The World Wide Web is just that – World and Wide. This means that you have to make your business stand out from the crowd, for people to notice you. We’ve all used social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to promote our business, but did you know that you can use Pinterest too?
Pinterest was originally founded as an online application to distribute information (particularly images) quickly and easily, but mainly to inspire. It allows users to save images and ideas in different categories and follow other like-minded people and ideas, sharing and saving ideas and inspiration. When you pin something to one of your boards, the advantage is that people who are following you will see your pins on their main Pinterest feed. For business, though, this is vital. When you click on an image in your Pinterest feed, you will notice that the image or story enlarges. When you click again, you are redirected to the particular company’s website, that created that board or pin.
Wolfgang Digital (a top Dublin-based digital marketing agency) carried out a study and deduced that website traffic gained via Pinterest business pages engaged more followers for a longer period of time. We investigate how to tap into this amazing tool below.
First things first
Firstly, you need a Pinterest account for your business. If you don’t have one, create one. Once you’re all set up, login to your business profile.
“Pin-it” button
You will now need to add the “Pin-it” button to your browser. This will enable you to save content from your website onto your business Pinterest profile.
In your web browser, search for “help.pinterest.com”. Once you get to Pinterest’s help section, search for “Pinterest browser button” in the search bar and click on the “All about the Pinterest browser button” result.
Read the options of installing the browser button, depending on which browser you have (Chrome, Internet Explorer etc) and select one. Then scroll down slightly to the instructions on how to install, depending on your browser type.
Once you’ve done the above, you’ll see a little block on Pinterest with “Get our browser button”. Click this to install the button.
Now that you’ve installed the button, it will appear in your browser on the right-hand side of your search bar on your browser (it’s a little round red Pinterest logo).
Pin, pin, pin!
Go to a page on your website that you want people to visit, for example, “Blogs”. This particular page will have images, as part of the “article” or blog post.
Hover your mouse over any of the images and you will see the red “Save” button pop up in the top left corner of the image.
Click the “Save” button on an image you would like to appear on Pinterest, as part of the content to drive traffic to your website.
Select a Pinterest board where you would like to save this particular image, or create a new board if you don’t have one for, say “Blogs”, and click save on the particular board you have selected or created. Before you save, check the caption underneath the image – you may like to change it and make it more relevant or appealing to followers.
A little pop-up will appear in the top right-hand corner of your screen saying “Success!”, confirming that this image has been added to your Pinterest profile
Repeat the process a few more times (Ideally, you should select and save a few images from one particular section or article on your website to your Pinterest page – the more content you save, the more likely these are to appear in more people’s Pinterest feeds)
Check that your “pinning” has worked – go to your Pinterest profile, select the board you pinned your content to, and you should see the images you’ve selected. Click on one of these images, wait for the image to enlarge and click on it again, and it should redirect you to the article on your website, which you saved images from.
Try the above pinning process for a week or two. Then go to your Google Analytics account and monitor how much traffic you are gaining to your site, via Pinterest. If it’s not very high, you need to add more content to your Pinterest profile, as per the above.
The more followers you have on your Pinterest profile, the higher the opportunity for you to send them to your website, so get Pinning!
