Everything You Wanted to Know about Pinterest Business Accounts

We all love Pinterest on a personal level, right? It is a fun idea, using visual media rather than the usual form of social blogging that we are used to.

As far as business applications are concerned we all know we should be utilizing Pinterest as the valuable tool it is. But because it is so specific (It’s all about visual content!) it can seem a bit intimidating. How do you actually use it? Does it really work?

The answer to the latter is a resounding ‘Yes!’ Pinterest has been used by many brands, big and small, to improve everything from visibility to traffic, and can even be leveraged into full sales conversions.
Due to the versatility of the tool itself, and the wide range of uses it will have from company to company, your success is directly proportional to the time and creativity you put into it.
Pinterest is not just for fun niches! Bank of America used Pinterest to gain lots of exposure:

In less than 5 months, BMH content on Pinterest reached nearly 6 million unique Pinners, generated more than 29 thousand repins and led to thousands of actions on BMH.com

 

Pinterest Business Accounts

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In many ways the business account is similar to the personal account. Where the differences lie are in the features, and there are some that are available only to businesses. These give a brand the tools it needs to properly make its mark on the network.
Pinterest Analytics (Free!)

First, there is the cool analytics feature. While there are third party platforms out there that will monitor analytics for you, and they work well enough, Pinterest has their own dashboard which is free (There’s no other free alternative for Pinterest, mind you). You will be able to watch patterns over time, and put together reports that show you how your pins are performing.
Once you have that data, you will be able to better narrow down a content strategy. What pins are being shared most? Which are engaging through comments or likes? Is there some visual component that seems to be matching, or is it the content itself the image is representing?

Analytics is especially important for seeing the success of the next business specific feature: rich pins. These are pins that can be filled out in a format more fitting to the content and user intent.
For example, recipes can be written in a recipe form, listing the ingredients and instructions under the image. Movies, books and other media can have ratings. Soundcloud files can be integrated to be played in the pins, as well as YouTube and Vimeo videos.
Perhaps the most vital is a rich pin for product selling. You can list prices and product specifics right in your pinnable image meaning that users will be able to see it’s a product to buy when clicking the image in a pin.



Promoted Pins
Once you have posted your pins, you may be able to feature them. Promoted Pins was launched in 2014, and it is still a limited product. It works by allowing you to target specific audiences, which determines the cost. You only pay per visit that results from that pin.
You have to join a waiting list. While that is a shame, it is worth throwing your business on there for the chance to use this excellent promotional tool.

Buyable Pins
The most recent addition (and the one I still need to play with personally) looks very promising for retailers. Your buyers can buy from you directly from Pinterest.
Sounds like fun especially for emotional shopping
You’ll need to sign up to the waitlist but you have no chance to be accepted unless you represent a business account.

How To Set Up A Pinterest Business Account

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Now that you see the benefits, it is time to get started!
Step 1 – Sign Up as a Pinterest Business Account
Go to the Pinterest For Business page, and sign up for an account. If you already have a personal account you have set up for your brand, or you want to take a personal account and make it brand specific, you can convert it on the same page. This is great news for the many who got started before Pinterest released business pages.



Once you have your account, it is time to optimize it. Provide your business name, a logo, and write an informative but simple, keyword rich description. Usually your slogan will be enough, along with an explanation of what you do.
You should also provide a URL to your website, and verify it with Pinterest so it shows as an active link on your profile.

Step 2 – Begin Building Your Pinterest Business Account
From there, it is similar to setting up a personal account. You want a wide range of related boards where you will pin your own content, as well as share others to drive traffic to your profile. Make sure all boards are using an attractive cover image, and have titles that match popular keywords.
Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest is not limiting its business entities in any way: You are free to follow anyone and interact with anyone (be it a person or another business page) which helps a lot in growing your presence.

Begin using your account regularly, and watch it grow!
If you have other social media accounts (of course you do), you can promote your profile on them. You would be surprised by how many people will follow just because you took the time to ask. Which puts your content on their front page, and will increase the chances of them seeing your new pins.

Step 3 – Optimize Your Pinterest Business Account Strategy
Once upon a time, Pinterest was available on Hootsuite. For some reason, that is no longer the case. Which has given many people the false impression that there are no social dashboard tools for Pinterest.
There are actually several, but the most popular right now has to be Tailwind. It is a  more advanced analytics tool, scheduler and monitor. If you do have Hootsuite, you can add an app for Tailwind. So you can technically use it for Pinterest, if in a very roundabout and inconvenient way.
In any case, having a third party tool to improve your Pinterest use should be a requirement for all business accounts. The difference it makes is incredible

Conclusion

That is all it takes! Creating a Pinterest business account, or converting a personal one into a business account, it surprisingly easy. It is also a necessity for brands today, whether you are specializing in a tangible product, content, or a service.
With a bit of creativity, you can improve sales, traffic, and brand visibility. So get started on your Pinterest marketing strategy today with your own business account.






http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/content/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-pinterest-business-accounts/

Using Pinterest to Get Customers through the Door

A picture is worth a thousand words. You’ve heard that before, right? But, how often do you profit from it? With Pinterest, you can. A beautiful image is your best friend on the Internet. Pinterest is a website dedicated to beautiful images. It’s almost like a match made in heaven. Here’s how to make use of it, and how to capitalize on a new feature: Place Pins.

Place Pins For Local Business
Place pins are a way for you to tag places you’ve been (or want to visit). But, for businesses, they’re a way to garner free advertising. What you do is pin your business, using images, and tag them to a location – your store.

Think of it as a mix between Foursquare and Yelp. Because users can access pins from their mobile device, they can find you pretty easily when they’re tooling around town.

These pins are like other rich pins in the sense that they will contain things like your phone number, address, and other pertinent details. Why is this important?

Let’s say your customers are out getting groceries. They’re tired from all that shopping and they want a bite to eat. You’re a deli owner and your customers are out there – hungry. They stop in and they love the place. They want to pin your business and so they do. Guess what? Other pinners find your place through Pinterest. They see what their friends pinned and, more importantly, where you are. It’s free advertising.

Arranging Images On Your Site
When you put images up on your site, make sure they are place pins. That way, when users pin them, they pin your business location so that others can see it.

Creating Your Pinterest Board
Create an interesting board that will resonate with your target audience. This is something you should be doing regardless of whether or not you’re using place pins, but it’s more important if you are. Think locally.

According to marketing firm Yodle, Inc., things like a “things to do” list for out-of-town travelers or a local guide that includes your store location work well. You could even make a game out of it. If you’re a larger store, create a scavenger hunt.

Outreach
Reach out to other bloggers in your niche, or those who write about your industry, and let them know what you’re doing. Create a news story out of it, if at all possible. That will make it very easy to write about, and it will also give the blogger or reporter a motivation to write about you.

Signage In your Store
If you want to encourage users (customers) to pin your store (and you do), hang signs inside and out that encourage people to pin you. Give them some kind of incentive to do so too. You can offer them a discount on their next purchase or a freebie of some kind.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a promotional offer from your store. You could also enter them into a contest to win something – a “VIP” prize of sorts.

(Flickr / mkhmarketing)

http://socialbarrel.com/using-pinterest-get-customers-door/55475/?utm_source=CustomerSure&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=100%20blog%20list 

Pinterest: Not Just Interior Design & Cats - There’s Real Money To Be Had

This month’s guest post on all things social comes from Marketing Insights Analyst, Natalie Meehan. Natalie has worked in marketing for almost a decade, and forms part of Brandwatch’s marketing insights team - writing reports and other content about all things social. She keeps a big, well-stocked tin of sweets on her desk at all times.
 

Think Pinterest, and you might think it’s just a platform for perving over rainbow layered cakes, or watching people try and fail at recreating hairstyles that require scaffolding and a week off work to achieve.

The thing is, Pinterest is a whole lot more than that.

Bringing in the mega bucks

It’s a money spinner, and one that’s crazily underutilised by businesses. Want to see some facts and figures and some unnecessary caps lock? OF COURSE, YOU DO.

The average order placed by Pinterest shoppers at $169, nearly $100 more than orders placed from Facebook and Twitter adverts.

• Pinterest users are high earners, with 28% earning more than $100,000 a year
• Pinterest drives 7.10% of web traffic that sites receive, more than Reddit or Twitter
• 69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item that they’ve then purchased, or intended to.

source

It’s clear to see that Pinterest is not just kittens and cupcakes. With Pinterest being a far more open landscape than Facebook or Twitter, it’s much easier to see what exactly people — your potential customers — are interested in, and savvy businesses are using this data in a myriad of ways, including to ‘reverse showroom’, or use secret boards to drive sales.

 

Using the right tools for the job

Community Managers in all sectors will likely be well-versed in using social media management tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. These platforms enable you to make the most of a lot of your social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all mostly pretty easy to manage and report on. But I’m not going to teach granny to suck eggs here. You’ll know this already.

What you may not know is that there are a number of analytics tools that enable you to manage your Pinterest accounts in the same way.

These lesser-known tools are perhaps a step into the unknown, a leap of faith. Do you pick a free tool, and hope for the best, or shell out for a paid option and cross your fingers that you’re going to get at least some return on investment?

We decided to delve into the murky world of Pinterest analytics  tools mainly out of curiosity. We were trying to decide what would  work best for us as a company, and we realised that there wasn’t all that much information out there.What we wanted was a simple report that rated everything out there in a clear and simple manner - one that would help us make the best business decision for us.

We couldn’t find one, so we made one.

Making the right choice just got a little easier

We’ve evaluated Pinterest’s top tools, giving marketers an insightful overview of the industry which stretches far beyond Pinterest’s basic web offering.

For each tool we’ve isolated five key areas to most simply describe the functionality -

• Competitor Analysis: How can you use the tool to track competitors profiles and benchmark your brand’s performance against others?
• Historical Data: How far back can the data be retrieved from Pinterest prior to the date of your initial subscription?
• Scheduling: Does the tool have the feature to schedule the publication of pins, and is it any good?
• Website Traffic: How about metrics that show traffic data relating to your website and different pins?
• Pin Metrics: How does the tool display native Pinterest engagement metrics such as likes, repins and comments?

We’ve also included a detailed index for these metrics and criteria, because buzzwords can get pretty buzzwordy, if you know what I’m saying.

 https://www.distilled.net/resources/pinterest-not-just-interior-design-cats-theres-real-money-to-be-had/#comment-47069