by Kay Mathews
For startups and SMBs, increasing your presence on Pinterest reaps valuable rewards beyond the self-satisfaction of pretty Boards adorned with stylish Pins. Businesses can attract more followers, new customers, and higher sales.
When it comes to e-commerce-related sharing, Pinterest surpassed Facebook last year. Sharing on Pinterest translates into more earnings for businesses: according to March 2014 data from comScore, “Social media users spend 31% more than average online, and Pinterest users spend nearly 2x the norm.”
Pinterest may be the new kid on the social block, but it shouldn’t be ignored. As Venture Beat reports, if you want a site that introduces new customers to retailers, Pinterest is the “clear winner” ahead of Facebook and Twitter.
Here are five tips for boosting your business’s presence on Pinterest:
- Images are everything. Pinterest is a photo-driven network, so images are critical, as Artifact Uprising found out. As featured in U.S. News & World Report, it was noted that “A single photo shared on the social media site Pinterest in 2012 generated 48,000 hits in one week for the website of startup print shop Artifact Uprising, building momentum for it to eventually grow from a Colorado basement office into a multi-million dollar company.” Entrepreneur recently urged businesses wanting to boost sales on Pinterest to invest in a creative, visual strategy that shows you are taking memes and product images seriously.
- Get the Pin It button. Consider Etsy, which was founded in 2005 and has grown to more than 40 million members and boasts $1.35 billion in total merchandise sales for 2013. When the Etsy team observed that their customers were pinning Etsy items onto Pinterest, they added the Pin It button on each item listing page on Etsy and explained that the “Pin It button makes it easy for Etsy shoppers to pin items while browsing the site.” Another example is Allrecipes, which states that three months after adding the Pin It button on each recipe page, “more than 50,000 recipes were pinned resulting in 139 million Pinterest impressions, and clicks on Allrecipes’ Pinterest content increased more than 900%.”
- Share and re-pin images related to your brand. If you want to supercharge your startup marketing, Under30CEO says that “Pinterest is where e-commerce startups need to be.” Organic growth won’t happen overnight, the report goes on to say, but if you share and re-pin images related to your brand then using Pinterest will start to generate results. The example given was fashion designer Joy Cho, who, in March 2014, had 83 Boards and 12.4 million followers on Pinterest. She now has 89 Boards and 13.4 million followers.
- Create Pins and boards for the season. Why? As Kevin Knight states, “Businesses that take advantage of seasonal interests, including products, DIY projects, travel and recipes, can inspire people while they’re in a holiday mindset, ready to take action.” Knight recommends checking out Seattle-based designer Moorea Seal’s page for ideas.
- If you haven’t done so already, establish a business account and subscribe to the Pinterest business blog. Jessica Merchant opened the How Sweet Eats business page after starting with Pinterest for personal use. Danny Maloney, CEO and co-founder of Oklahoma City-based Pinterest analytics firm Tailwind, told the Pittsburg Post-Gazette in February 2014 that “How Sweet Eats” is Pittsburgh’s second most followed account. Pinterest is “a great way for small businesses to get out [of] the shadow of their corporate counterparts,” said Maloney. “It would be pretty hard for a business like How Sweet Eats to reach 160,000 loyal followers on an ongoing basis on another site, but they’re able to accomplish that on Pinterest.” Of note is the fact that How Sweet Eats now has more than 224,900 followers. At the Pinterest business blog, information is available on topics such converting from a personal account to a business account, adding the Pin It button, and managing analytics about your customers.
Don Faul, chief of operations at Pinterest told U.S. News, “Pinterest is offering something rival social networks can’t: A way to ‘discover’ new things people didn’t know they wanted. Twitter offers real-time micro-blogging, Facebook is becoming the new online phone book for friends and Google is good for searching for something specific, but Pinterest helps you explore your interests.”
By utilizing the tips featured above, startups and SMBs will be discovered, garner customers’ interests, grow a larger customer base, and increase sales. Boosting your presence on Pinterest will give your business a boost.
