Why Pinterest Is a Social Platform Worth Using for Your Business

While many businesses are constantly looking to break into the digital world and explore social media marketing, Pinterest is often left behind in terms of interest or priorities.

However, Pinterest, an image sharing and discovery app, is home to over 459 million monthly users worldwide and drives more leads than all other social media sites – making it platform brands truly don’t want to underestimate.

To learn more on why and how to utilize Pinterest as a digital marketing tool for your business, keep reading this?Bold x Collective ?guide.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a unique social media service that allows users to share, discover, and collect images, animated GIFs, and short-formed videos in the form of pinboards.

Pinterest is most used by its users to share and/or gain inspiration and ideas from content that matches their interests and hobbies. When users save an image it is represented with a pin and known as a “Repin” rather than a repost/share or retweet.

Likewise, each “post” on Pinterest is referred to as a “Pin”. Each pin can link back to a website, whether it be a blog post a brand wants more traffic on or an online store to increase sales. Users can then combine and organize different Repins or Pins into a folder, known as a “Board”.

Why Should You Be Using Pinterest for Business?

With so many further established social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even TikTok, why should brands put focus on Pinterest?

Ultimately, it comes down to these 5 statistics:

• Pinterest generates 3.8 times more sales than any other social media platform.
• 87% of Pinterest users have purchased a product because of Pinterest.
• 93% of Pinterest users use the platform to plan purchases.
• 40% of Pinterest users have a household income of over $100k.
• Pinterest shoppers spend 2 times more per month than those on other platforms.

This demonstrates that there is a huge market for businesses on Pinterest as many users are willing and looking to spend on what they discover. Pinterest can be used to not only grow your online presence and audience but also to drive more traffic to your online store and website.

How to Use Pinterest for Business:

Now that the importance and impact of using Pinterest for your brand have been established, how can you incorporate Pinterest into your brand’s overall social media marketing strategy? Here is how you can get started.

1. Create a Pinterest Business Account

Either create a business profile from scratch when signing up on the platform or convert your personal Pinterest account (if you have one) to a business account.

Do so by clicking on the three dots symbol located on the top right corner of the page and then clicking on “Upgrade your account”. With a Pinterest business profile, you will now have access to tools such as Pinterest Ads and Pinterest Analytics.

2. Optimize Your Profile

Include your brand logo in your profile picture and create a very brief profile description that describes your brand and what your followers can expect from your account. Make sure to include your company website link to drive more traffic.

3. Browse Competitors

As a rule of thumb, it is always important to look at what competitors and others in your industry are doing on social platforms. Moreover, Pinterest is all about gaining inspiration from the content you see, and a brand is no different.

Researching what others are doing and what is performing well will help your brand generate content ideas for this platform.

4. Create Captivating Content Worthy of Being Repinned

Much like Instagram, Pinterest content relies entirely on aesthetics. Only create and upload Pins that are high definition. As well, 82% of Pinterest users browse on the platform through their mobile devices so aim for images with a 2:3 ratio to avoid your content being cropped.

Lastly, post product/service images with context, such as in its proper use or in a lifestyle setting rather than a standard product image. Pinterest is about inspiring others, and you want to inspire users to incorporate your product/service into their lifestyle through your visuals.

5. Optimize Your Pins for SEO

Much of Pinterest’s success in driving traffic for brands can be attributed to the platform’s various possibilities to optimize SEO. Using keywords under your Pins’ descriptions, boards, and hashtags is crucial to ensure your brand’s pins can be easily searched by Pinterest users.

6. Cross-Promoting

With similarities in the type of content being posted on both Instagram and Pinterest (primarily high-quality images), Pinterest is a great social platform to use to cross-promote your Instagram (or even Facebook) account.

Posting the same content from your other social media platforms and backlinking the Pins to those other social media pages can lead to not only traffic on your Pinterest page, but also to wherever the image was originally posted.

This is a great method for increasing your overall reach through different platforms but still with the goal in mind to bring traffic to a specific site/post.

7. Pinterest Boards

As a brand, create a collection of different boards to organize and categorize Pins with a common theme/interest. This will help your followers and Pinterest users to easily search, browse, and follow the content/boards that are of interest to them.

8. Experiment with Pinterest Ads

Much like other platforms, on Pinterest, you can target ads to a specific audience based on interests, age, location, keywords, etc. Through detailed audience targeting a brand can even aim for very specific Pinterest users such as those who have engaged with your pins or similar content (known as “Actalikes”) and those who have already visited your website by uploading your customer list.

There are numerous ad formats for brands to experiment with on this platform such as the standard image ad or video, shopping, carousel, and collection ads. You can decide your daily budget, the duration the ad is running, and track performance as you go to optimize your advertisements.

The best performing ads on Pinterest are those that blend with feeds rather than those that are obvious sales tactics. You want to increase traffic by having users organically click on your ad as it appears on more users’ radars rather than having users instantly recognize it is an advertisement.