So I wanted to pop in today and talk about a subject that many of us have heard a lot about. Maybe too much.
Pinterest.
For those of you new in the niche Pinterest is a huge search engine which returns answers to your search terms in picture form or ‘pins’. For those of you who have been in the niche a while, you may know about Pinterest as the one platform that everyone recommends.
51% of the takers of the quiz found that Pinterest was the best suited to their business. Am I surprised by this? Not at all. Unless you want to place a big emphasis on Live Video or interactive communities, Pinterest is one of the most flexible of the platforms.
Why should we take notice of it? Well, for a start, 87% of active Pinners have reported making a purchase because of Pinterest. This isn’t limited to the online space either; with 72% of Pinners saying that they use Pinterest to make offline buying decisions as well.
For smaller bloggers and small businesses there is another huge benefit to Pinterest. The sheer amount of traffic you can generate, with a relatively small amount of followers.
The views I get on my Pinterest are 100x the number of followers that I have. As I went over two thousand followers on Pinterest, I was getting over 200, 000 views.
I don’t say this to display my prowess at Pinterest, there are many people out there with much bigger followings than I have. I tell you this to illustrate the fact that even small businesses can achieve big figures on Pinterest.
But…it doesn’t work for me
This is the biggest barrier that I see when I talk about Pinterest. People who have tried Pinterest but couldn’t seem to crack this ‘magical traffic formula’.
I totally get it. When I first started on Pinterest, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Sure, I was getting some traffic through it but it wasn’t really anything to write home about.
And then the big breakthrough came. My ‘Overcome Fear and Start Your Business’ pin suddenly jumped from a thousand pins (achieved over quite some time) to nearly three thousands re-pins. And it kept going. It’s currently slowed down again now, settling in and just under 11, 500 re-pins.
So what did I do to break the pattern? Well, there were three main things I changed.
- You are probably tired of hearing it but when it comes to social media, consistency really is key and this is doubly true for Pinterest.
- Design. I don’t think there is any one design or universal tip for creating the perfect Pinterest design. I think it’s just a matter of experimenting to see what works for your audience.
- Wording. I changed the wording on my Pin, to reflect how people were talking about the topic. If you can observe people in Facebook Groups and Forums, talking about your niche – look carefully at recurring phrases and words, then use those in your Pin.
Of course there are other things you can do to create a successful business profile on Pinterest. These three things, for me, were the absolutely crucial lynch pins of a successful Pinterest.
