5 Pinterest Strategies that Drive Major Traffic

Pinterest - the image driven social network that burst onto the social media scene in 2010, has seen rapid growth in 2013 and it continues its winning streak in 2014. This chart from Pew Internet Research shows that Pinterest has by far been the fastest growing social media platform of all in 2013, growing at a blistering 40% y-o-y.  However, as with every marketing platform, you need to analyze whether it addresses your target audience and then proceed to derive maximum marketing gold from it. Pinterest has been, since inception, a female dominated social network, unlike most other social media platforms (except LinkedIn) with 80% female and 20% male users in 2014. So if you have a at least half of your audience among the fairer sex, read on to learn the best ways to drive traffic to your website using Pinterest. 5 Pinterest Strategies that Drive Major Traffic 

1. Do The Basics That You Would Do On Other Social Networks

Pinterest may be a unique social network in that it is dominated by women and is more like a scrapbook than a newsfeed like Twitter or Facebook, but the basics remain the same for all social media platforms. 

• Get a ‘Pinterest for Business’ account: This way you can verify your company URL, get a customized URL if you like and get access to the full suite of Pinterest Analytics to understand what is going on, on your Pinterest page.
• Be Regular, Frequent, Auto schedule: The same rules that apply on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn apply here too. Post regularly to build a serious following, post often to keep engagement high. Use tools like Hootsuite, or Piqora to auto schedule your posts on Pinterest ahead of time and manage your Pinterest account alongside your other social media accounts.
• Maintain Two-Way Communication: What makes a social media platform tick is the conversation that you have with your followers or Pinners. Respond to their comments on your pins to show them that they matter, repin interesting pins from your followers and engage with them as you would on any other platform.

2. Let your images be ‘Pinnable’

As mentioned repeatedly in this post, Pinterest is a complete visual delight. Whatever you do on Pinterest, let your images do the talking for you. Get beautiful images that inspire, engage and are relevant to your business. Catch the attention of Pinners by overlaying title text on your images as a variation. Pinterest does not have any restrictions on how large your images can be. The bigger the better, they will be resized automatically based on the space available on your boards. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to have your images be at least 600 px wide. Also, try and use watermarks on images so that they serve as a branding tool while they are re-pinned on Pinterest or shared on other social platforms. Conversely, your website probably has a bunch of images that you own the copyright for and are relevant to your line of work. What better way to get users to engage with you on Pinterest?  Image: Modcloth offers rich detailing in its product images on site. It also allows users to pin their favorites straight from their website. Allow pinning of images that you display on your site. Learn how to embed a ‘Pin It’ button on your images and let your visitors take a piece of your site back with them.   

3.Use Rich Pins

Pinterest recently launched a more descriptive way of sharing content on its platform – rich pins. Use rich pins to provide descriptions of your image, prices, click through links to your page, ingredients, recipes – details that make your posts more useful to your followers. Rich pins are of 5 types – products, travel, recipes, articles and movies.  Image: Recipe rich pin Apply for your Rich Pin here. With Rich Pins, you can directly link products listed on your site to pins on Pinterest, and hence grow direct traffic to your site.   

4. Have a variety of boards

Leading brands on Pinterest create engagement and drive traffic back to their sites by using segmentation effectively. Have different boards for different products/services you offer. Have sub categories within individual product categories? Create dedicated boards for them. This will help reach out to pinners with niche interests that you might not have been able to draw to your website otherwise. While you focus on creating segmented boards for different interests, also maintain a ‘Top Pins’ board for visitors who arrive on your page for the first time. Zulily’s ‘Zulily Loves’ board gets the most action compared to all the other boards it maintains.   

5. Guest Boards and Collaborative Boards

Social media is nothing without interactions between brands and users. Just like other platforms have opinion leaders, Pinterest has star pinners who have their own huge followings. Invite star pinners to create guest boards on your page – this will do two things: 

• √ You’ll get some great content for free on your page
• √ The followers of the guest board pinners get to know about your brand and might become your followers too

 Another way of working directly with pinners on Pinterest, is by joining Group Boards or setting up your own Group Board. In the former case, you contribute to other group boards and spread your authority among the followers of those boards. In the latter case, you invite your followers to contribute to a collaborative board that you, the brand; and they, the followers can jointly create. Pinterest is an exciting, colorful and highly addictive social media platform that works wonders when used right. The best news is that it is still mostly free, with Pinterest taking its first baby steps in the world of paid advertising right now. Build your presence on this rapidly growing, highly engaging platform and reap the results of your labors in the form of high volume, qualified leads to your site.  

Have more questions about maximizing Pinterest? Leave a question for Simon in the comments, or tell us about which of his 5 strategies you're going to put to use!