and help you to get more work done more quickly.
Here are some of the best ones to consider using.
(IFTTT.com)
IFTTT is an absolutely incredible tool that allows you to synchronize a large number of different apps and services that you use on the web. It works by letting you set up certain actions on social media, web apps, or even WordPress to work as ‘triggers’. These triggers can then cause an action on a range of other connected services.
The most basic example of this would be to have your WordPress page automatically share posts to Pinterest when you upload them. Make sure you’re adding in the rich articles metatags, and then let IFTTT take care of the rest by adding the articles to the pages automatically. This can save you a lot of time but do remember that you don’t want to make all your content automatically added – you also need to actively select some of your Pinterest content to make sure that you’re providing value.
There are also a ton of other ‘recipes’ (as they’re known on the site) that you can create through IFTTT to streamline your Pinterest posting. For instance, why not have your Instagram pictures automatically shared to Pinterest as well? Or how about the Instagram pictures that you like? Alternatively, you can go the other tact and make sure that your Twitter followers are notified each time you add new content to Pinterest. Now, each new pin you add is another opportunity for your followers to gravitate toward your Pinterest account and increase the number of followers you have there.
You can sync this up with any of your social media accounts which will help to keep your profile looking busy!
There is a Pinterest Chrome plugin that can save you a huge amount of time on Pinterest yet again. What this allows you to do is to easily share any image you come across online (as long as you’re using the Chrome browser) by just hovering your mouse over it. This is much faster than having to navigate to Pinterest each time you want to add a photo and then manually enter the URL and it basically means you’re more likely to add more high-quality content as you find it to your account.
Pinterest also has great apps for Android and iOS – both of which make it even easier for you to manage your account and to add new photos or respond to comments. The great thing about the apps is that you can use them wherever you are, which will again save you time and which means you can promote your brand when it’s convenient for you instead of having it eat into your other business activities.
The other great thing about the app is that if you hit the ‘plus’ sign in the top left, you can quickly take photos that you can then add as pins. If you have a personal brand, or if you want to show off your company hard at work in the office, then this is a great tool! Other than this additional feature, using the Pinterest app is broadly similar to navigating the website, so you should find it very intuitive.
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