The Wonderful World of Pinterest

I’ll admit, Pinterest is addictive. I will not admit to how many hours I spend consuming an array of snacks, and pondering “to pin or not to pin? I guess I’ll just heart it instead.” I’ve always recognized the potential this social platform has to be beneficial in Public Relations. There are endless ways to use Pinterest to better your brand and client relationships. Here are a few tricks of the trade from yours truly.

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Pin Vocab – Pinterest is a social network that allows users to visually share, curate, and discover new interests by posting, also known as ‘pinning,’ images or videos to their own or others’ pin-boards (i.e. a collection of ‘pins,’ usually with a common theme). Users can either upload images from their computer or pin things they find on the web using the Pinterest bookmarklet, ‘Pin It’ button, or copying a URL. One can browse through the items other users have pinned and ‘like or heart,’ ‘repin’ or ‘comment’ on them. You can invite members to pin for your boards, as to add more content-user interaction. There are about 70 million registered users and about 54 million new pins added to the site everyday. It’s only growing.

Key Uses with Pinterest to improve your company’s PR image:

Pin blog articles or other Web pages – The latest feature on Pinterest is their pinned article layout. Instead of just an image being pinned that links to the story, now Pinterest articles have a headline, author, story description and photo that all show on one pin.

Untitled2 Image from Pinterest Blog

Pin with colleagues around the world – The great thing about Pinterest is that you can tag people in pins they might find interesting. You can share ideas for an event or new product quickly with one @ sign. Not only can you share a pin, but commenting back and forth on it is also a feature. There is a comment box under each image for easy communication. Sharing and interacting with others, even if they are far away, can enhance relationships in a creative way.

Keep posts visual – Always pin images for your client or business that are visually enticing. Pinterest is a pictorial site, which means having beautiful pictures; whether they be travel photos, funny pictures from a craft gone wrong, or professional photos of your product — and combining them with a well-written blog article, product, or how-to, is guaranteed to be very successful. Pinterest users love pinning beautiful pictures, it is the basis of the site. Users will repin something if they see value in the image without even seeing what the click through links to.

Untitled3 Chart from KissMetrics.com

Don’t use obvious promotion –
Using Pinterest to sell products in a non-blatant way is a great way to get your business or client’s name out there. If you add Pinterest content, your followers will see striking visuals for a great product. They will then use the click through link if they want to buy the product. There is also an option for businesses to promote their pins, which means paying for people to see the pins they post. I think consumers like having the choice of whether or not they are interested enough in an item to go to the website.

Show what’s going on in the industryCreating boards for public relations, marketing, business or whatever it may be; lends a great opportunity to share information about your industry to other people on the job, or those outside a particular career realm. This is also a good place to proudly display infographics!

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Put a pin on all of your social media channels – Be sure to have a “Pin It” clickable link on all sites. This makes it incredibly easy for a consumer to directly take a product from a business’ website and pin it on their own board. When something gets pinned, that means more eyeballs through the site, which is always a good thing when it comes to sales.

Contests – Many companies use Pinterest to garner more interest in a particular brand. For example, Victoria’s Secret sends out emails saying that if people make a “Pink Board via Pinterest” (Pink is one of their clothing brands) their board could be chosen for a Pink vacation, or another select prize. Generally, contest guidelines require users to pin a certain amount of images from the business’ direct site, creating more content circulation for them.

There are many more tools out there to enhance your Pinterest experience. Using these tips, you can create fun consumer relatable content that is sure to drive more traffic to your business or a client’s. Pinterest is the secret to success in interacting with target audiences and getting information to the public in an unobtrusive manner. Get pinning!

By Alyssa Worley, Account Executive