How to use and Grow with Pinterest - A fastest growing Social Networking Site

We all use Facebook & Instagram a lot to stay in touch with friends and relatives. We all love to share photos, status updates, check-ins, etc on Facebook and Instagram, Now a days my lady friends and relatives kept jumping onto Pinterest to share their likes and interests. Pinterest has became a platform for everyone to show and learn about hobbies like cooking, photography, gardening, Art and craft, DIYs, Pets, Celebration, and the list is endless.  We can not only share things, but can spend LOTS of time "pinning" and viewing "boards".

With 250 million monthly users, Pinterest and TikTok are one of the leading visual content sharing social media platform and growing exponentially. A study has also shown that 70% of Pinterest users spend around 14 minutes performing actions like constant pinning and clicking-through.

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What is Pinterest and how does it work?

Pinterest is a visual social network site that allows users to visually share and discover new interests by posting also known as 'pinning' images or videos to their own or others' “boards” and browsing what other users have pinned. Using a visual orientation, the social network is very much focused on the concept of a person's lifestyle, motives, interests and hobbies allowing you to share your tastes and interests with others and discovering those of likeminded people. The social network's goal is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting." In Pinterest users and followers can either upload images from their computer or pin things they find on the web using the Pinterest book market according to their interested categories.

Like most other social networking sites, users can perform standard social networking functions such as following the boards of their friends, liking and commenting on other users' pins, re-pinning content to their own boards, sharing others' pins on Facebook and Twitter or via email, and even embedding individual pins on their website or blog.

Pinterest had an incredible growth in 2013 - for the first time ever; Pinterest surpassed email as a sharing medium, and even outpaced Facebook. According to the study, that’s all thanks to the ladies, especially in the Midwest, because 80% of Pinterest users are women.  I'm not quite sure why - as far as I can tell, men like looking at photos as much as ladies, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that in the beginning Pinterest seemed to have been started with interests in the home arts like cooking, decorating, fashion, gardening, and other topics of interest to women. But, to my pleasant surprise, I just checked out Pinterest and there are boards for some of my decidedly, male-oriented interests like flyfishing, hunting and cigars, so I wouldn't be surprised to see the pinetrest statistics on male usage for Pinterest climbing.

Remarkably, Pinterest is now the fastest-growing platform for online content sharing, according to a new report from online content distribution service ShareThis. The report analyzed the millions of monthly shares made through ShareThis in the third quarter of 2013 across more than 120 social media channels and two million websites and discovered that content sharing on Pinterest jumped 19.2% in the latest quarter of 2013, and LinkedIn sharing grew 15.1%. Facebook saw content sharing rise 14.7%, while sharing on Twitter fell 7.6%. (see the graph below)

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The new data offers a reminder that businesses should look beyond Facebook and Twitter when managing their social media outreach.  Says ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson in a release: "The more advertisers understand how consumers are using all social channels — beyond Facebook and Twitter — the more effectively they can use social media to augment and improve campaigns,".

Small businesses can capitalize on the Pinterest surge to market their products and grow their consumer base. Pinterest, a highly visual medium, gives businesses a chance to engage consumers with compelling images and colorful infographics that promote deals and new products. Pinning pictures of employees could also help customers identify with the people who work at the company, putting a face to a name. Small business owners can also help facilitate conversations about their brands online by adding "share" buttons to their websites. These digital icons allow site visitors to easily click and share a piece of content through a specific Pinterest board.

MAKING PINTEREST WORK FOR YOUR BUSINESS

If you're on the hunt for a few surefire Pinterest brand marketing techniques, then you're in the right place. As many as 50% of people who see a promoted Pinterest pin, make a purchase! So, for business owners, this social media platform is well worth investing your time and effort into. Let's dive into these strategies!

1. SET UP A PINTEREST BUSINESS ACCOUNT

First things first, you want to set up a Pinterest Business account. Then, make sure your profile is optimized to reflect the tone of voice and aesthetic of your brand.

The main hack of Pinterest account is to ensure your bio's filled with plenty of relevant keywords while reflecting your company's voice and deliverable.

1.       Branding Your Account

Add a board cover to your profile. These are amazing for making your Pinterest account more cohesive with your brand.

It is always better to opt for SEO-friendly board titles. Try to keep them short and snappy. Then, you can utilize the board's description section spot on description to insert more keywords and hashtags. These hashtags are clickable and fantastic for getting a better idea of what your target market is looking for on Pinterest. You can use this info to refine your marketing strategy.

2. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE IMAGES

The website of the business should be easily accessible and pinnable for your website visitors to pin images from your web pages onto their Pinterest boards.

You can do this by installing Pinterest's 'Save Button' to allow users to save your images onto their Pinterest account, with just a few simple clicks.

Rich Pins

Utilize rich pins. This display pricing info makes them ideal if you're running an e-commerce store. Alternatively, if you're running a blog, 'article pins' are just the ticket for driving traffic.  Use vertical images, and scale them, so they boast a 600-pixel width and an aspect ratio of either 2:3 or 1:3.5.

Handy Hack: If you're struggling to create Pinterest friendly images, use Canva. It's a free resource offering a ton of pre-made templates which are fabulous for Pinterest marketers.

If you want to take your product pins a step further, you can sync your online store with your Pinterest account. This way, when users save your pin, they can "Add to bag" and pay for your products without even leaving Pinterest - how awesome this that?!

Apply for Rich Pins

You can only use rich pins if you have a validated site. This validation process doesn't occur automatically. Instead, you'll have to apply by doing the following:

Add Pinterest's code to your site. You can use the Yoast SEO plugin to do that; this app allows you to add a Pinterest meta tag as well as the option of copying and pasting the necessary code from Pinterest. Once you've done this, you enable Pinterest to review the legitimacy of your site.

Validate your site on Pinterest. To do this, head over to Pinterest's validation tool. Not only does this give you a preview of your pin, but it also gives you the opportunity to apply for rich pins. If the application is successful, you'll get an email from Pinterest telling you your Rich Pins have been enabled.

One more important thing to be note is this can take as long as a week, so don't worry if you don't get an email immediately. It's a pretty simple process and it's well worth doing. You're sure to boost engagement when you start using rich pins.

3. STAY ACTIVE

Now you have everything up and running; you need to stay active on Pinterest.  You should continually add content to your profile and assess what users are searching for. This way you can provide the best possible content for your audience.

One more useful hack, to make your brand memorable, aim to pin at least five times a day. You can make this easier by using a scheduling app like Buffer to plan what you want to pin and when.

Handy Hack:  You want to space out your pins. It's no good publishing ten pins all in one go. When you space out your content throughout the day, you're more likely to engage with your audience.

By staying 'active' on Pinterest, we also mean you should be continually analyzing the effectiveness of your current strategies. Use Pinterest's analytics to see what your most popular pins are. That way you'll know what kind of content to replicate.

4. ADDITIONAL THINGS YOU CAN DO

There are a few other things you can do to maximize your Pinterest efforts:

1.  

   Categorize your boards: When you do this, you make it easier for users to find your pins. Not only does this result in increased engagement, but you may even score a few loyal followers.

2.       Find popular group boards. You can use a resource like PinGroupie to identify these boards and contribute to these communities. This is fantastic for getting your brand out there.

3.       Add your logo to the bottom of all your images. This helps to boost brand recognition. 

All these ideas will undoubtedly help improve your Pinterest branding.

Businesses can leverage Pinterest’s powerful engagement rate to promote themselves. But first, they need to understand how Pinterest works and create an efficiently optimized business profile. Therefore, to help you with that, I will list 6 tips that every business, no matter how small or big, can use to create an impressive business profile on Pinterest.

How to set up a Pinterest account for your business

Whether your business is small or big, if you are planning to use Pinterest to market your business, you should create a Pinterest business account, rather than a personal account. Business accounts offer business-specific features like analytics and the ability to use Pinterest advertising.

If you already have a personal Pinterest account, you can convert it to a business account. You’ll just need to fill in some additional information about your business and accept the business-specific terms of service.

If you don’t already have a Pinterest account, here’s how to create one for your business.

Step 1: Create your Pinterest for business account

Go to to the Pinterest for business page and click Join as a business.

Enter your email address, password, business name, and website, and choose which category your business falls into: professional, public figure, media, brand, retailer, online marketplace, local business, institution/non-profit, or other.

Be sure to review the terms of service and privacy policy. Then click Create account.

Concluding Pinterest is the ideal place for e-commerce sites, small and emerging business as well as big brands. And while it is a relative newcomer on the social media scene, it holds the honor of having the highest per-click revenue of them all. This is a huge advantage when it comes to its Google organic ranking potential. Each pin on a page represents a link that drives traffic back to your webpage, and creates another point in a Google search that goes to your products.