97th Floor did a presentation on utilising Pinterest for Marketing and the content was definitely worth listening to. This blog summarises their ideas on how to really make Pinterest work for your business.
The biggest misconception is around the demographic that uses Pinterest, it is presumed that Pinterest is mainly female but in fact the statistics show that about 45% of users are male. Businesses who sell products or services predominantly for males should really get on “board”.
The most popular categories are Food and Drink and DIY and be prepared to get creative when using these categories. Keep in mind that Pinterest is not about publishing lots of your own product but rather about sharing interesting and relevant content to peak interest in your brand.
9th Floor offers some sound advice on how to get your pins to go viral. First and foremost is the issue of visual content, is your content visually appealing? Small, blurry images will not get the recognition they deserve. Secondly, is the actual content informative and helpful? Perhaps try an “instructographic” which is a few steps with images on how to do something. I really enjoyed “the invisible tree” which was an instructographic pin created by 97th Floor. The third bit of advice is around timing and seasonality, in the above example this pin was create with Christmas and the holiday season in mind. Why not create something unique for Valentine’s Day or Easter? If you want your pins to go viral then pin on Thursday, Friday and Sunday nights for the best response. Lastly, how do you get more people to see your boards? Pinterest has community boards which can only be found by browsing through Pinterest. Contact the owners of the boards to see if they might be interested in letting you pin onto their community boards. The content on your own Pinterest account would have to be relevant and useful to their board and not contain spam.
I think the most important factor in Pinterest is to have fun! Keep content fresh, interesting and for lack of a better word “pretty”.