When it comes to social media marketing, every platform has its own tiny quirks that set apart one from another. Each has its own language, style, demographic, and etiquette and require media marketers to be creative and strategic in designing unique, yet unified, social media campaigns across their various social media networks.
Pinterest is a prime example of a unique social media site that has brought about a lot of change and strategy in the way businesses do social media marketing. Pinterest has quickly risen to prominence in the social media marketing world. On Pinterest, users post links to products, articles, blogs, projects, etc. that they like, sharing them in albums with friends and like-minded individuals. Pinterest users don’t just pin internally from the Pinterest site (though hopefully they are repining items from your company or organization’s boards) – they are able to pin items from anywhere on the web that has a compatible image. Thus, businesses have to take measures to make sure their websites are Pinterest-user friendly, to allow and encourage pinning.
Here are some tips to ensure your website and products will be accessible to Pinterest users:
- Make things easy to pin. Adding a direct pin button on each page of your site, or even on each product, makes it extremely easy to pin items on your site.
- Include lots of Pinable images. If you don’t have a lot of images on your site, you may want to rethink your web design. Pinterest users cannot pin images from your site if you don’t have any images the platform recognizes. (Beware: some content management systems (CMS) don’t display images in a savable format.)
- Post quality, original photos on your site. Because Pinterest is photo based, it is so much easier to see what you’re linking to at a glance. This makes quality photos THAT much more important for websites (as if they weren’t already important). Also, use original photos, not stock photography. You are trying to market your specific business and/or product, so you don’t want the image you’re using associated with multiple websites and competing content.
- Write the descriptions for your images. Some pins come with the caption included in the metadata, which means that you can choose what the description for your pictures reads. If you code your company name and even the price of your product into your website images, this will automatically show up when someone tries to pin something they like from your site.
- Add text to images. While users can change the descriptions of your images, they cannot alter text that is directly on your picture. If you want to ensure that information stays attached to your images when they are pinned, adding text to your images is the way to go. This is very common with blog promotion.
No matter what social media marketing strategy you are using, keep in mind the most important thing is to engage with your followers. Social media makes it easy to be in direct communication with the people who love your business or organization! Whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or any other social media site, make sure you are joining conversations about the things that your followers are interested in. This will build a community of loyal followers as well as happy customers!