How to Promote Yourself with Pinterest

Transcription

1 1 How to Promote Yourself with Pinterest A Guide on How to Get Started and Promote Yourself or Your Business with Pinterest By Mitt Ray of Social Marketing Writing

2 2 What is Pinterest? Pinterest is a social media site where people (pinners) can share and collect images. Pinterest is a social media site where people (Pinners) can share and collect images. On Pinterest, people can either upload new images or share images they have found on other websites. These images are placed on Pinboards where they are well organised and easy to find. Pinners and other users can access these images. Normally the images have a link which leads to the original site where each one can be found. Who can use Pinterest? People normally use Pinterest for leisure purposes. They use it to collect recipes, see what their friends are sharing, find funny and interesting images, plan weddings, look at the latest trends in fashion, etc. This social media site is becoming more popular every day, as the visual way of communicating with people is one that has attracted a lot of attention. Pinterest is both innovative and entertaining, which this is why it gets lots of new users every month. Marketers can take advantage of Pinterest s popularity and use it to market their content, images, services and products. Both B2B companies and B2C companies should be able to use Pinterest effectively. The key to using Pinterest lies in creating unique images. If you want people to click and share your image instead of someone else s, then you need it to be special and distinctive. Bloggers can use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs, while companies can share images of their latest products and offers, run competitions and promote their business. How to use Pinterest effectively As I mentioned earlier, people mainly turn to Pinterest for leisure. If you are going to use it for marketing purposes, then you need to stay focussed. Attractive images of food and clothes, humorous incidents, books covers and so on can distract you away from your task of promoting yourself. If you want Pinterest to work for you, you need to ensure that you complete your task of promoting yourself or your company first, before you start browsing it for fun and games. Always make a schedule and have aims for the day only after you have accomplished those should you go ahead and use Pinterest for entertainment.

3 3 Investments to make to succeed with Pinterest If you want to succeed with Pinterest, you need to make an investment in equipment, books and time. 1. Camera Pinterest is mainly about how good your images look. Pinterest is mainly about how good your images look. If you want yours to stand out from all the others and be repinned many times, you need to create top quality images. For this you will require a proper camera something which is better than your mobile phone. So invest in a good model. 2. Read about photography A good camera isn t the only thing you need to produce high quality photos. Alongside it you will need to learn how to take good pictures. Invest some time in reading a few books or blogs about photography. Making the effort to improve your photography skills will help your images of your product or content shine. 3. Improve your creativity Creative pictures really stand out. Try to make your photos both unique and inventive. Think of something out of the ordinary and free your imagination with every picture or image you create for Pinterest. This may call for time spent planning and trying out new ideas, but it will be time well spent.

4 4 Getting Started With Pinterest 1. Get an invitation You need an invitation from a Pinterest user to join. If you have any friends already on Pinterest, ask them to invite you. Otherwise, leave a comment on this post along with your address and I will send you an invitation to join Pinterest. You can also contact me at mitt@socialmarketingwriting.com and let me know that you need an invitation and I will send you one. You can also register on the site and wait for an invitation, but this could take days or even weeks. 2. Complete your profile Once you have received your invitation, visit the website and sign up for an account. You need a Facebook or Twitter account to use Pinterest. To sign up for a new account on Pinterest, you first need to have a Facebook or Twitter account. You can connect your Pinterest account to either of these. Signing up with your Facebook or Twitter account is beneficial since it makes the process very easy. The details and the photo you use for Facebook or Twitter will be filled into your Pinterest account automatically. But you can always change them if you prefer. A further advantage is that it makes it easy for you to share your pins over Twitter and Facebook if you want to.

5 5 After you enter your details, you will be directed to a page where you need to select your interests. Once you ve chosen your interests and clicked Follow, Pinterest will automatically make you follow a few accounts. You can either continue following these people or you can unfollow them. Next you will be redirected to a page where you can edit and create Pinboards.

6 6 After you have created your Pinboards, you can add Pin It to your bookmarks bar. This will make it easy for you to pin pictures to your boards in the future. All you have to do is click on this button whenever you come across a picture on a website that you would like to share through pinning it on your Pinboard. All you have to do is click on Pin It and drag it to your bookmarks bar. 3. Change settings You can change your settings by hovering your mouse over your name, located on the top right hand corner, and clicking on Settings, which appears on the drop down menu.

7 7 If you scroll down you will come across fields where you can change your photo. There are also options to link or unlink from your Facebook and Twitter accounts. To start with, you will automatically be allocated five Pinboards Favourite Places and Spaces; For the Home; Products I Love; My Style; and Books Worth Reading.

8 8 But you can easily create more by using the Add button located at the top of the page. Clicking on this Add button will give you the following options: Add a Pin, Upload a Pin, Create a Board. 4. Edit your boards Once you have created your Pinboards you can start editing them. To do so, click on Edit which will take you to the edit board page.

9 9 Here you can change the title of your board and its description, and you can also adjust contributors. You can allow other people to contribute pins to your Pinboard, but they have to be people that you are following. Make sure you also add a category. Choose one which will suit the pictures you plan to pin on that board. 5. Start pinning Now that your Pinboards are all set up and ready, you can start pinning. You can check your stream by clicking on Pinterest which is located at the top of your browser. When you do this, you are brought to a page where you can see what s being pinned on Pinterest. This shows you what you are pinning, and what other people are pinning. It's like the feed on Twitter or Facebook.

10 10 A repin is just like a retweet. If you want to repin, like or comment on something, simply hover your mouse over the image and the options will appear on the top of it. To comment, click on Comment and leave your message below. If you want to like it, just click on Like. You can repin an image by clicking on the Repin button and choosing the Pinboard that you would like to add it to. You can give it a name, choose whether you want to publish it on Twitter and Facebook or not, and then you finish by clicking on Pin It.

11 11 A repin on Pinterest is like a retweet on Twitter or a share on Facebook. The image you repinned will be published in your stream and added to your Pinboard so that you and your followers can see everything you have pinned on Pinterest. 6. Finding the source If you come across an image on Pinterest you like and you want to find out more about it, simply click on it. It will enlarge and open on a new page. You will find a link at the top right hand corner which will lead straight to the website page where the image came from. 7. How do you pin images If you re browsing on other websites, look for the Pin It button there, as this allows you to pin posts. You can also pin images by using the Pin It button that you installed on your bookmarks bar. If the image you want is not located on a website, you can upload it using the Add button. 8. Following people Once you start using Pinterest, you will come across friends you already know and other new, interesting people to follow.

12 12 You can also invite your other friends to join you at Pinterest. You don t have to follow any person completely. If you want, you can follow just one or a few of their Pinboards. Why it s easy to succeed with Pinterest You don t need many followers to make an impression on Pinterest. When you use any of the big three social media, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you can share your posts only with your followers. For any of these big four to work well, you will need to develop a platform. Here you need to get friends, fans and followers first and only then should you start sharing content. Developing this platform could take a while, especially for newcomers. However, Pinterest has a way round this. Pinterest gives you the Everything option. If you click on this, you can look at everything that has been pinned on Pinterest. You don t need to be friends with a specific person to see their pins with this option. So, in the same way, your content can therefore be exposed to everyone on Pinterest instantly. This feature also means that an image can go viral, even if the person who pinned it doesn t have many followers. When someone looks at your picture and finds it interesting, they can repin it, like it, comment on it and share it with their friends. This will help you get more followers and also increase traffic to your website.

13 13 To allow everybody to see your images, you will need to make one small adjustment to your Pinboard. You will need to edit it and add a category to it. For example, if one of your chosen boards is Books, make sure you place the Pinboard in the Film, Music & Books category. Now every time you pin something in that Pinboard, it will be added to Everything, in the Film, Music & Books category and everybody on Pinterest will be able to see it. If your pin proves to be popular, i.e. it receives many comments, repins, and likes, it will be added to the Popular section of Pinterest, where it will get a lot more exposure. This might help it receive even more repins, likes and comments. So every time you pin something, your aim must be to get it into this section of Pinterest. How to get lots of Followers on Pinterest Remember, you can still get a lot of exposure on Pinterest without many followers. But here are some tips to increase your popularity.

14 14 If you share good content, both your own and other people s, you should see an increase in your number of followers. People will want to regularly check the content you pin on Pinterest. When your followers in turn pin those images, they will appear in the Popular section of Pinterest. Once your content is there, more people will want to connect with you and find out more about your Pinboards. This will increase both your traffic and your number of followers. Other ways to increase the number of followers you have is to follow others. Follow plenty since usually only a fraction of them (about 30%) will follow you back. After a while you can unfollow people who don t follow you, and start following some others. This way you will gradually get more and more followers. Inviting friends is the best way to get many followers. Another option for getting followers is to invite friends to join you on Pinterest. When you do this and they join you on Pinterest, they will automatically follow you. If you have a lot of friends on other social media already, this could help you develop a lot of followers quickly. How to market yourself with Pinterest For a whole week I visited the Popular section of Pinterest three times a day, every day.

15 15 This section contains the images which have been repinned, liked and commented upon many times. I discovered that the most popular images had the same three features. Each one was unique, original and had a description. Some of these descriptions were just names or hashtags, and if there was no description written below then there was a description printed on the image itself. The descriptions complemented the images and made them easier to understand. So if you want your images to be popular and shared frequently on Pinterest, make sure they have these features: 1. Uniqueness The best images on Pinterest are both unique and original. If you take a look at the most popular images and pictures, which are the ones that have been repinned, liked and commented on more than the other pictures, you will see that these pictures are very interesting. They make you stop and observe them more closely. You will always feel like clicking on them and visiting the source to find out more about them. Each of these popular images was shared multiple times because it was catchy and different from most of the other images on Pinterest. This could have been because it was funny, colourful, creative, etc. So if you want to make images that are shared a lot, they must be one of a kind. 2. Originality Most of pictures were also original. They were new they were created specifically to promote the content or product. They weren t taken from Flickr or any other free image service. The people that created these pictures took the time to create original images that really stood out. Whether it was just a free recipe or an expensive product, they were all unique and original images. So next time you take a picture of the product or content you re trying to market, be creative and take an innovative picture which will stand out on Pinterest. The more original and unique your picture is the higher are the chances of it being repinned, liked or commented on.

16 16 3. Description All the popular images had a description that defined them clearly. The description didn t have to be very long. Sometimes it was just one or a few words. For example, one of the pictures I saw was of a couple of cookies and it had the description Chocolate Chip Cookies. This confirmed that the cookie image was of chocolate chip cookies, and suggested that clicking on it would probably lead to a recipe on how to make those delicious biscuits. This sort of information helps increase website traffic. Another picture was of a few beautiful trees in a well-lit forest. It had the description Portugal. This is something that would work for a travel website that is looking to take people to that location. That one word combined with that attractive location told you that this lovely place was in Portugal. By visiting the website you could find out more about it and how to get there. So the description needs to be about talking the picture up. It can be a couple of words long or much longer. 4. Hashtag Hashtags on Pinterest are just like the hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are words which start with a #. For example, if the word book was preceded by #, it would be #book this is a hashtag. Hashtags make it easier for you to find a picture you re looking for. If someone wants to find anything relating to books, all they have to do is type in #book or #books in the search bar, located on the top left, and all the images which have the description #book added to them will be brought up. If you want your images to be found easily, then you must add hashtags to their descriptions. 5. Links Most of the popular images had a link back to the website where you could find out more about them. If it was picture of food, it led to a recipe; if it was a picture of a product, it led to the website where the product was being sold. There were only a few popular pictures that didn t have links,

17 17 and this was because they were just funny pictures or pictures that didn t need a website to help explain them better. 6. Content Many of the links of these popular pictures led to a page where there was content which described the product or the picture. For example, if it was a picture of some food, the content it linked to was a recipe or information that taught the reader how to prepare this food, and if it was a product, like a garment, it directed the reader to a page where you could find out more about it, and how to buy it or make it. 7. Gifts When you add a dollar sign, $, to your image s description and write a price beside it, it automatically becomes a gift and is listed in the gifts section. When people want to look for gifts, they can consult the image and the price, which is placed at the right corner of the image, and think about buying it. How to implement these techniques It s not hard to get your images into the popular section of Pinterest. These steps will get you started. As we ve seen, being successful with Pinterest is all about creating unique and original images to go with your product. If your product is food, clothes or something that s good on the eye, it s all ready to be photographed. You only need to be a little imaginative and create pictures that are unique and distinctive from the rest. But if your product is something that s not so attractive visually, or can t directly be associated with pictures, you need to be more creative and learn how to associate your product or service with an image. Pinterest is all about coming up with pictures that your audience will like and be able to associate with. You need to think of new ways to make your products appear better through pictures. People want great pictures to pin on their Pinboards. This will help you get multiple pins and your image will

18 18 automatically be sent to the Popular section of Pinterest, where yet more users can repin them.. These tips will help you get started with promoting yourself or your business with Pinterest:- 1. Create unique and original images Regular pictures won t do you any good. You need to create unique and original pictures, which people will enjoy looking at and will want to repin. If your product is naturally attractive, then you already have an advantage, but make sure you take a top quality photo of it. Make sure it has a good background and that the overall quality of the image is outstanding too. But what if your product isn t pretty? It s not really a problem. You will just need to think of an original slant to it. For example, let s say you re marketing a very fast printer. How can you make this creative? One way would be to take a picture of your printer, airbrush it and give it the legs of a cheetah, or colour it yellow with black spots, just like a cheetah. This will give the impression that your printer prints as fast as a cheetah runs! If you put yourself in your audience s shoes and think the right way, you will be able to come up with scores of ideas to help promote your product. 2. Use descriptions and hashtags Make your keywords into hashtags by placing a # before the word. You might create an amazing, unique picture which will help your product stand out, but if you don t give it a description, it won t make any sense. Always make sure you give at least a short description that complements your product. Writing the description is just like writing a headline it needs to attract attention. Headlines work best when they generate curiosity or state a benefit or do both. For example, for a lamp picture you could use a description such as A beautiful lamp for a beautiful home, or Light up your beautiful home with this bright lamp. For your printer picture you could have a description like Zoom, zoom, zoom or A quick printer for quick people. You could also place hashtags in your descriptions so that your images appear when those hashtags are typed into the search.

19 19 For instance, you could write your lamp description as A beautiful #lamp for a beautiful #home. You could write the printer description as A #quick #printer for quick #people. As you can see, it s best to convert the keywords into hashtags as these are the ones that will probably be searched for. 3. Links and content On Pinterest you have two choices: you can either upload a picture and add it to your Pinboard, or add the picture to a webpage and then pin it. The second option is always the best one, since when people see your picture they will usually want to know where it comes from so they can find out more. If you re selling this product, it will be great if it leads to information on how to purchase it. It could also lead to a blog post where this product is described really well. 4. Gifts Making your pins into gifts can make it easy to sell them. If the picture leads to a link where the product can be bought, you could go one step further and make this into a gift. This way people can know how much your product costs as soon as they see it. All you will need to do is add the $ sign and write the price next to it in the description. This will display the price. People can look at the picture, the description and the price and quickly think about buying the product. If you follow the above tips, you should be able to market yourself successfully with Pinterest and use it to sell products or generate traffic to your websites and blogs and create powerful brands. Some creative ways to use Pinterest Pinterest gives you a lot of freedom to use your creativity effectively to market your product. Here are some creative ways to market yourself with Pinterest. Many of these methods are already being successfully used by big brands. 1. Create catalogues with Pinboards First create a Pinboard and label it according to the products you would like to pin on it. Next visit your website and pin the relevant products to your Pinboard and give each product a description and a price.

20 20 2. Hold competitions Competitions can help create a lot of buzz. Invite people to take part in competitions and offer prizes in the form of free gifts or coupons. Think of a photo competition that would interest your target audience. Let people know that the best picture wins the competition. Ask them to pin their picture to their Pinboard and add a unique hashtag specified by you to its description. This prize will encourage people to take part in the competition and the hashtag will help you keep track of the pictures and the participants. This can create a lot of buzz, as people love winning prizes. 3. Run offers Run offers on a regular basis on Pinterest. Create a unique image that specifies an offer and make it exclusive to Pinterest and pin it onto your boards. This will encourage your followers to share it with their followers and to spread a lot of interest in your product. The above methods are just a few ways to market yourself with Pinterest. If you observe what other people and companies are doing, you can come up with many ways of implementing and promoting your products in a similar manner. All it takes is a little bit of creative and open thinking. Pinterest isn t just reserved for big brands and pretty products. Anything can be promoted with Pinterest. All you need to do is think of interesting ways to associate your product with pictures pictures that will help it stand out and attract a lot of attention. About the author Mitt Ray is a content marketer, social media marketer and white paper writer. He is the author of the book White Paper Marketing. He blogs about social media on Social Marketing Writing and white papers on The White Paper Blog. He is the director of Imittcopy where he provides white paper writing, copywriting, inbound marketing and social media marketing services. He is also the Founder of Social Marketing Writing. You can contact him on mitt@socialmarketingwriting.com. Connect with Mitt on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ and Pinterest.

21 21 Social Marketing Writing Social Marketing Writing is an online magazine where the topics of social media marketing, inbound marketing and other forms of marketing are covered extensively. More tips on how to use Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other tools effectively are covered there. You can find out more by visiting the website or by contacting Mitt on Connect with us Facebook Twitter More free resources: The White Paper Blog The White Paper Blog is a blog that focuses on white papers and content marketing. Here you will learn everything about what white papers are, how to write them, how to promote them and how to use them as part of your inbound marketing strategy. For more information click here. Understand and Write White Papers Understand and Write White Papers is a white paper on how to write white papers. As the name suggests, this white paper teaches you how to write powerful white papers which can be used effectively in your inbound marketing strategy to spread expertise, generate leads and get more newsletter subscribers. You can download the white paper by visiting this page. Copyright 2012 Mitt Ray and Social Marketing Writing. All Rights Reserved.