Best practices for Pinterest small business marketing

Part II of our series Social Media Best Practices focuses on Pinterest. Over the next few weeks, we will be introducing best-practices for small business marketing using the top social media channels. If you missed last week’s focus on Facebook, here’s the link. Keep these cheat sheets handy when developing your content or editorial calendar.

PINTEREST MARKETING BEST PRACTICES

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing platforms for social media marketing.  The platform helps small businesses create visually engaging, organized marketing pieces, and Pinterest users are much more inclined to make a purchase than those using Facebook. Many users are collecting ideas for future purchases on their own customized boards.  Below are a few key Pinterest best practices.

Focus on the image and optimize your content.  Pinterest is image driven.  When creating your pins and boards, find the best possible image to represent your pin. Just like with all web-based channels, optimize your content with relevant keywords and properly categorize your boards.

Clearly identify your target audience when creating your business page and boards.  We’ve shared several times how dangerous it is to try to sell to everyone.  Our team of experts recommends you clearly identify your target audience and create a list of information that is most important to this audience. Your goals with Pinterest marketing are to nurture relationships and generate sales.  Using the myMarketing Cafe Pinterest board as an example, our target audience is the small business owner.  Items we found most important to this audience include cost-effective resources to help market their business, help starting up a new business, ideas for content when creating marketing strategies, and help with small business budgeting (operational and marketing).  We used this list to customize our Pinterest boards, so that we would provide the best information possible.  You can find a board dedicated to each of these items on our Pinterest page.  Looking ahead… Boards we have in the works and also might work for your small business include a board of services and products we offer, customer testimonials, and case studies.

Create boards that link back to your own valuable content.  In a recent blog post, we shared useful strategies for creating content.  One of our recommendations was creating a library of resources to help your target audience. We recommend you host the library on your company website but use your social media channels, like Pinterest, to promote the content in the library.

Create an Inspiration board.  Inspirational quotes make up the content that is most shared by Pinterest users. They are universal and can be applied to so many areas of life, whether professional or personal.  We recommend all businesses create an Inspiration board to help introduce your business to the Pinterest community.

Connect with your pinners.  The ultimate compliments to your content are when it is pinned directly from your site, or repinned from other users.  Pinterest offers a free analytic program to help you, but a short and easy method is using the URL below.

http://pinterest.com/source/YourWebsite.com/

Where you see the words YourWebsite.com, replace them with your website name.    As your content is pinned, follow these best practices to begin engaging with your audience.

1.  Like the pin.
2. Repin pins created by other users.
3. Share the love and follow your promoters’ pages or boards.

Read this recent article on Mashable.com for more in depth strategies for tracking your Pinterest content.

Like, follow, and comment on pages from your target audience.  Support your target audience’s Pinterest efforts by liking and repinning pins, following their boards or page, and adding comments.

Give credit where credit is due.  In a recent blog post, we shared how Facebook allows users to remove you from shared content.  If you are sharing information from a source, follow best business practices and give credit to the source.

This post should certainly get you started, but now it’s your turn, what tips do you have for using Pinterest with small business marketing?