Pinterest continues to grow and grow. Many brands are jumping on Pinterest looking to build brand awareness and drive traffic back to their sites. Pinterest can be a easy platform to gain spread brand messaging and product images quickly, as opposed to other social media platforms. 80% of pins on Pinterest are repinned, while only 5% of tweets on Twitter are retweeted. The challenge is to fill pinboards with content that will get repinned. Here are our top 5 tips to get your brand's image repinned:
Don't Upload, Pin: When you upload content to a pinboard, you are missing out. If your goal is to get people from Pinterest to your site, they cannot do that without a link. Always pin images from your site instead of uploading. If you want to pin photos that are not on your site, start a blog to hold your photo content and pin from there. This way not only will your site's URL be featured at the top of the pin which helps with awareness, but users can click through to your site.
Be Bold & Brief: Whether you are creating images for your pinboards or scouring the internet for cool, repinnable images, chose high contrast images. If your image includes text, make sure it is brief and bold.
Pin Faster: By highlighting the text and image you wish to pin and clicking the Pin It bookmarket, the text will automatically be incoporated into the comments of your pin. For pinners pressed for time, this is a valuable tool to use.
Use hashtags: A tip for social media marketing that seems to work everywhere. Hashtags work on Pinterest just like they do on Twitter, adding hashtags to the comments on your pin makes them easier to find in search. Contests are also being conducted on Pinterest using hashtags.
Price it: If you represent an online retailer, always be sure to put a dollar sign in front of your price. This way, your pin will be pulled into the Pinterest gift section, which has a button in the navigation bar on the Pinterest homepage. The price will also appear in a banner across the left hand corner of your image.
Betsy Smith is Senior Social Media Strategist at Flightpath.
Hi, thanks for the post.
I have a question re: hashtags. Unfortunately they do not work like Twitter. I created a hashtag - I was going to ask my community to submit their own pins by using this specific hashtag - but nothing comes up when I search for it. According to other forums, this is because Pinterest ranks by relevance, which makes it hard to plan. I have no idea if it will work!
Can anyone help?
Pinterest is still evolving so currently the it's a little clunky for search and contests. Like Betsy says it's largely a manual process to track entries to contests or relevant hashtags.
We're hopeful as they release the API, engagement opportunities will become more seamless.
We recommend having your audience comment with a link to their pins; you can then create your own board of repinned content from your audience. This process would eliminate the risk Betsy mentions allowing you to ultimately control what content appears on your boards.
Another way to run Pinterest promotions and monitor for pins is to ask users to email a link to the board or pin, like Lands' End Canvas does with their promotions. Or, other brands are experimenting with asking users to follow them and then adding each follower as a contributor, so that they can pin to a brand's board. The risk of this of course is that by adding anyone as a contributor it makes it difficult to control content.
Cheers for the tips