More than sure you have read over and over that Pinterest is a major source of traffic for most businesses and bloggers. And indeed Pinterest is a unique combination of search engine and social platform that’s gaining importance each day through gradual market infiltration in valuable demographics. As you have probably found out by now, Pinterest makes constant changes in its algorithm, and consequently, we have to update our Pinterest best practices for business.
If you still doubt take a rough look at some statistics here.
It’s worth noticing that 1 in 2 people decide to make a purchase after viewing a promoted pin, 89% of US users count on Pinterest when looking to make a purchase. Not to mention it’s used mainly by millennials and gen-X.
These changes hurt traffic generation for lots of us and we have to tweak our incorporated Pinterest marketing strategy in order to profit from the opportunity to reach out to our audience till this is still free.
There are many Pinterest marketing strategies out there you can use to gain more visibility from Pinterest, but some bring results some do not, it depends on many details. You just have to try and test and keep what works best for you.
Before starting or digging more in-depth, I think is compulsory to design the large guidelines, and see the whole forest, before approaching the trees. Here are the strategic tactics that you need to implement if you want to take profit from the goldmine phenomenon that is nowadays Pinterest for businesses.
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1. Start with the Right Base: Your Pinterest Profile and Account
Create the right profile targeting your buyer persona
Your profile should be conceived and tailored to your buyer persona, comprising your biography that informs about who is your target client, solutions that you offer to solve their problems, and a call to action. A professional photo should be attached and also keywords included in the profile name.
The purpose of having the right profile is to attract and keep the attention of your buyer personas and avoid any type of confusion that might arrive while visualizing your profile.
Create a good-looking profile with the Cover banner. Here you have several displaying options like your latest pins or pins of a certain board. I suggest that you insert here the board that contains just your pins. In my case “MarketingDigiBook” board.
Another tab is the Overview tab which offers a glimpse of the recently saved pins, pins saved from your domain, and the most recent boards that you saved pins to. Supplementary additions are the Follower tab – which shows the number of your followers, the Board tab – which lists your boards in various ways and the Monthly views – which displays the average number of persons that sees your content in a month.
Use a Pinterest for Business Account
A Business Account will give you access to all the current and future features that Pinterest will develop exclusively for businesses. Some of them are local SEO, educational tools, and resources that help you reach a broader audience on Pinterest. The Business Account is a free account.
Some supplementary insights may be depicted by consulting the Business Best Practices section of Pinterest. And check also the general best practices for Pinterest.
Get your website verified with Pinterest
This action should be completed as it provides you with access to Pinterest Analytics, useless to say it is of out-most importance for your strategy. And it also enhances credibility in front of your readers and builds trust, by certifying that you own the content that was pinned from your site.
Install “Pin It” button
To facilitate the pinning activity and help your users share your content more easily, install the Pin It button. It’s a simple way to increase impressions and clicks. Don’t skip it!
Your site should always be the source for your pins
When uploading your Pins make sure to upload them from your site. This is an extremely important detail, as your site will be registered as the source link of your Pin. And each time you send a pin you create a backlink to your site from an authority source, re-pins will keep this source also. Backlinks created this way will reinforce the authority of your own site and strengthen SEO.
2. SEO – Optimize Your Profile, Your Boards, and Your Pin Descriptions
Since Pinterest is more a search engine, a visual one to be precise, then it appears logical that SEO strategy and tactics should be used.
The ultimate aim of Pinterest is to serve its users the exact content they are looking for. Since Pinterest is using a ranking algorithm to rank content, you should strive to rank as high as possible. The higher, the better for your business.
On your Pinterest account, be sure to have just the boards that your buyer persona expects and wants to see and follow. My recommendation is to have a minimum of 20 boards.
Create a panel of boards in one relevant category. Valid for your pins also, use them in the appropriate category.
Tip: Place your most successful boards on top
When constructing your profile, your boards, and your pins, the focal element is the keywords you choose to rank for, and through them, you are found on Pinterest. Your keywords should be the same words that your buyer personas use while searching.
Your board titles and boards description need to include these keywords. The keywords should reflect the right category and inform your users about what they should expect. Also, it’s important to keep the descriptions short and straight to the point.
Pin descriptions are a powerful tool you should use to engage your audience, so, take advantage of them and write targeted descriptions. These descriptions are the trigger for the traffic you generate for your site. It’s compulsory for pins to be optimized based on the long tail keywords that your buyer persona uses to search, as it drastically increases the chances of your pins being found. Some social media studies reveal that 200 characters description for pins receives the most re-pins. So, test this hypothesis on your audience and adjust accordingly.
Tip: Insert ca call-to-pin to skyrocket the engagement of your pins. It seems that on average the presence of a CTP increases engagement by 80%.
3. Post Consistently. Engagement and Pin Shares Build Relationships, Interact with Followers and Influencers
As I am referring to Social Media, it’s obvious that when using it for our business purposes we have to be social and socialize. On Pinterest, while actively generating the content, also make efforts and engage with your audience, by re-pinning, commenting, or liking, it will help you extend your audience.
Tip: Post daily 10-30 pins, spread throughout the day.
Engagement is a two directions ring, you want your followers to comment on your pins, and you should comment on their pins also. Their followers will also notify you. Engage and follow popular boards in your niche, try to “steal” and learn from the “eminences” that act in your domain. Observe their boards, their pins, and their engaging activity, if you want to reach their level.
Tip: Follow and engage influencers in your industry.
Invite your community to get involved and allow others to send pins to your boards. It’s a huge plus if you can attract industry experts to post on your boards.
4. Use High-Quality Visuals
Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, the quality of the images you use should be nothing less than excellent. Just take a look:
Visuals are the first vector of sales.
Use Professional Styled Stock Photography to Promote Your Business.
No doubt, images have a dramatic impact on pins. If you are not a Photoshop pro or a skilled designer, you still can create great visuals by using tools like Canva. Since Pinterest is stressing more and more about original content, using free stock photos is not a reliable option. But you can try affordable-styled stock photos to use for your visuals.
Right from the beginning upload your blog images optimized for Pinterest. Optimized images mean images with descriptions incorporated and keywords that will automatically appear, it will definitely ease your work.
Tip: Pin all images of a post to reach a broader audience
5. Create Exclusive Images and Infographics
Creating images or infographics that are exclusive provides a remarkable edge: the only manner to share them is to re-pin. Since these will be of course linked back to your site as a source, they will be visible on re-pins also.
Use Pinterest templates to ease and fasten your pin creation activity. As Pinterest favors original pins, the more original pins the better. But you have to create them and this takes time, lots of time. A shortcut to this is using Pinterest templates. Also, you can use Pinterest Marketing Planner Templates that include original content, are highly customizable, and are available in various formats to help you attract more readers.
6. Use Rich Pins
Rich Pins were thought to provide supplementary information within the context. The current types of Rich Pins are articles, apps, recipes, and products.
Rich pins have an increased rate of pins/re-pins, which speaks wonders of their power in the Pinterest world. Don’t hesitate to use them to turbocharge your sales.
Even if Rich Pins request more effort, they improve the user experience and are more attractive. Make sure to have meta tags added to your site and Rich Pins enabled.
Not all your content is appropriate to be used as Rich Pin, use them wisely and when appropriate.
Keep them for products, photos, in-depth articles, events, webinars, etc. Thus, there is one feature from Rich Pins that you should extend to all your pins, and that’s the link to your site.
Tip: Insert a link to your website in the description of every pin.
Tip: Conceive a board only for your Rich Pins
7. Schedule Your Pins
When you create a new piece of content for your site, pin it onto Pinterest and then re-pin it on all your boards that are relevant to the topic.
On your Pinterest account, you should hold a board uniquely for your posts, so, your audience could quickly get a general idea of the type of content you publish.
One of the most common causes that impede an increase in your Pinterest traffic is that you don’t pin enough of your content, and you are not consistent. Pin daily, this is the best strategy to expand your exposure, which could finally lead to more followers, more traffic, more subscribers, and more clients!!!
Tip: Pin daily!
But pinning daily is a time-consuming activity. Software applications enter the scene to reduce effort, you can appeal to schedulers such as Tailwind.
Tip: Schedule a mix of content 50% of your own and 50% of others.
9. Connect with Other Social Media Platforms
Interconnect your accounts on different social media networks Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. In such a way, you can connect followers that you have on one platform with your account on another platform and share quality content across them.
10. Join Group Boards If You Are a Beginner
Expanding your network with niche boards and group boards could provide valuable help to increase your follower number in a short interval. Joining industry group boards is sometimes a shortcut with multiple benefits (increased targeted audience, quality boards for referrals, etc.), but first, you must be invited to that group.
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11. Expect Constant Change on Pinterest and Adapt on the Go
Obviously, the algorithms are always on the move and you have to move with them. We have seen Google, Facebook, and now Pinterest updating their algorithms, and this will be a constant in the future. Being ready to learn new ways of doing things is not an exception otherwise you’ll be left out.
Pinterest, like any other social platform, involves numerous changes that happen permanently. The way the platform worked in 2018 will be different from how it will work in 2019. With the development of technology, there are new requirements that come with it for the betterment of the platform at large. When you adapt to the change, you’ll know how to use Pinterest at any time or season. Thus, be flexible and embrace change! This is the true path of evolution.
What we’ll discuss forward is part of the changes that already took place on Pinterest and impacted current Pinterest marketing strategies. Most of them are Pinterest creative best practices that have yielded results for those that have tested them, I and my clients included.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: The only constant changes, get used to it and embrace it.
For all details on Pinterest updates from this summer, check Alisa Meredith’s Tailwind interview with Pinterest’s Product Marketing Manager Sarah Hoople here:
12. Enhance Your Pins’ Breakthrough
This is the recently updated rule on Pinterest creative best practices 2021 and it is a game changer. We all have the possibility to choose between smart feed or following feed.
The following feed lists in chronological order the newest and greatest pins of the persons that you follow. Which translates into increased importance for engagement and fresh content.
The main purpose is to create more pins, based on delivering more content. New pins are favoured by the new Pinterest algorithm. The idea is to focus on producing more pins and expanding their reach to increase blog traffic, not necessarily to increase the number of followers.
In addition, it is advisable that you create multiple pins for the same post. This advice has been added to Pinterest’s best practices page.
Others can opt to create a different pin version which is still good. However, when you do this you should change the pin description. This is important as the platform will read it differently from your other pins. You are also in a better position to reach out to different audiences using the selected keywords.
Even if there is no such thing as an ideal number of pins for a day, you should test to see what works best for you and play with the number of pins. Just be consistent, do not pin in bulk one day and nothing the next few days (use a scheduler to help with this). In the new following feed, your followers will see all the pins that you saved in a row.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Pin consistently and throughout the day.
Visuals are the first vector of sales.
Use Professional Styled Stock Photography to Promote Your Business.
13. Guidelines for Creating the Perfect Pins
To come up with the best Pinterest marketing strategy, you have to ensure that you follow the guidelines laid by Pinterest, that’s obvious.
There are many myths flourishing on the web about the new pin ratios and the best images that work.
Here are some common guidelines you can count on:
a) Ideal Images to Choose
Choose high-quality photos and avoid human faces on your pins (or test this – depending on the niche might be different results). Another thing is that these types of images need to have the ability to grasp the attention of the reader. In general lifestyle images are a good choice, persons need to visualize the item in context. Use overlay text to provide more context or a creative description, preferably both.
Making someone stop whatever he/she was doing by an image isn’t a joke. The images should be of high resolution and colorful. Do not forget to test your pins on mobile, as 80% of Pinterest users are on mobile.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: You might consider making your own photos instead of buying them or using free stock. Or use small stock photo databases that have fewer users.
b) Perfect Pin Sizes
This is what has been causing a huge debate on Pinterest. Everyone is coming with his/her size that has worked for them causing confusion to new users.
Actually, the only thing that has changed is the cutoff point but not the pin ratio. It is still the same as it used to be – 2:3. For those that are obsessed with square pins, they are back, and this is one of the recent updates.
Recommended size by Pinterest is 1000 by 1500. Those are the measurements for the width and height respectively. The maximum dimension is 1260 long but as long as you keep the ruling ratio.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: For new pins use the recommended dimensions. For your best-performing pins create new ones with these dimensions.
c) Use Hashtags
Common for Twitter or Instagram fans, however, they are back again on Pinterest. What do they offer? A real-time feed for users. Pinners that want to find out what is trending on Pinterest use hashtags. You should include them in your new pins, it’s not necessary to modify the older pins as this is irrelevant, and place them at the end of the pin description. I use in general 5 hashtags for my pins.
The guidelines of Pinterest state that hashtags should be:
· Relevant for your content.
· Act as a broad search term. This means that it should not be used for any other purposes like humor.
· Add a maximum number of 20 hashtags once you have discovered that they are relevant to the content.
Hashtagged pins get more distribution the day they are saved.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Add hashtags to your pin description, and place them at the end of the description.
14. Add Fresh Content, the More the Better
At some point, we said that Pinterest loves fresh content and will give priority to it. Let us now dig in to get to know what this fresh content means. Fresh content means firstly an article that you just wrote and that you publish for the first time with its associated pin. New pins for articles already published count also. Before we go further, Pinterest loves new content as it is the main concept behind adding hashtags.
The use of Hashtags has two main purposes. The first one as we all know is that it is used to identify a keyword and facilitate the search for it. The second function is that it is used to differentiate fresh content from older one. In short, they act as filters.
According to studies performed on Pinterest metrics, pinners are more interested in new content and that’s why everyone rushes toward it. Your followers on the platform are always searching for content that will satisfy their needs. So, freshly posted pins are more on their radar.
By constantly posting new content, you are able to swiftly draw a large number of readers to your profile.
Also, be aware that a new Pinterest best practice is to save new pins directly from your site instead of repining them. For example, if you have a new article with a new pin and you want to save that pin to seven boards, save the pin directly from your site for each of the seven boards.
Pinterest aims to promote the content creators or first pinners. So, pins created by the owner of the site and pinned from the respective site first will be given distribution priority in the feed.
Another detail to take into consideration is to pin first to the board what is the most relevant to the topic of the article. This article for instance will be first published to my boards in the following order: Pinterest tips and tricks, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Strategies, Digital Marketing, MarketingDigiBook.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: The Pinterest algorithm will give first priority to new pins and newly published content saved from your site.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Pin your new pin first to the most relevant of your boards on its topic.
15. Manual Pinning and Automated Pinning
If you have been keen on Pinterest users’ questions, you know that this is the most frequently asked question. Let’s get this straight. You can use automated pining as long as you use a Pinterest-approved scheduler. It is advisable that you ONLY use schedulers agreed upon and approved by Pinterest. If you consider is best for you to use one, ensure that it is approved.
Now next big question is: do you need to use just manual pinning, just automated pinning, or both?
Each option has its fans. Personally, I use both and I will explain to you why. I tested pinning up to 40 pins a day with Tailwind and some manual pinning, I tested just automated pinning without manual pinning and I used just manual pinning when I started this blog.
Here are the results of my tests:
– You should keep manual pinning, daily if possible, at least 10 manual pins. If you renounce manual pinning you will see your monthly views decrease heavily and also your traffic. Monthly views are not a very important number, but any way to see this number decrease by about 50% (from 370 k to 200 k) in one month it’s not ideal. My traffic from Pinterest was affected less, but it still decreased. I also saw decreases in traffic and monthly views for other blogs that belong to my clients.
Even if Pinterest says “You’re considered active when you’re saving content on the platform.” That is not exactly true, manual pinning counts.
– Decreasing the number of scheduled pins might not affect the traffic that Pinterest delivers to your site. In my case it didn’t, I decreased from 80 pins a day to 50 pins and after that to 30 pins.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: No matter your choice, do not skip manual pinning for too long.
16. Use an Approved Pinterest Scheduler
A Pinterest Scheduler can be a huge time saver. Even if there are bloggers that say they have great results with manual pinning, the truth is manual pinning requires lots of time.
Personally, I use Tailwind to schedule my pins in group boards and Tailwind tribes. I have to confess Tailwind helps me minimize the time I spend on pinning and brings nice results. I use it for this blog and for blogs belonging to my clients.
Besides having a smart schedule that allows me to optimize the best time to schedule pins when my audience is most active, I am very pleased with the looping options that I employ to schedule my evergreen content into my boards. And also, with the analytics tools that I can use to measure the results of my Pinterest strategy. These are the options in the Insights tab: Profile Performance, Board Insights, Pin Inspector, Website Insights, Organic Activity, and Referral Traffic.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Pins scheduled via Tailwind are posted as fresh pins, not as repins.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Tailwind can offer you extra referral traffic via Tailwind tribes. Give them a try.
Another question that pops up frequently is if you as a content creator need to pin content from others. Pinterest sustains that not, as long as you have enough content of your own to promote. To be tested.
17. Do Not Delete Under-Performing Pins
What about them? The first thought that comes to your mind is to delete them as they don’t add any value to your account. Not really. If you get the chance to speak to bloggers that have reaped big chunks of dollars in Pinterest, you’ll know that they are not into the idea of deleting the underperforming pins.
You could think that they are probably hurting your performing pins, but they aren’t. The performance of a pin has no effect on the rest of your pins.
As we all know (probably by now) Pinterest is subject to algorithmic change and new updates. This can turn out to be good in the long run. The underperforming pins may gain traction and become useful due to new changes and turn into a goldmine.
What you have to do is constantly review the Pinterest analytics and find out which pins are performing well and which are not. For the ones that aren’t working well, you can do some revamping or simply create new pins with another description to increase engagement.
From my own point of view, I strictly do not recommend deleting any of your pins regardless of their performance.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Do not delete underperforming pins, you don’t know when you’ll have a nice surprise. Make new pins and improve their description.
18. Ensure to Have Correct Linking to Articles or Landing Pages
Make sure your pin links to the article you intended. What you should keep in mind is that the pin is not about the image but about the content and relevance of the image to that content.
The pin only acts as a short description of its content. To make the pins more effective, ensure that the keywords are matching.
19. Don’t Forget About Pinterest SEO and Keywords
Keywords are the primary vector that drives eyeballs to your profile, boards, content, and finally to your site. Hence use them properly. The huge majority of the reach will happen far beyond followers that’s why SEO counts.
We hear all over “use catchy titles”, some people use puns and clever titles hence cannot be found when you type the keywords you’d like to search for. Remember Pinterest is a search engine.
Board names are not a place to show your prowess in the English language. Pinterest best practices advise that you should ONLY name your boards with keywords. But do not exaggerate, do not stuff the board name or the description only with keywords. Make all your descriptions conversational.
The keywords should just be enough to help the algorithm understand what it’s the pin or the board about. To make the keywords more effective, they should be written in a user-friendly way.
NB: The Pinterest SEO keywords should be relevant to the boards. The relevance of the keyword helps in spreading the content which will, in turn, reach a larger target audience.
Pinterest Marketing tip: Use keywords relevant to Pinterest, not keywords that are relevant to Google.
20. Take Care of Your Followers
If you are a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram fanatic, you understand pretty well that followers are the drivers of your account. The more you have, the faster and wider your message will spread. The same case applies from now on to Pinterest. The way to get your content shown up in the Smartfeed pass first through your followers.
Even if it’s still possible to generate high traffic for your blog without having a large number of followers, they have a heavy word for spreading your new pins. With the recent updates, the followers are the first to have a glimpse and interact with your new pins in their feeds.
The best thing for a business is that Pinterest has a high affinity for new content. Pinterest will, therefore, ensure that the content reaches your followers as fast as possible.
If your followers are relevant and show interest in your content, they will quickly engage with it and roll it over to non-followers and Pinterest will push it further into the topics and feeds. And this is how pins become viral. However, to make this happen, the ball still rolls on your side. Any content you post on the platform must be relevant to your brand. Nobody likes irrelevant and random boards that make no sense.
For example, picture this. If you are a home décor entrepreneur, everyone expects your posts to be full of the best home upholsteries, décor boards, and decorative brands. You don’t need to post irrelevant posts like food recipes or fashion-related boards.
A final tip: unengaged followers are not of much use. If most of the many followers are not active, they will not spread your content. It is better that you only have a handful of followers that engage with your content rather than a million of them that will not even take a look at what you’ve posted.
Pinterest Marketing Tip: Aim for engaged followers that are interested in what you have to say, not just followers.
21. The Implementation Strategy
With all said and done, it’s now the time to put all that you’ve read into practice. The implementation stage is more important than any other step and this is where many bloggers fail. It is of no use that you get all the available helpful information and throw it away.
There is a lot going on with the Pinterest algorithm and probably even lots to come. And consequently, lots of changes to implement and the above-mentioned Pinterest best practices for business should be of help in 2023 to keep attracting quality traffic for your blog.
You might find it hard to apply them all. Take them one at a time and see what you can incorporate successfully into your Pinterest marketing strategy and what brings you results.
