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Guide To Start Using Pinterest For Your Small Business
Written by: Rhea Ghosh, Executive Intern
6 Steps to Creating your own Business Account on Pinterest
Creating a Pinterest business account is super easy and completely free!
- Start by signing up with your name and using your business email address (so everything is better organized). When picking a username for your profile, choose your business name and try fitting it into the 14 character limit.
- Add your company’s location and important details about your business to better connect with your audience.
- Finish your profile by filling out all the info and using keywords in your bio to describe your business.
- Make sure your website is linked for people to easily click the link and drive traffic to your website.
- Remember to claim all your websites — including Etsy page — and all other business social accounts. This ensures that your name and profile picture appears on all your content. It’s super simple and worth the effort! The Digital Decluttered blog has a great article on why claiming your website is important and how to do it!
- Your business account is ready! Don’t forget to read till the end to find out how to keep engagement up and a daily Pinterest checklist to ensure your Pinterest account continues to grow!!
4 Steps for Creating Pinterest Boards for your Small Business
Want to create aesthetically pleasing boards for your company but unsure on how to start? We got you! Boards are a great way to show off products and drive traffic to your company's website or blog.
- Start by creating 5-10 boards that are relevant to your company’s niche – start with adding fresh graphics that embody your company’s mission and add informative descriptions incorporating specific keywords that describe the content posted.
- NFC TIP: Create a secret ‘inspo’ board that only can see where you can store inspiration content to create and visualize a board before putting it out to the world!
- Optimize your boards by creating board titles that attract your niche market. This also helps Pinterest understand your content and push it to the right people.
- Showcase products and promote website content by creating fresh and engaging pins. A fresh pin is essentially fresh content. Pinterest favors new and engaging content created uniquely by you!
- Create separate boards for the different areas of your business. Ultimately your business profile should be easy and organized for your users to navigate when visiting. Creating different boards for each brand helps the brand stand out with its own individual brand colors and attract the niche clients it’s looking for.
- NFC Tip: Fresh content that you create yourself is what Pinterest prefers (content you created rather than re-pinning someone else’s content). So create a content plan to continue updating your page.
Tips for Creating Pins
Recommendations to Start You Off
- Pinterest seems to favor vertical pics that are 1000×1500. Using a Pinterest graphic template on Canva gives you the perfect pinterest image size of 735 x 1102 which is easy to use and more accessible to those who can’t adjust image sizes.
- Scroll through your pinterest and create a “secret board” where all your pinterest inspiration will live to help you curate content that will stand out.
- Create a Canva account and use your own photos to create an engaging pin about your business using your brand colors and fonts. To learn more about Canva, check out this blog post!
NFC Tip: Make sure to have a catchy headline to grab your audience in. Your pin description should be a carefully curated sentence about your content using keywords. Make sure to add relevant hashtags at the end of your descriptions to optimize your keywords!
What to Avoid When Creating Pins
- Due to the sizing of square and horizontal pics it can look out of place when scrolling through pinterest. Using the correct sizing helps your content look more aesthetic and common on pinterest.
- Spelling mistakes! If you don’t take the time to proofread your content multiple times people will not click on your pin!
- Choosing a font that’s hard to read- when choosing fonts for your pins make sure it aligns with your brand and it is easy to read!
- Forgetting a pin description! Having a good pin description is key for Pinterest!!
Optimizing your Pin Strategy
- Focus on consistently posting relevant and high quality pins daily and remember to pin your own content first before sharing others content!
- Make sure your pin stands out! It should grab the attention of others, otherwise pins get lost in a sea of pictures. A great strategy is going through your pinterest and pointing out the pins that stand out to you. Take note of that and create content that would grab your attention. Remember the energy you put out is the energy you get back!
- Search Engine Optimization is key with Pinterest. Because Pinterest is a search engine it’s important to curate perfect keyworded pin descriptions so Pinterest can understand what your pin is about and therefore push it out your niche audience in turn reaching more people.
Keyword Targeting
- A strong keyword description is essential for boosting your pin. Pinterest discovers pins through keywords and pin descriptions. Utilizing these tools are powerful for organic growth and great for strategy.
- Make sure there’s a strong Call to Action (CTA) within the first three lines of the keyword description.
- Make it conversational! And add hashtags in the description and at the end of the description.
- Keywords are all about targeting, so know your audience and create content for them.
Affiliate Links
- Affiliate links on Pinterest, you can either link your product to brands’ websites or drive traffic to an affiliate website to convert people from that site and in turn pay a commission to the affiliate website. If you want to learn step by step on how to use affiliate links on Pinterest and why you should be using them, the Grow and Glow blog has a great article on it!
Engagement
- Engagement on Pinterest is crucial to growing your business and driving traffic to your website and sales. Engaging with your followers and other accounts as much as possible is so important to growing your pinterest business account.
Analytics
- Fresh pins are the best way for creators and businesses to get the most out of their pinterest strategy as pinterest highly prefers fresh pins from businesses. As repinned content no longer counts towards your analytics.
- Use keywords in more than just pin titles and descriptions make sure to include keywords in your profile title, profile description, board titles and descriptions, and pin graphics!
- When understanding pinterest analytics, keywords are always key (as they are with every platform)! Pinning fresh content to relevant boards with the right key words describing the “mood” of the board helps Pinterest understand who to show your content to.
Top 3 Apps for Social Media & Business Management
Buffer/ Hootsuite
These social media management platforms offer an array of tools that benefit your overall social media strategy. Buffer and Hootsuite automatically schedules and posts content to your platforms so you never forget to post daily! Pre loading content is so easy and quick and will save you a lot of time and money!!
Canva
Canva is an amazing tool to design your own engaging pins and as well thousands of templates to choose from and make your own! To learn more about Canva, check out this blog post!
Tailwind
Tailwind is a management platform for Instagram and Pinterest. But let’s talk about the benefits of this tool for Pinterest. Design beautiful pins right from the platform and schedule them to reach the right people by using Tailwinds tools to attract the right people to your account. If your business is primarily present in Pinterest, Tailwind is the tool for you!
NFC Tip: Hootsuite is definitely on the more expensive side but Buffer is a great cost alternative option and offers the same features as Hootsuite! Tailwind is an excellent tool if you’re using the platform as a primary social media platform for your business.
Weekly Engagement Checklist
- Batching content is so important when it comes to pinterest. Posting daily can be tedious and take up alot of time. Taking time out of your week to create, batch and schedule content for 1-2 weeks makes it so much easier to keep up with your pinterest strategy!
- Brainstorm pin titles and descriptions for new content each week
- Create 5-7 fresh pin graphics
- Check your analytics to understand what content is performing well and what isn’t performing well.
- Research and write rich keyworded descriptions
- Schedule at least one pin a day
- Create and post a pin!
