I believe that Pinterest is an incredibly exciting communications platform with endless opportunities for marketeers.
In a B2B context, social media activity should generate quality content and then share it with a business’ target audiences in an informative and creative way, all to drive traffic to the business’ website. We know right now that web users love visual content, photos, info graphics, videos etc. and if we take all this into account, Pinterest is an obvious choice for improving engagement levels.
On a more basic level, Pinterest offers companies the ability to showcase their businesses. It clearly works better for companies with visual products, but it is actually all about being creative. A key part of making Pinterest work as hard as possible is to ensure that your website is as visual as possible too, with content that is unique and easy to share. For instance, posting blogs with good visual content and offering a Pinterest ‘share’ button is a good starting point. Nevertheless, to get the most out of Pinterest, you will require a more integrated approach, and essentially this comes from cross-promoting your Pinterest content onto Facebook, Google+ and other popular social media platforms.
In much the same way to other social media platforms, networking on Pinterest will also help you build more followers with your ‘pins’ being re-pinned more often. It is always important to find people who are interested in the same subjects as you so that you can re-pin the ‘pins’ that would be most interesting to your audience.
Another key consideration is to ensure that the pinned images (or videos) arouse curiosity while also being topical and relevant as this will mean that there will be more likelihood that users will then share the content.
Here are some helpful tips to help you get the very most out of Pinterest:
• Always remember that Pinterest is essentially a visual hub that is very dynamic, so ensure that you invest enough time each week to keep it up-to-date with quality, imagery.
• Ensure that your ‘pinned’ images arouse curiosity, questions, and opportunities for engagement from followers as this will encourage dialogue and drive traffic to your website.
• Be selective about what you share, you don’t want to flood your networks with content.
• Develop a community who have the same interests and share relevant content by pinning and repinning.
• Pinterest is a great opportunity to humanise your brand, include pictures of key people and your organisation in action.
• Create discussion pins that are used to highlight upcoming company news and information.
• Use contributor boards so other people create content and do the work for you – see http://bit.ly/TmIjnK
• Use Pinterest to represent your organisation in the most effective way – use pins to convey benefits, positive testimonials, a vision for the future etc.
• Optimise your website for Pinterest, so pins are easier to share.
While Pinterest is a great opportunity to humanise a brand, companies should be careful not to divert aware from key brand values and brand guidelines. It also goes without saying that brands should only use content that they are licensed to use.
Happy Pinning!!