Guest post by Lisa Sicard.
According to Social Media Today, “The days of organic reach on social media might be disappearing, but that’s not the case for Pinterest. In fact, it’s exploding in popularity and offering businesses valuable opportunities to reach and engage with new, high-intent audiences using organic content.”
The problem with the big three is organic growth is almost down to nothing and ad prices are up!
The reach of each network is as follows:
Ø Facebook page 1-2% average
Ø LinkedIn is 2-4% average and
Ø Twitter is just .05%
Additionally, if you only tiptoe into Pinterest, not taking advantage of the network’s full offerings, you may be missing out.
The biggest selling factor for Pinterest is its referral potential, as it brings in 33% more referral traffic to user websites than Facebook.
(And that’s even with the overall usage of Pinterest having recently gone down as everyone has been out and about and not online.)
What is Pinterest?
Remember the old pin boards made into collages? Well today Pinterest is an online pinboard doing the exact same thing. Users love to save their favorite recipes, images, products, etc. on their pinboards. Some people keep their “wish lists” on a Pinterest board.
Pin Boards are categorized for easy searching and finding.
Not only that but the pinned images take you to the other places online to use a recipe, read a longer version of the image’s post, or to make a purchase.
Did you hear that one? Make a purchase!
Now, that’s a little different than Facebook or Twitter. You barely see any business page posts in your Facebook or Twitter feeds anymore.
What Can Pinterest Do for Your Business?
Pinterest helps boost your website presence and increases site traffic. This helps get your site found more on search. And the best part is you can generate more sales directly from your pins on Pinterest!
Another factor is the bounce rate. Don’t you love seeing that the bounce rate from pins on your website are lower than on other social media network posts? That means people are staying longer on your website when they come from Pinterest.
Don’t forget the organic power of promoting on Pinterest. One of the best ways to promote your website organically is to post your most popular awesome shareable blog posts through pins.
Formulate a post pin strategy to equally share your key topics.
Pro tip: use an automation tool to automate Pinterest as much as possible. Pinterest is highly addictive and being there and posting there doesn’t feel like work at all, it feels like fun.
I use Agora Pulse and am happy with it, but my blogger friend Nikola has been raving about Missinglettr for quite some time, so I’ll have to try that tool next.
For bonus pinning fuel, optimize for Pinterest by creating visuals to meet the platform’s specs and requirements. (Keep reading for more on this.)
Who Is The Pinterest Audience?
Women are the majority Pinterest demographic. According to the Omnicore Agency, 77.1% of the Pinterest users are female. Other interesting stats include:
- 38% of users are aged 50-64 years old.
- 34% are aged 30-49 years old.
- 89% of pinners use it for purchasing inspiration. 80% of United States moms use Pinterest.
- 90% of weekly pinners make purchase decisions on Pinterest.
- The most popular categories are food and drink followed by home decor.
- The average number of monthly searches on Pinterest is two Billion!
So if you want to reach women, Pinterest is the place to be for your business. If your business happens to be in those popular categories, even better!
Pin Insights Helps Your Business Pin Better
Pinterest offers helpful insights for your business so you can pin away with better clarity. And, they just began offering them in REAL time.
These insights give you a look at what’s working or not when you pin.
Impressions – The number of times your pins were on a screen.
Engagements – A tally of clicks, saves and comments.
Total Audience – The whole audience who have seen your pins.
Engaged Audience – The number of pinners who engaged with your pins.
You may also see your top boards and top pins.
Audience Insights – Learn how your audience connects with your pins and what they do once they see your pins.
You can view these in the last 24 hours or 90 day period. Or if you want, make a custom range instead.
Pin Sizes and Pin Types That Work Well
When Pinterest first began, it was easy to share pins. Today, users must have great pins in large sizes with the right descriptions and tags to get noticed.
Use a 2:3 aspect ratio to avoid ending up with awkwardly cropped images. Square pins: 1000 x 1000 pixels. The recommended size is 1000 x 1500 pixels and the max file size is 20MB.
Keep in mind, if you use other pin sizes, Pinterest does crop the images from the BOTTOM of the images. I try to be aware not to design work too close to the edges when creating visuals for social sharing, in general.
Collection pins are a 1:1 ratio. That is 1000×1000 pixels and a 10 MB max file image.
Lastly, the newest story pins are a 9:16 ratio, 1080×1920 pixel size with 20MB max file size.
What Are Pin Saves?
When you save others’ pins to your boards, it helps grow your Pinterest account. This save or repin is a great way to engage with others and network on Pinterest.
Pin saves are like re-tweets or Facebook shares.
Pin Ideas You Can Use or Not
Pin ideas are similar to stories on Instagram and other social networks. They are in a multi-page video format. But people either love them or hate them. Yes, there is a love-hate relationship with pin ideas.
On the plus side you can make them right on Pinterest if you choose.
The downside is people can’t click on them to go over to your website. The result is people stay on Pinterest, but of course, Pinterest loves that. What network wouldn’t, right?
What is the Pinterest Downloader?
Pin downloader – Pin Saver is an easy app to download Pinterest videos and photos to the gallery and share ideas with your friends on Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
You just need to have a Pinterest Downloader (check the App store) and it will download any video or photo from Pinterest easily with simple steps.
What Are Product Pins?
Product Pins are a form of a rich Pin (opens in a new window), further enriched with metadata and formatted to let people on Pinterest know that they’re shoppable. They also feature the most up-to-date price, availability, product title, and description from your website.
Of course, these only show up if your product is in stock in the US or UK.
Support small businesses. Don’t buy through “review sites” and give your money to Gartner.
To learn more on setting your product pins and catalogs up check out the instructions from Pinterest on product pins. Hey, did you know to put your products up for sale directly to Pinterest? Sounds good to me!
Pinterest Advertising Makes Pinterest a Great Social Media Channel for Your Business
Pinterest ads are much easier than advertising on Facebook. You already know this if you’ve tried recently to do ads on Facebook! With every ad, you need to read up on the latest rules and guidelines now. Oh my.
Even simple boosts are now complicated for people. Oftentimes, my clients want me to do boosts for them as they keep on getting rejected on the social network.
They don’t have the time to figure out how to do the so-called “easiest” of the Facebook advertising methods.
However, with Pinterest ads, you can generate clicks to your webpage or blog and then gather purchases if you use the product pins. My most recent Pinterest campaign costing $12 resulted in 20 clicks. That’s $1.67 per click. Not bad, huh?
In this post, Moss Clement explains how to develop a Pinning strategy for your business to elevate awareness and hone in on advantages through keywords. He further confirms the surprising purchase power from the Pinterest populace, just below the powerhouse, Facebook.
If you want to gain Pinterest followers, here are some tips, also incorporating keyword strategy, from Louise Meyers. In the post, Louise reminds you to complete your Pinterest profile, fully, for best results.
Enstine Muki explains Pinterest ranking factors, and discusses in more detail why Pinterest, like Google, is considered a search engine.
Lisa Sicard loves helping others to thrive online through social media, blogging, and SEO. What good is knowledge if you cannot share it with others? She has 30+ years of experience in marketing/advertising with 10 years of experience in content marketing, social media, blogging, and SEO. Check out her latest eBook “How to Tweet and Thrive on Twitter” now on Amazon.