The Marketing Executive’s Guide to Pinterest

The latest social media portal to create a marketing frenzy is Pinterest. Many marketing executives, social media enthusiasts and even brand managers are looking at it as the next big thing after Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Fashion brands were the first to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon in an effort to showcase their products on social media platforms a more organized manner. Other brands and niches caught on soon enough, like...

Nike’s official Pinterest Page

So once you have understood the art of pinning and re-pinning images on the different Pinterest boards, it's time you consider incorporating the platform in your social media strategy in order to increase the online visibility of your product or brand. Here are some tips <guide to pinterest> that will help you explore this platform further from a marketer’s perspective.

First, the stats:

Before we start talking about how one can best utilize Pinterest for marketing purposes let's look at some numbers and know why one should do so in the first place. Pinterest has 73 million page views worldwide. India accounts for 3.6% of the total page views. This is approximately 262,800 views! Overall, Pinterest is the 76^th most popular site in India (Source : Alexa Ratings Data). This is in less than two years since it came into existence in the year 2010. This is reason enough for many marketing teams to go gaga over Pinterest.

Pinterest; Country-wise Usage Data

Next, how you can make the most of it:

1. Niche Marketers Rule:

Pinterest is by far the most organized of all the top social networking sites today. With a neat pin board type interface where you can view pins done by friends, family and others and easily organisable pin boards which let you classify images as per your wish, the site makes for a clean viewing experience overall. Hence, if you are to make it big on Pinterest, make sure you create different boards based on the niches you are present in. This will help you rank higher on the Pinterest search pages.

Mounish Ambaliya’s Handicraft Page has more than 8 top pins on the first Pinterest search page for Indian Gifts

2. Social Integration gets more eyeballs:

It is mandatory to register for Pinterest using your Twitter or Facebook account and this should be all the more a reason for you to leverage the fan base, followers and friends that you have on these platforms to promote your Pins. Experts suggest integrating your Facebook brand page with your Pinterest as well as Twitter so that all the news feeds, photos & status updates and albums can be shared on all three  profiles for increased visibility.

3. Contests & Freebies will make you more viral than ever:

Almost all social media users are  lovers of freebies and this attitude helps brands go viral in ways that no ad campaign designer can ever imagine to achieve with the same budget. Any gift or freebie, no matter how small or big will surely attract people to your page and get you a lot of traffic & visibility online. Also, offer discounts to new followers in an effort to get them hooked to your products and services and come back for more with more customers in tow.

4.Lastly, Describe, describe, describe but smartly:

The USP of Pinterest is images and the organized manner in which they are shared. As such, having perfect copy and smart descriptions about products is vital. A catchy description of a product with a high level of sensitivity towards the keywords and words used can help  you get a lot of leverage. For instance, a person searching for “Black Shoes” will see all pins that have the keyword and not your Pinterest profile page. Also, a smart thing to  do would be to place your web address in the image itself.

Featured Image Courtesy Verino77