8 Must-Dos for Pinning to Your Business Pinterest Account

Pinterest can help your business get discovered by millions looking to plan, buy and do almost anything. It’s no wonder more businesses are jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon. To ensure your business stands out (in a good way), get familiar with these eight must-dos so you’re pinning to your business Pinterest account like a pro.

1. Include Pin It buttons on your site: The Pin It button is the best way for your business to get discovered on Pinterest. When you add the Pin It button to your site’s pages, you make it easy for people to add your content and images to Pinterest. According to Pinterest, three months after Allrecipes.com added the Pin It button, people added more than 50,000 recipes from their website, leading to 139 million impressions!

2. Pin a variety of subjects: Pinterest appeals to a wide range of interests that your followers have, so why only represent a small portion of that conversation? Pin a variety of topics, not just those expected from your business. Pinterest did this themselves for the New Year with their Things to Try in 2015. They encouraged pinners to get in the action by creating boards of their own and sharing across other social networks like Facebook.

3. Pin enough content to your boards: A common mistake businesses on Pinterest make is creating too many boards that contain just a handful of pins. A more effective approach is to start with a few, broader topic but robust boards that you can add several pins to. Later, when you’ve built up the number of pins on a board and want to get more specific, Pinterest allows you to select up to 50 pins to move to a new board. You can also copy pins so they live on two different boards, or delete them. For example, build up a hefty Holidays board, then later create a more specific Valentine’s Day board off-shoot.

4. Link your pins and include a link: It’s a total buzz kill when you click a pin and it’s a dead end. Make sure you link your pins back to your website or blog to drive visits from Pinterest to your business. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than any other social network aside from Facebook, so it’s worth it to make sure your pins are linked. In addition, include the link directly in your photo caption. It eliminates the fact that you have to click twice on a pin to reach the original site, and it doubles your chances of gaining traffic back to your site.

5. Include a price: Always include a price when you pin a product or service. It makes it easy for everyone to know immediately how much something costs. If you want to take this a step further, try using Rich Pins. Rich Pins include additional information, such as when a product is in stock, or when an item changes in price. Pinterest also automatically emails anyone who has pinned that item letting him or her know about the changes. This directs more visits back to your Pinterest account, your website, and may even result even some purchases. Cool right? You’ll need to add some code to your website for this, but Pinterest has all the details to help you.

6. Use Promoted Pins: Pinterest recently announced that they’re opening up their successful paid Promoted Pin functionality to any U.S. business. Similar to promoted Facebook posts, Promoted Pins appear in search and category feeds, which reach more people. After recent beta testing, Pinterest found that Promoted Pins performed just as well, if not sometimes better than organic pins. On average, Promoted Pins are shared eleven times, which can boost the number of people who see your pin by 30 percent. You’ll have to pony up some budget for Promoted Pins, but it could be well worth it to drive engaged visits to your website. Visit the Promoted Pin page to get on the list for the program.

7. Pin offerings to build your email list: Building a solid list of engaged email subscribers is an on-going process – This is where Pinterest comes in. Use specific pins to drive people from Pinterest to an email sign up form on your website or landing page. Melanie Duncan advises small businesses or entrepreneurs to first create an offering such as a coupon code, ebook, checklist, guide, video, online training workshop, etc. Then, you’ll want to create and upload an image advertising your offer (remember to include a call to action). Lastly, link people from your pin back to your site with a sign up form that allows people to redeem the offer. This works especially well for those who have non product-based businesses.

Here’s an example she used:

8. Measure pin success with analytics: Pinterest drives more traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit combined, but do you know how much traffic your site gets from it? Pinterest analytics can tell you. You can also find out what people are pinning from your website and which of your pins and boards are driving the most impressions, clicks and repins. Watch this primer video and read this post to learn more about Pinterest analytics.

If you don’t have a Pinterest for Business account, you can get yours here, or convert your existing Pinterest account here.

These eight must-dos will have you pinning like a pro in no time. Have a tip to add to our list? Share it in the comments.