With so many different forms of social media, it can be a bit intimidating to decide which one is the best fit for your needs as a business. Pinterest provides a way to interact with your customers on a more personal and unique way. The trick is understanding how pinterest works, and being able to create a personal connection with pinners.
Creativity
Pinterest is about individual’s lifestyles. This means that you don’t want to use your pinterest as a billboard with constant advertisements for your business. No one wants to follow constant ads. Instead, pinners are interested in unique, fun pins that speak to their lifestyles and interests. This means discovering how your product or service fits into that lifestyle, and communicating that through your profile.
It is important to find ways to create boards and pins that reflect your company values and culture, and provide visually attractive, creative content. This may mean you have entire boards that seemingly have nothing to do with what your business actually offers.
Take Starbuck’s Pinterest. They include specific coffee boards about “Espresso”, but also have a page about “Inspiring Spaces” which features island and outdoor locations that may not seem to have a direct relationship with coffee or tea. Yet those pins do speak to customers who enjoy the inspiration of spaces, and may find Starbuck’s to be one of those spaces. This board speaks to a particular lifestyle.
Content
Another way of connecting with your followers is to be sure to create pins that provide quality content. Pinterest is highly visual, so image is everything. Without an interesting image, and good tagline, your pin will not draw viewers interest. Once you have their interest, be sure that the actual content you are linking to is something that is interesting and of good quality.
This means you need to be sure that the pin you have included has a useful link. There is nothing more frustrating than finding an interesting looking pin and getting an error message when you attempt to go to the link. A good habit to form is deleting old pins that no longer have a useful link attached, and replacing them with links to the updated product or website.
Engagement
This goes back to not only creating new pins, but repinning other images and links. You should be interacting with other users who have similar interests. Remember to comment and like, as well as repin. Be highly active, and make your Pinterest presence known.
Pinterest is also a great opportunity to see what your followers are interested in. Pinterest allows users to follow specific boards, as opposed to the whole company’s profile. This means a specific board might have more followers than your business’ actual profile. This is a great opportunity for you to see what content is working, and what might not be, and will inspire your creative side.
Your initial reaction may be that your business is not Starbucks and has no place on a visual social media platform. And perhaps that is true, but think about what products you sell, or what sort of things your audience is interested in. Even if it is not a tangible product, but instead a service you provide, there are still visual ways of representing that through images, infographics, and articles. And just like with any other social media platform, the more you work with Pinterest, the more you’ll learn what works, and what doesn’t, for your followers.