We will tell you what Pinterest is, how to promote your account in it and whether it is worth doing it.
What is Pinterest
Pinterest is a service app that combines a social network where people share images (like on Instagram) and a digital scrapbook for collecting and sorting interesting ideas from the web.
Pinterest s interface is a collection of “boards” (catalogs for images and links) in which you can store any content you like. People collect in them ideas for decorating an apartment, rare and beautiful flowers, films that must be watched in the future, or places that must be visited in the coming year. Variations are endless, because the service does not restrict users in any way. Pinterest boards are free space where you can store whatever you want.
From here, there are a lot of opportunities to promote and develop almost any business or personal profile. Indeed, you can place any media content on Pinterest, and under it you can drive products from your personal store, and dishes from a restaurant, hotel numbers, just beautiful images with links to the main site, and so on.
Plus, Pinterest has many ways to interact with users. These include comments under saved posts and private messages. So you can communicate with the audience just like in other social networks. It would seem that all this versatility of the social network opens up many avenues for development, but in fact it is quite difficult to promote a profile on Pinterest.
What audience is there on Pinterest?
Women. There are a lot of women from all over the planet who save or add millions of pins to the service every day (as they call content units on Pinterest), coupled with more than one and a half million big brands selling their goods there in a beautiful wrapper for local aesthetes.
More than 300 million people visit the site every month. For 10 years of Pinterest s existence, the audience has generated over 175 billion pins. And these numbers continue to grow, covering more and more countries. Including growing popularity in Russia, especially among girls.
The social network is mainly used by young people, people from 18 to 24 years old. Young aesthetes collecting cool ideas for home, relaxation, tattoos or handicrafts. Less often, romantics who collect beautiful quotes, unread books, photographs of their favorite stars, etc. on their boards. And almost all of them live in English-speaking countries.
Is it worth spending time and resources promoting on Pinterest at all?
For Russia, Pinterest is not the largest and most reliable source of profit. Trying to get promoted on this social network is too risky for most businesses. Resources are likely to be wasted due to specific audiences and their specific interests. But there is a small chance your business will fit perfectly on Pinterest.
This is how the audience of the service looks like and its habits. Compare it with your target audience. Perhaps there are matches:
Pinterest users often use the service to make plans. For example, where to go, what to give to relatives for the holidays, how to decorate a bathroom, etc. So firms selling furniture, renovating or decorating should definitely consider creating at least a couple of boards on Pinterest.
If you believe the polls, more than half of social network users make a decision to buy something after analyzing the pins. Branded products are also in demand among Pinterest fans and have a significant impact on purchasing decisions.
More than half of the women who use social media have found brands of cosmetics and personal care products there that they would hardly have noticed in the store and never seen on other social networks. So, boutique beauty brands should also register their brand on Pinterest.
Almost 70% of users are guided by their own “boards” when choosing products in online stores.
More than 35% of social network users have high income.
Almost 90% of users have made a purchase using Pinterest at least once. That is, the social network (one of the pins or several) for them was a key factor when buying any product at least once in their life.
If your target audience is women from all over the world who love to plan and buy something beautiful, then it is worth considering developing your Pinterest profile. Polls show high conversion rates and the prospects of social network users as a source of income.
But this applies to global brands. A suburban bakery from Pinterest will be neither hot nor cold.
Examples of Successful Entrepreneurship Development of a Pinterest Profile
The company that promoted the Tattoo Sketches website had been actively developing the brand profile in Pinterest for several months and was able to achieve impressive audience growth (about 100,000 new visitors), and subsequently the growth continued by inertia.
SEO experts in the European segment of the Internet note that creating landing pages for the requests of the Pinterest audience significantly increases traffic. Moreover, the level of the solvent audience is growing. This has been noted by many resources that have increased their income after creating a profile on Pinterest.
5 Steps to Successful Marketing on Pinterest
The creation and development of a Pinterest account can be roughly divided into 5 simple steps.
Getting ready for work
Build yourself a foundation to promote your brand on Pinterest.
Create a business account. It will open up two new possibilities:
Dedicated statistics showing the age of the audience interacting with your Pins and other data related to profile visitors;
launching advertising campaigns to promote individual Pins or “boards” within the social network.
Create a content plan that acts as a roadmap to guide you as you populate your profile with new content. This will help avoid stagnation at different stages of profile development.
Take a look in advance on the social network. See what similar brands are posting, prepare whiteboards with relevant content.
Publishing relevant thematic pins
Pins need to be tailored for search queries and user preferences.
For search engines
We must comply with the technical requirements of the social network. Images on Pinterest must comply with the resolution and format described in the recommendations of the service. All Pins must contain keywords that people use to search. They are inserted into titles and descriptions: they will appear on Google, and it will be easier to find them in the Pinterest itself. Also, links to the main site are attached to the pins to increase conversions and conversions.
In order not to accidentally increase the number of “bounces” on the main site, add only relevant links to pins that lead to the product / object / product that is displayed in the pin, and not to the main page.
Encourage people to go to the main site. Leave calls to action right in the pin description. Place your brand logo on your images (there is a separate menu for this in the Pinterest dashboard).
For user preferences
Pins for the audience depend on the preferences of the target audience. It is important to make emotional contact with her, satisfy needs (aesthetic and pragmatic), adapt the content to the devices used by people, etc.
Experts recommend:
Do not use human faces in pins. Advertise your product without using other people.
Do not add faded, low-contrast images to the site. The presence of two or more dominant colors increases the attractiveness of pins for the bulk of social network users.
Do not use photos or images with a lot of white space as pins.
Do not overdo it with cold tones in the design of the “boards”.
Add the Pin It button on the site
If you have a business account, you can add a Pin It button to your main site. It s a small red tag with the Pinterest logo. By clicking on it, the user can attach any image from the page to the “board” in his Pinterest profile.
Fans of the social network use this shortcut and regularly share images and links from other resources. This will make life easier for them and increase the chances that they will actually share your content with them.
Using Pin It has a positive effect on the number of impressions of the post in recommendations from other users.
To add Pin It to your site, you must submit an appropriate installation application and confirm ownership of the site.
Choosing an ad type and setting it up
Advertising is available for accounts not registered in the Russian Federation, and is needed for international promotion.
Like other social media platforms, Pinterest has built-in content promotion tools. In particular, advertising of Pins in user feeds after setting up targeting. There are three types of ads on Pinterest.
1. Regular advertising of pins
This is one pin with advertising text in PNG or JPEG format and no more than 10 MB in size. This type of advertising is needed to increase brand awareness and attract a new audience that is not yet familiar with your company / business at all. Clicking on this pin leads the interested user to the landing page attached to the advertising post.
2. Advertising carousel
A relatively fresh format that appeared in 2018. It looks like a regular pin, but in fact it contains several pieces of content at once, between which you can navigate using swipes.
Each carousel item can have a unique description and link. This way you can place up to 5 different landing pages in one ad unit.
3. Other formats
Video pins. These are images that turn into videos after clicking on them. Similar to short pre-rolls on YouTube.
Pins are goods. By clicking on them, you can buy the advertised product / product.
Application Pins. By clicking on them, the user is taken to a page in the App Store or Google Play to install the advertised program.
Launching an advertising campaign
We set a Pinterest Tag on our site to track the behavior of users who arrived from Pinterest.
In the settings, we select the goal of promotion: increasing brand awareness, increasing the number of views, increasing the amount of traffic to the main site, or increasing the number of installs of the promoted application.
We set the budget for the advertising campaign (how much you can spend per day, and how much will be spent on the campaign as a whole).
We create an advertising “board”. It will store the promoted content.
We set up targeting (set the characteristics of the target audience).
We indicate where the advertisement will be placed (in the “Browse” menu or in the search results).
We add keywords and categories in which potential customers are most often looking.
At the end, we indicate the start date of the advertising campaign and the date of its end.
Analyzing statistics
You can connect Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics to Pinterest to collect additional data.
Built-in statistics display data on the popularity of individual pins. Which of them are viewed most often, which are opened, which are shared, which are added to their “boards” and so on.
Also in the built-in statistics, you can see the characteristics of the audience. Age, interests, place of residence, device used. A standard set of data required for target audience analysis.
Use the received data in your work. Tailor your content to the dominant paying user groups, take into account their interests and make Pins look like those that your target audience has already liked in the past.
Instead of a conclusion
Despite its low popularity in the Russian Federation, Pinterest remains a promising direction for some categories of business. True, paid advertising mechanisms cannot be used for promotion on the territory of Russia. If these restrictions do not bother you, and you clearly see how you could promote your services on Pinterest, then this platform is worth a try.