How I Use Pinterest for Business
How I Use Pinterest for Business – Thirty-Something Angie
How I Use Pinterest for Business
Are you on Pinterest? Are you using Pinterest for business purposes, yet?
I really love Pinterest. I’ve been on the platform since it was invite-only. I remember begging my friends on Facebook, trying to find someone that was on the platform and could send me an invite. Virtual inspiration boards?! Yes, please! I was hooked as soon as I got on it, and have been happily pinning away ever since. (Psst….if you love Pinterest, too, you can follow me
Do you use Pinterest for your business or blog? Find out how to add this to your social media…
I never really considered using Pinterest for business until more recently.
When I finally decided to give Pinterest a shot for my business, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t see much traffic from it at first, and wondered what all of the talk was about. Then, I stumbled on the secret to success. How do I know it was the secret to success? Because
my traffic literally tripled overnight.
I don’t want to keep all of the secrets to myself. I want to share, so that you can be successful at Pinterest marketing, too! After all, I owe my success to those that came before me and taught me, so I can’t take all of the credit, anyway.
Step-by-Step Guide to Start Using Pinterest for Business
This post contains affiliate links. To learn more about this, you can read my full disclosure
It can be sort of overwhelming to build up a new platform for your business. I started with a pretty active personal account, and it still took some work to get it promotion-ready! I did my best to break this up into an easy-to-understand tutorial that you can follow to start using your Pinterest for Business.
Step 1: Sign up for a business account.
The first thing I did when I decided I wanted to use my account to promote my business is to sign up for a Pinterest business account. If you already have a personal account, you can switch over without affecting anything you’ve already pinned. This will help you gain access to account stats, advertising options, and give you the option to set up rich pins. You can sign up for your business account
Step 2: Verify your site.
It’s a good idea to make sure that all of your social media accounts are directing followers to your website, and Pinterest is no different. Verifying your website puts it on your profile and lets followers know that you are legit, and that your website is a real website.
Follow these instructions
to verify your own website.
Step 3: Sign up for rich pins.
When you get on Pinterest, have you noticed that some pins really stand out with a big bold title under the picture?
. You can see the difference in this screenshot below. See how the pin on the left has a nice, bold, catchy title under the photo, and the one on the right doesn’t? That’s the difference between having a rich pin and a normal pin! I was very intimidated by this process at first, but it turned out to be incredibly easy to do. Just
follow these instructions
and you’ll be good to go!
My Small Business Organization System
Step 4: Clean up your profile.
To keep your brand cohesive, it’s important to keep even your Pinteret profile branded. You want people to recognize it as your page before they even see your website. Some things you should remember to do on your Pinterest profile include:
Keeping your profile picture the same as your blog picture (and all other social media)
See? Same picture I have on my blog!
Writing a keyword rich description
Rearranging your boards to keep the most relevant up at the top
Making non-related boards secret (I have secret boards for my kids, PTO ideas, and parties, for example). This allows you to keep pinning what you love, but you don’t have to show it to 10’s of thousands of followers.
Keeping a cohesive color scheme for your board covers. You can either make album colors, or choose pictures with a similar scheme.
Pin bright, vertical images. They just stand out so much more on Pinterest!
Step 5: Sign up for group boards.
When I first started using Pinterest for business,
is the biggest piece of the puzzle I was missing. I couldn’t figure out how others were seeing such great results! I would simply pin my new link to a board on my page and wait. And wait. And wait.
Then, I discovered group boards, and a whole new world of Pinterest marketing was revealed. Group boards are huge! Group boards are collaborative boards with other pinners (preferably in your niche) that allow everyone to share easily. There are individual rules for each board you join, but the general idea is that they are reciprocal. The best group boards are the ones where people not only pin their own items to the board, but also go in and re-pin links from the group board into their personal boards. I like to go in once a week and grab interesting pins from each of my boards to share, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
To get started joining group boards, you can check out
by Terryn, from Just a Simple Home. It’s a really inclusive list and is totally free!
Tip: When looking at boards, don’t look for the ones with a huge list of contributors. Look for the ones that are most active, with great re-pin rates.
Step 6: Sign up for a Pin Scheduler.
If you’re new to blogging or online business, this little bit of information might blow your mind. I know it did mine! But yes, businesses and bloggers schedule pins on Pinterest. Pinterest expects your account to not only be active steadily throughout the day, but it also expects you to be pinning
. I know some bloggers pinning up to 100 pins a day! I personally pin somewhere around 25-50 (I honestly haven’t counted). Still, if you try pinning that much every single day, you’ll realize how time consuming it is.
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So, we turn to programs to do it for us! I have been using
to schedule out my pins for about 4 months now, and can’t imagine maintaining this pin schedule without it. BoardBooster has all sorts of cool features. You can create scheduled campaigns, random campaigns, loop campaigns (this is where you tell it to “loop” all the pins in a large board, bringing older pins to the top), and so much more. I haven’t even tried everything they have to offer, so I’ll stick with what I do know.
How to Use Scheduled Campaigns on BoardBooster
My favorite way to use
is through scheduled campaigns. This is where you’ll take a new link from your website, pin it to a secret board, and it’ll be run through a campaign that you set up. To create a schedule, you first need to gather all of your group boards in a niche. I like to make a mock schedule in Excel, because it’ll make the scheduling on BoardBooster easier. Depending on how many group boards I have, I like to pin to 2-3 boards in a day.
Once you’ve got all of your boards organized, you simply go in to BoardBooster and click “pinning tools” and then “campaigns,” and then “scheduled campaigns.” You’ll then be prompted to pick a name and set up the schedule you chose for your boards. Once you’re done, a secret board will be created with the same name as this campaign. Every time you create a new link on your website, you’ll simply pin it to that secret board, and BoardBooster will do the rest. It is a really great way to use Pinterest for business marketing, because it does the work for you!
Step 7: Re-pin relevant content from others.
Nobody likes spam, do they? When you’re working on your Pinterest pins, be sure that you are pinning a lot of content that isn’t yours. In fact,
of the content should be from other pinners! When people come to your profile, they want to see that you’ll be delivering high quality pins from all over the internet, not just your own website. This is another place that boardbooster really comes in handy!
Nobody likes a spammer. Find out how to use Pinterest for business fairly right here!…
I used to spend countless hours perusing Pinterest for relevant pins and pinning them to the approrpriate boards. It took so much time, and I honestly wasn’t able to keep up consistently. Now, I use the BoardBooster pin scheduling tool and I’m able to get this task done in just a few minutes a day! The pin scheduler is a nifty tool that takes pins from a secret board on your profile and trickles them out through the day. This way, I can go on a pinning spree at 11 PM while I’m relaxing, and I won’t flood my feed with a ton of new pins all at once. Instead, I’ll have them all in a secret board, and they’ll be pinned to the attached public board at the rate I set on BoardBooster. This makes it look like I’m pinning consistently, even when I’m doing something else (like taking a nap).
