Pinterest, without a doubt has been one of the fastest and every growing social media platform for brands with over 11 million users. I have always maintained that it is one medium every B2C brands should explore. Pinterest also has a great potential for brands to increase their reach unlike the conventional marketing channels, especially in the emerging economies.
With more people trying to make their purchase based on finding of products over Pinterest, there are few tricks that can optimize those simple looking pins get the desired attention.
1. Long tail keywords
As with any SEO strategies, it is very important to choose your keywords wisely. More important, try to have ‘long tail’ keyword – keywords with better and longer shelf life. How do you do that? Well, you can personalize the pin to cater to particular geographic location or gender. This apart from having the product description in place. In effect, you’re making the pin searchable for – product, place & person.
2. Using hash tags
Like Twitter, Google Plus or Instagram, Pinterest too latched on to the popularity of hash tags. These hash tags help you anchor the pin to a particular subject and makes it easily discoverable. Many of the brands track their marketing campaigns using hash tag like the recent Lakme campaign where it has asked users to pin with hash tag #BeautifulBrides. An excellent way to use hash tag!!
3. Backlinks
Backlinks form the core of any SEO campaign. It is very important that your site get a link back from the pin. While those links from Pinterest are ‘nofollow’ meaning you may not get the SEO juice, but you cannot discount the traffic that can be generated by backlinks. You should even consider adding the URL in the description, so each time the pin gets shared, you have stand a chance to add multiple visitors.
4. Track Click-through
Like in every marketing campaign, success is driven by the way you drive engagement, but even more important is how you quantify the campaign. With tools like Reachli, you can keep track of the campaign and track the CTRs. The information thus generated can help you to tweak campaigns to ensure better reach and generate the right amount of buzz.
5. Pin-it Button
And last, make it easy for visitors to easily Pin your products. Having a ‘Pin-it’ button from Pinterest on your website will ensure that the visitors to your site can also pin apart from you.
6. Bonus Tip – Alt Text/Image Description
Here’s the bonus tip – ensure that images on your site have great ‘Alt’ text and description, because that is the default information picked up by Pinterest when a visitor pins from your site. They may not change the description, so ensure that you have the right keywords to describe your product.
Hope the tips above will help you better the reach on Pinterest. But at the core of any social media campaign is engagement, so focus on that too!!
Your turn
1. What is your successful Pinterest strategy?
2. Apart from the above, what is a better way to increase success on Pinterest?
Your views are important, please share them using the comments below.
