Pinterest is a Visual Search Engine
Pinterest is all about search and not strictly speaking a social media application. It’s more of a visual search engine or social sharing tool. A platform with an abundance of great content. It’s known as a resource for inspiring home décor, fashion, makeup, graphic design and even educational content.
Pinterest can be utilised to drive large volumes of targeted traffic to your website. Or potential customers who are actively looking for solutions to the problem that your business solves.
It’s hard work and not really a place for chatting, but it’s worth the time. The algorithm is called ‘Smart First’and works on these four factors:
- Domain quality. You need to verify website and have a business account, then you can enable rich pins.
- Pin quality – get repins with great titles / creative – all about beautiful imagery
- Pinner quality – the person pinning – wants to see you are optimum posting (around 4-6 times a day is ideal), pinning popular content
- Relevance – that you are using all the keywords related to ‘branding’ for example.
So how are you going to get your pins noticed?
- Pin quality is very important so images need to be exciting to make them ‘pinable’.
- Creative should be aesthetically appealing. Poor product shots won’t cut it!
- Optimise pins for mobile: Vertically orientated, with text that’s easy to read on a phone.
- Ensure your pins are thoughtful and compelling.
- Clarity is more important than cleverness when it comes to being found by search. Great descriptions are also very important
It’s worth investing some initial effort though as pinterest images are timeless. 30% of clicks are 30 days or more after image was first pinned. So it’s not the best platform for product promo codes or current news and timing is very different on Pinterest than other platforms. You need to prepare any seasonal pins well in advance. Christmas imagery is very popular around December and is likely to be seen again in subsequent years, so don’t completely rule out all seasonal content.
To optimise your Pinterest posts for search you will need to specify descriptions and add keywords. These need to be embedded in the pin.
Pinterest is different the other social platforms and requires a unique approach
- Follower numbers don’t matter, apart from social proof as pins are seen by everyone, not just those following you.
- Content is much more important than conversations.
- Focused on the future
- More like Pocket or Evernote than Twitter and Facebook. Used to save things for later, like project research or moodboard building.
- It’s not about engagement metrics but great for driving traffic to websites and selling!
Hubspot and Buffer are service based businesses doing well on Pinterest - More focus on Sales than the other social media platforms
- 2/3 of content on Pinterest is brand content (products etc)
- 93% use Pinterest to plan for purchases
- 87% of Pinterest users have bought products
- Shares and clicks are what is important
So it’s important to optimise your pins to get them in front of the right people as there is a lot of competition, but also huge potential!
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