With more than 100 millions of users, Pinterest offers a big pool of market for businesses to promote any brand. According to Wall Street Journal, Pinterest earned $500 million dollars of revenue from ads in the running year. But if these figures are not enough to convince you about the viability of this powerful marketing platform, let us share you with some insights revealed by renowned websites.
In a study by Jeff Bullas, it is revealed that Pinterest is the second social media website in terms of growth (111%) followed by Tumblr (120%). Taking a comparative analysis, the website also shows that Pinterest generated twice (80%) more average spending than Facebook ($40).
Interestingly, Pinterest has an increasingly growing number of female audiences. According to Search Engine Land, 71% of total users of Pinterest belong to a female gender. The phenomenal number of female audience indicates a growing influence of women-centric features on this photo-sharing website.
Considering this trend, Pinterest has made several changes in its Guided Search System to make it easier for both men and women to easily filter their topics of interest.
How You Can Use Pinterest to Increase Traffic to Your Blog?
Now that you know the potential of Pinterest to promote a business, you must be wondering how it can help your blogging? Let’s help you with the follow guidelines:
Find Successful Brands
First things first.
The success of your Pinterest marketing is conditional to engagement of your audience. The higher is your engagement rate, the higher will be the exposure of your brand.
Starting with the basic, you first need to find brands within your business and follow their followers. To make the process even faster, you need to find successful brands in your niche so that you can cash in on their large number of follower and increase your exposure in short time.
Let’s say you are an apparel retailer searching for pinners in your niche, you first need to look for accounts of popular brands with a higher number of followers and engagement rates. Reaching out to famous brands will put your profile in front of a wider audience and you will get more traffic to your blog as a result of increased engagement.
Create Blog Boards
Having blog boards on your Pinterest profile significantly increase the exposure of your profile and directs your pinners to your blog. To optimize your blog boards, you should create categories of your blog posts so that your audience can easily find relevant blogs.
Check out this fantastic example of Olyvia which is run by Erika, a professional blogger that helps startups establish a strong brand reputation. The Pinterest profile of Olyvia is a perfect example of how you can show categories of your blog in a blog board. The blog board shows blogs in specific categories to help pinners find their relevant topics.
Engage With Influencers
As the opinion leaders make a strong presence on social media, Influencer marketing has become the talk of the town. Connecting with influencers in your industry helps you get an endorsement for your brand which in turn attracts more audience as a result of word-of-mouth publicity.
Engage with industry experts in your industry by sharing comments on their pins and repining their pins. Once you build engagement with your influencer, you can then collaborate with them on creating the hype of your brand and leveraging from their strong influence on your targeted community.
Remember that Influencer marketing not only increases exposure of your brand but it also lends a credible voice to your brand.
Optimize Your Pins Strategically
As Pinterest uses images as marketing collateral, it is important that you optimize your images have to be technically appropriate to attract the pinners. Hot In Social Media reveals that the appearance of your images has a big influence on your pinners.
According to the website, an image with less than 30% of background is likely to draw more attention of the viewers. Similarly, if an image uses multiple colors, it is 3.25 times more likely to be repined than those using a single color.
It also shares the fact that images with a good width-height ratio are going to be liked more than vertically-angled images. Most importantly, it reveals that images with a tone reddish-orange get twice more repins than those with blue.
Keeping these facts in mind will help you optimize your pins according to preferences of pinners.
Include a Call To Action (CTA)
Having a clearly laid-out call to action (CTA) description is critical to direct your pinners to your blog. A CTA is a brief and concise description of your pin and it directs your pinners about what to do next to read your blog.
Getting the audience on your blog is the second step once you have inspired your audience with your pins. What you need here is a short CTA description that prompts your audience to click the URL of your blog.
Make sure that your call to action is simple and visible to be viewed by your pinners. Follow this criterion:
Write a short and clear CTA description
Put a link to your blog
Do not put more than one link
Make Your Pins Searchable
So you have found your audience, optimized your pins and the pinners have started to flood in. But what about those searches that are directed from Google?
To tap into the audience from organic search, you need to optimize your Pinterest profile with standard SEO techniques. As Google index social media profiles of online businesses, you can draw plenty of traffic from search engine result page (SERP).
Make sure if:
Your blog board title matches with your blog title.
You optimized the right keywords in your pins.
There is any hashtag used in your pins.
You have created the ‘Alt tags’ in each of your pins.
Pinterest features a ‘Verify you website’ tool that requires you to verify your Pinterest account. By using this tool, you are able to validate the authenticity of your account which leads you to get higher ranking on Google. It is a proven fact that websites that are verified have higher chances of getting top rankings on the SERP.
So if you want to take leverage of Pinterest this year, make sure that you follow the above-mentioned guidelines.
Rochelle Ceira is a professional specializes in offering help to learners around the globe by offering them tips, techniques, and insights into ed-tech and current educational trends. Presently, she’s working as a senior executive at Dissertation Avenue.