While photo-based social networking website Pinterest may not appear to have any use or applicability to your company, all it takes is a little creativity to see how you can harness its power for promotion.
What can I actually get out of Pinterest?
That depends on the size of your company, and the amount of funds you have for advertising. Most larger companies use Pinterest for ‘building brand awareness’, and pay large sums for promoted posts, while others use it strictly for entertainment or PR purposes.
Most medium to small business however, use Pinterest simply to drive traffic to their websites, in order to acquire new customers. This requires no investment of money. For this article we will focus on methods geared to achieving this goal.
Check the Competition
You never know what brilliant ideas & methods you might be missing out on unless you take a look at what other business are doing on Pinterest. That is not to say that one should not be original, but it does say that doing things which are already proven successful is a surefire way to achieving your own success. Examine the types of posts that your competitors are making, and how much engagement they are getting. Then do this with several others, and make an evaluation.
Get Photos
If you already have plenty of non-copyrighted photos then this step will be unnecessary. If you don’t however, you will need to acquire your Pinterest ammunition by acquiring photos from a third party.
The type of photos you post is entirely at your discretion. You can choose a conservative route where you only post photos which are closely related to your business, products, services and overall industry. Or you can take a more ‘social’ approach and also post photos which are generally interesting, entertaining or personal. The latter when done in moderation does help garner a larger audience, as that is what unites people together in social networking websites.
Free Photos
http://www.freeimages.com/
https://unsplash.com/
http://www.morguefile.com/
Premium photos
The better the photo the more engagement it will get. If your budget allows for it you should acquire professional photos at a premium:
http://www.istockphoto.com/
http://www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml
Use Analytics
The most important aspect of any social media campaign is to collect and analyze data on the performance of your posts. By this you can know the types of posts and times which are not getting engagement, and which posts are; thereby enabling you to continuously enhance the effectiveness of your actions.
Pinterest or Instagram?
Pinterest itself is quite similar (to a marketer’s viewpoint) to social networking site Instagram, with most of the same principals applying to both. For the sake of efficiency it behooves the maketer/promoter to pick and focus on one.
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