Did you know you can pin videos in your Pinterest account? I didn’t until yesterday when I listened to a great webinar by Melanie 
Duncan, the Queen of Pinterest (at least to me). It was hosted by Amy Porterfield (Queen of Facebook). I really enjoy tuning into informational webinars. If you’ve thought about using Pinterest for business, this article will give you some reasons why you may want to and some of the tips I learned.
I have a Pinterest account that is pretty sparse at the moment. I haven’t succumbed to the Pinterest time suck vortex just yet, but it wouldn’t be hard. You can find me here. This is my personal board. I will be starting a board for business since I learned some pretty cool things you can do with a business Pinterest account. There are two reasons you may want to set up a business Pinterest account:
- Free analytics tool – essential if you want to see how your pins and boards are doing.
- Promote your pins – not available just yet, but coming soon.
If you have a personal account, you can easily convert it to a business account. When I signed into my account yesterday, it said ‘it looks like you’ve been using this account for business, would you like to convert to a business account?’ I think it knew because I had put my website in the account information.
Advantages of a Business Pinterest Account
If you, like me are thinking, ‘what would I pin on a business account?’ Here are some ideas from the webinar:
- Infographics – people love infographics – you can make checklists, how-to’s, tutorials and people eat it up. A resource to make your own infographic is at http://infogr.am.
- Videos – as I mentioned, if you have a YouTube or Vimeo account, here’s another place to put your content. Just put the link, add a description and now your content is doing double duty.
- Blog Posts – Repurpose any of your blog posts over on your Pinterest account. A big pro tip here is to make sure you have a link back to your site. Use a big, quality image to complement your blog post and if people click on your photo, they will be taken to your site.
- Make sure you have an email sign up form. Remember to take every opportunity to build your email list. Even if you have nothing to sell or promote, work on your email list. It’s something you’ll be glad you have.
Pro Tips for Using Pinterest
These are the things ‘99% of people don’t do on Pinterest’, that will put you ahead of the crowd:
- Make tall pins – taller is much better than wider for Pinterest.
- Put text on your photos – When you pin a photo, take a few minutes and upload your photo into Picmonkey or Canva and add some text to it.
- Link back to your site or another strategic spot on the web – you can see I’ve left blank the source back to the pin of my dog. If this was a business account, I’d be sure to have it link or go somewhere. I pinned a blog post from my site and note the image below (two women on the computer). Besides the
- Use keywords – make sure to use strategic words in your description because people do searches on Pinterest to find things. You can also use hashtags on Pinterest.
- Include a CTA (call to action). People want to know what to do when they look at your photos – do you want them to visits your site, sign-up for your newsletter, buy something?
- Make sure your website is pin friendly. Have the social sharing buttons both at the top and bottom of your posts.
So does this get your brain spinning and thinking about all the things you can do with Pinterest? If you have a Pinterest page – business or pleasure – leave a link in the comments.