You might be wondering where to start with Pinterest, or even whether you should. If you have a product or e-commerce business, it’s safe to say you definitely should have a Pinterest strategy. Boosting interest in your Pinterest is simple but it can be time consuming. So we thought we’d compile our Pinterest tips for small businesses to get the platform working for you while driving traffic to your website and boosting your sales.

1. Why bother using Pinterest?

• There are a staggering 175m active Pinterest users every month!

• Around 85% of Pinners have made a purchase due to something they’ve seen on Pinterest.

• Once the stomping ground of knitters, bakers and gardeners, Millennials now use Pinterest as much as Instagram.

2. Where do I start?

People buy from people they like. So your Pinterest profile, boards and pins all need to be on brand. But they also need to ooze intrigue, lateral thinking and passion for your product. Pinterest is a fabulous platform to demonstrate the myriad layers of character, thoughts, insight and behind the scenes detail of your product or business. Imagine pins that show-off your offering as well as things, places, foods that inspire it, for example. Let this brand personality sparkle through your boards, raising your brand awareness and build your brand identity in one swoop.

3. Consider the content mix

People don’t follow companies on Pinterest, they follow boards. Work to make yours wonderful moodboards of useful and compelling material. Aim for ⅓ your content : ⅔ other people’s content. You are sharing ideas, inspiration, lists, recipes, case studies… anything that you or your target market might want to happen across while browsing.

4. Be bold

Keep your images lively and vertical. Shelve the arty black and white shots; they just don’t compete on Pinterest. Using free design tools like Canva can really lift your game; use the Pinterest templates to format your images professionally. Use board cover photos and Featured boards to make the page look slick.

5. Boring board names

We would never advocate being boring, but we do suggest you do everything possible to be found. Type the board name you are considering using into the search function and see what suggestions are offered to you. Use one of these. Use adjectives to increase their appeal and assign categories to your boards for better user experience.

6. Details, details…

Pinterest is possibly the best social media tool for SEO benefits. It is generous with caption space, so with your SEO head on, write long and detailed captions using all the keywords you can squeeze in to the box. This is your sales opportunity. Every board needs a description that’s useful to both users and search engines.

7. To hashtag or not to hashtag?

Hashtags are now live on Pinterest (they aren’t on Facebook, for anyone still using them there, btw). If you do decide to use them, one or two is plenty.

8. Think about the link

Don’t simply drag and drop your beautifully made posts from your desktop. Pin material that is already on your site, or at least online somewhere. You’ll need to input the link manually if your material isn’t hosted anywhere online.

9. Pinterest is different

Pinterest works differently to other social channels. Pinners aren’t fed the most popular content, they are fed the content that Pinterest believes they will like the most. See how it updates your homepage after you’ve finished a pinning flurry… However, sharing more popular content will attract people to your boards like moths to a flame, so consider this when re-pinning other people’s content.

10. Little and often

Scared that Pinterest is going to drag you into another social media time warp? The joy of Pinterest is that pinning little and often is more effective than a 2-hour slog. 10-15 minutes a day should give you enough time to post fresh content and re-pin snippets. If you post too many items in one go, your followers will get an overload of notifications.

11. Simple analytics

As with all social media, unless you keep an eye on the analytics and adjust your strategy accordingly, you risk wasting your energy. There is a wealth of data on the site, but if you’re strapped for time, just keep checking your ‘monthly unique viewers’ and ‘average monthly engaged’ numbers are going up. Don’t worry about the follower number ; it’s as irrelevant here as on the other social channels. Ensure the Pinterest pixel is embedded on your site so you can track traffic from the channel too.

And finally… as always, we heartily recommend you toot your tune! Let everyone know you’re on Pinterest by announcing it on your other channels, adding the Pinterest button to your site, and adding it to newsletters and email sign offs.

Need help compiling a Pinterest strategy? Let’s talk.