Thanks to the “images pinning” action, it has become an interesting tool for brands of different sectors : from tourism to fashion, but also food.

Pinterest has achieved early success thanks to its ease of use for expert users, but also for inexperienced members.

However, it may not always be easy to understand which strategy of social media marketing you should choose.

So here’s 11 tips to get the best from your Pinterest account.

1. From Personal to Business Account

It’s free and takes very little time to set up.

You can create a business account from scratch or by converting your existing one through this page.

For the visitors of your profile will not change anything, but you will have access to analytics that will allow you to monitor the performance of your account and find out, for example, the number of unique visitors or repins.

2. Write a Good Description

You have 200 characters to capture your potential followers through a description of your business in your profile.

Be careful what you write and use your keywords.

This will help capture the attention of your audience and will simplify the search of new followers.

3. Not Just Your Content

The famous rule of 80 to 20 (80% content external to the brand, 20% for your product content) also applies to Pinterest.

Sure, it will not be easy to resist the temptation to fill your profile with photos of your product, service or website, but for a correct use of this social media instrument, you should find topics related to your brand and pin pictures about it.

An example?

A fashion brand should look for aphorisms about the world of fashion or celebrities, a tech brand should pin about cool gadgets or a travel company can focus on the typical dishes of the world.

4. Build Relations

Again, the classical rule of the online marketer.

For a winning strategy, it is necessary to build relationships with your industry influencers and Pinterest is the right tool to do so.

You can repin their content, for example, and discuss it with them : it could be a way for you to be noticed or receive a positive feedback!

5. Rename the Images

Before to pin your images, you can rename them with your keywords.

This will help users find your images when they make the search for the keywords used.

Image credit @ http://readwrite.com/

6. Pinterest = Inspiration

Another reason that has allowed Pinterest to climb the peak of success was undoubtedly his inspirational and emotional aspect.

Users, as pinners, love to be inspired by the social boards.

For this reason it is good to create boards that can excite and inspire people to dream.

Boards of art, film or photographs will be appreciated by your followers and will attract new ones.

7. Create Shared Boards

Have you ever thought to directly engage fans and influencers in a conversation with your brand?

With Pinterest you can do that by inviting them to pin their photos in a board you created.

If you’re looking for ideas , visit the Top Group Boards account, which includes the best boards shared within the social network.

8. Pinterest and Corporate Social Responsibility

Users love the companies that share their stories and who explain their values publicly.

Pinterest can help you to do that.

Make sure that your board visually communicate the topics that are dearest to you to tell or the initiatives you have in place.

9. Replace Boards

Pinterest allows you to reposition the boards at your leisure.

It is advisable to reorder them depending on season and occasions.

An example?

Under the winter holidays you may place at top the collections of gifts and ideas of decorum, while during summer those related to leisure, travel and relax.

10. Use the “Rich Pins” Feature

Since some time already, Pinterest allows, through the Rich Pins, to add information and details to your pin, in particular:

– Article Pin: to add title, author, description and link;

– Product Pin: to add real-time availability, price and where to buy;

– Recipe Pin: to include ingredients, cooking time and information to serve the dish;

– Movie Pin: to write details about the cast members and reviews;

– Place Pin: to add addresses , phone number and maps.

These can be very useful to provide as much information as possible to your users thus being credible and reliable.

11. Optimize Pinterest for SEO

To get the most out of your Pinterest account, you should optimize it for SEO , for example:

– write carefully the section “about”;

– include the link to your website;

– use the language of your potential target;

– use carefully the description of the images pinned;

– be sure that the images have an appropriate name;

– use the hashtags;

– give relevant titles and enter the proper keywords to the boards name.

Conclusion

These are just some of the tips to successfully integrate Pinterest into your social media marketing strategy.

The best suggestion to give you is always to experiment new ways to market yourself or your brand!

Not all the topics are equal, and neither are the users.

You should test your target audience, propose new topics to discuss about and new images to share.

With some proper efforts, you will be able to achieve great results.

And you?

Do you have any other tips to share?

Let me have your thoughts in the comments below, thanks!

 And do not forget to follow me on Pinterest!

Add Pinterest Buttons to Your Website

Time management and efficiency are important for small-business owners. You can support both of these by having your customers help you pin new items on Pinterest. Add embeddable Pinterest buttons to your website and blog; their presence will encourage visitors to share any images or information they find interesting and useful. As Pinterest users pin your images, you’ll benefit from the ripple effect that takes place as other users repin the images.

Must Read: How to Use Pinterest in Your Marketing Strategy

Tease Followers

Don’t give users the whole enchilada in one Pinterest image. Instead, provide teasers that make them want to find out more. Pin images of your products or of things related to your services, and invite users to visit your site to learn more. Ask questions and encourage answers and feedback on your company website blog.

Connect with Your Business Blog

After you embed Pinterest buttons on your company website, be sure to add them to your business blog. Having those red Pinterest buttons on your blog will encourage subscribers to pin blog posts to Pinterest for others to see. Likewise, you can pin a new blog entry on Pinterest to attract new followers. Blog posts that offer tutorials or other useful information are very popular when pinned on Pinterest.

Point Them in the Direction of Further Information

Pinterest users scan over images quickly, looking for things that catch their eyes. Although you can inundate users with copious amounts of text information, it’s better to pin a really great image and lead users back to your website for further information.

Deliver on Promises Made

If you promise to provide more information on your website or engage in conversation with users, be sure to deliver on those promises. Be genuine and authentic with your pins to avoid misrepresenting your business to potential customers. Ensure your pins relate to your business and your community involvement. If an image or pin has nothing to do with what your business is all about, you’re better off looking for a more appropriate image.

You can fool a potential customer one time, but you won’t fool him or her twice. Once you’ve caught Pinterest users’ eyes with your recent pin, you get only one chance to capitalize on the interest you’ve sparked. Divide your focus between posting attractive, relevant, useful pins and making sure you have a website that is also attractive, relevant and informative. The two go hand-in-hand, and if you don’t have a good website to draw customers to, then you’re sending them on a wild goose chase they’re not likely to repeat. Consider these five tips when adding new pins to your Pinterest boards to help you convert followers into customers.

You may be interested in reading: How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Site

With a bang, back in 2010, a new social site named Pinterest announced their presence and it is now the third most, the active social site in America. Expansion of markets along the global map, and social media is the perfect guide for getting that new edge.

Twitter is no doubt a perfect bride for those companies who want to marry quality business deals. However, with approach of Pinterest, you will see that Twitter is getting a tough compete.

Let us take a journey around both the sites.

Just Pin It!

A new site for social networking and sharing the hot and favorite ideas, just pinning them on virtual boards.

Better let me give an example, you love baking, so you create a Cookie Making Board. You post pictures of your home-made cookies, recipes that you may have found online, videos of how to prepare a perfect batter, notes on flavors and choices of toppings and even question from ever-growing users, regarding the presence or lack of dough. If you share the board openly then your audience will quickly grab it and will add more details, as well as preparing a veritable encyclopedic database of cookies-related goodness.

Pinterest is visually appealing and versatile. I heard of online fashion schools to share their designs encouraging students to share and pin what interests them. I also have made delicious sandwiches learning the recipes straight from the site. It is a great way to share what you love or find out those lost and memorable sweet desires.

You may be interested in reading: How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Is Anybody Tweeting?

Twitter just a 140-character info-burst that share your immediate thoughts in small phrase. You may be a Facebook animal and love to post long status on those things that interest you a lot. However, say for example, you stood in a queue for buying your favorite gadget; well you do not post about your strenuous evening. However, this feed is the perfect fodder for Twitter.

Well different social network, satisfies different personalities and Twitter is that site which attracts people with minds on the go. It is instant and it is used to coordinate revolutions, share links and at the same time express irrelevant yet clever interpretation of daily life.

You may be interested in reading: How to Use Twitter

Battle Begins: Twitter Vs Pinterest

Must Read: How to Use Pinterest in Your Marketing Strategy

Who Wins The Battle?

Pinterest is our winner, as it drives more traffic than Twitter and brings success to companies. Pinterest follows a successful market strategy and thus proves itself as the great marketing tool.

• Milo.com CEO and Founder Jack Abraham
• Michael Birch, the man who with brother Xochi sold Bebo to AOL for $850 million in ‘08
• Behance.com proprietor Scott Belsky
• Highline Venture Partners
• Silicon Valley angel funding giant SV Funding
• Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz
• Professional angel investor Brian Cohen
• Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman

Tweet it!

Other than investing efforts, navigating their website renders no means to advertise, thereby canceling that method of drawing revenue.  With the above mentioned investors, it appears that pinning is such a hot trend that pockets are generously emptying to the point of keeping Pinterest afloat at this current moment.  Now that we see the comfortable funding mechanism deployed by this company, stability shouldn’t be an issue.  We now look at how this company can dramatically boost your marketing campaigns for good regardless of their current stance financially, or legally.

Plug It In

Correlating nicely with “Tweet This” and other share buttons on your blogs, ‘Pin It’ buttons are available on the Pinterest website so everyone can push your picture-rich content through pinboards across the community.  WordPress even offers plugins which can be added through your widget area to enhance the Pinterest experience for users, and push your marketing efforts along even further.  No longer will your blog suffer by not having images shared along with content – these plugins and other methods to pull Pinterest share buttons off the main site will push your marketing efforts along.

Nifty features from LinkWithin’s tool will allow single posts to contain other posts for Pinterest users to pin from, another way to grow your marketing strategy from this plugin.

Hash Tag Optimization

Marketing professionals who share an affinity for certain niches can easily create individual pins on their pinboards which contain a keyword hashtag which contains the link they just pinned.  For example, let’s assume you’ll be marketing a Coach purse on Pinterest and wish to optimize your description for searches.  Your description could look like:

“With wonderful colors, plenty of room and affordable price tag, this lovely #Coach #purse will look wonderful with your collection.”

We just optimized, for marketing and search purposes, the words ‘coach’ and ‘purse’ – in Pinterest, that hashtag turns unto a searchable query containing the keyword where your pin is located.  When clicked, all people and boards related to your keyword are clearly visible.  Now, once optimized on your own blog, you can make seamless connections between your boards and blogs while people naturally pin your goods and popularize your stuff naturally.  It’s rather nifty what these hashtags can do for optimizing your Pinterest presence.

Along with hashtag optimization comes naming your initial pinboards correctly after your business; this will increase your exposure and rank your keyword-rich pinboards fast.  A current pinboard we control is already a PR3 and growing, and so can yours!

You may be interested in reading: How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Turning Content Into Sharable Goods

Since content isn’t pin-friendly as of yet, you’ll benefit by converting your articles or short white papers into either infographics or videos which can, in turn, be optimized two ways:  1) by simply adding the infographics or videos to your pinboards which contain keywords relevant to your niche and 2) by hashtagging the images to search queries.  Once you’ve created your pin, you can optimize that pin on your own site to help gain recognition and rank.  Through the sharing of the suddenly popularized infographics and tapping into the video explosion, you’ll access a crowd that has more depth than humanly imaginable.

When sharing content, another excellent marketing strategy is pictorial testimonials of services you rendered to past customers.  After pinning these, and adequate sharing, you’ll increase the reputation of your company along with increase traffic to your company page.

Pinning After Analyzing Traffic Data

Sometimes pinning during different parts of business hours will render higher traffic from Pinterest pins.  By simply tapping into your Google Analytics account, you can easily see the times during the day where pins, and their attached websites, are getting more hits.  From there, you can plan your pinning assault accordingly.  Using the hashtag feature as listed above, you can optimize your higher ranking pins to be thrown in front of millions of pinners who are searching for your pictures, infographics or videos.

Their exists on Pinterest’s homepage a Popular link which shows what’s currently hot and trending – use this link throughout your research and find what’s been re-pinned the most.  From this you can decipher marketability of certain products, pages or pictures you intend to share.

Marketing Pins Through Contests

Tapping into your marketing creativity, you could create a contest which allows your current following across Facebook or Twitter to pin infographics or website images which speak to your visitors.  Set a deadline about 1-2 months away, and have the community judge the best pins in which a prize can be awarded to winner.  This allows floods of interactivity to spread throughout Pinterest, and increase your pin’s authority since pinboards are generally ranked by popularity.  The same can be done with videos, and is actually better for viral marketing of your YouTube videos.

Instructional Webinar

Marketing services means some form of instruction on how to use these services will be imminent.  Therefore, create either a webinar or how-to video, upload to YouTube, and pin it onto Pinterest using the #webinar hashtag.  This will allow people looking for instructional webinars to find your content easily, and share it across the Pinterest community.  The video can also introduce members of your team or company which, of course, gives people security and validation of your company’s existence and goals.  Sharing the pin with your Twitter and Facebook following would make a complete ‘link wheel’ which grows social popularity.

Couponing

Who needs Groupon when you can simply pin savings coupons or valuable vouchers onto your pinboards using the #coupons tag?  Naming a pinboard specifically ‘coupons’ and continually tagging your coupons with descriptions of your company will aggressively fight its way to the top of Pinterest, along with other’s willingness to pin these savings simply because everyone is looking for the next big deal.

Marketing Simply Became Pinteresting

With more people sharing images and video than ever before, it’s no wonder Pinterest has actively became marketing gurus’ top target for finding buyers or fans.  The #38 ranked website worldwide is ever increasing image security, making the community more original than ever when sharing pictures.  If you’ve currently restricted yourself solely to Facebook, YouTube or Twitter when creating marketing plans, it’s time to incorporate the new dog on the blog which, inevitably, can connect the three most popular social media fronts onto one pinboard for excellent exposure, targeted traffic and authoritative spots in Google’s search algorithms.

The simplicity of Pinterest makes it very popular too. Basically after signing up you add a little bookmark to your favourite’s bar which allows you to start “pinning”…

So, what is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a kind of online pin board that can be used in a number of ways.  It can be used just like a real pin board for things like organization, planning, and showing things off to the world. On Pinterest you can post your images, videos, and anything you find on the Internet onto a pin board for any number of reasons. You can post it so you don’t forget it, to keep things organized; you can use it to plan, and many other things.

But on top of these functions Pinterest uses what it finds out about you through what you post on your pin board to connect you with other people with the same interests, making it a social media network as well. Through meeting other people with your same interests Pinterest lets you learn more about what you like and discover completely new things that you would probably be interested in.

At the time of writing this it was invite only – but this is not a big deal as you can request an invite from the site. Once this part is done you can set up your account and get started. I would suggest making a few pin boards up with a few different categories – make sure to include a personal one too, maybe some holiday destinations, or dream destinations……

So how do I get traffic from Pinterest?

The great thing about pinning your images on your boards is that the image contains the original link, so if people click on the image they are directed to the site. You can also re-pin other people’s images and videos onto your boards doubling the link. Imagine the ripple effect of this for a second? You could effectively have an image that could be re-pinned over and over and over again……..each time with a link to your site. It allows followers too much like the other social media platforms so each follower you have will see your boards.

Twitter allows you to write a tweet of 140 characters, this tweet gets sent out on your twitter feed and your followers can read it. But they will only see it if they are on their timeline at that moment. The big advantage with the way Pinterest works is that it is designed with a form of endless scrolling, which means you can get lost for hours and never run out of things to find on the page.

There is a great set of analytics tools with Pinterest, these tools will allow you to see things like how much traffic you’re directing to your website from Pinterest, how much traffic is being directed to your Pinterest, and exactly where the traffic on your Pinterest is coming from. This allows you to find people promoting your business and reward them in some way, which of course leads to more promotion from that person.

Must Read: How to Use Pinterest in Your Marketing Strategy

Increase your Online Popularity with Pinterest

A common thing going on at the moment is running a competition; this could include a small prize, an eBook, or even a cash prize. This should also link to your site and people could have to sign up to your mailing list in order to get their prize. There are many ways Pinterest can be used. I have seen all manner of companies using Pinterest, from wedding dress makers, bathroom specialists, and even plain old boring Internet Marketers. The point is there is a place for everyone.

I have seen businesses use it to promote their company’s ‘human side’ a bit more by putting pictures of staff events on there to show off their friendly side for possible employees.

I have seen people promote their cupcake businesses by showing off their latest designs.

I have seen Internet Marketers promote themselves by pinning how-to videos and images of their guides and courses.

Another great feature is the ability to cross-pollinate with the other social media giants. For example if your company has a Facebook page, that account can be synced with the company’s new Pinterest channel and people from the Facebook page will see on your feed that you’ve started to pin things on Pinterest. They are then highly likely to go and check it out, further reinforcing their connection to your business.

These are just a few ways to use this emerging social media giant. The great thing about Pinterest is it allows people to be creative – a key aspect in any marketing plan.

Are you on the Pinterest train yet? If not, you should think about getting on board.