How to Use Pinterest for Business

How to get traffic through Pinterest

This is Pinterest guide for businesses and marketer looking forward to increase traffic through Pinterest.

When you consider Pinterest as yet another social media marketing tool, you might be underestimating the wonders it can do for diverting traffic towards your website. It’s a new wave in the social media platform and its forte is images, very much popular in the United States.

A very interesting fact about Pinterest is that a majority of its users are females around the world. The website is an excellent social media marketing tool and its popularity can be estimated by its record breaking pace at which it has crossed the ten million visitor record.

Pinterest is one of the most popular social networking sites in world placing it among the pantheon of must use social tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

A research conducted by Emily Carr University, and research firm Vision revealed some very useful facts for businesses for driving traffic through Pinterest.

Some of useful nuggets of wisdom will startle you too:

Pinterest drives more traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.

1 in 5 Pinterest user bought an item after pinning or liking it. A very high conversion rate ( approx 21%) for social world.

1 in 3 Pinterest users under 35 has bought something after pinning it.

19% of the purchased items were discovered through friends while 24% were discovered through strangers and just 9% through a retailer’s Pinterest board.

More than 40% of the Pinterest based purchases are made with-in a week.

80% of the Pinterest inspired purchases are made with-in three weeks of pinning.

Breaking the notion of gender biased social networking website:

As mentioned earlier pinterest is famous for its female following. As a matter of fact its considered women centered specifically in the United States where as stats tell 83% of pinterest users are women but there are exceptions like England where it’s reported that more than half of the users of pinterest are males and interestingly much younger than the US followers.

What all this data reflect is Pinterest followed its strategy of targeting audience for itself very intelligently like any other social networking website does. It targeted women and came out with flying colors in winning their hearts, but over the time it’s getting male attention.

If we talk about pinterest in terms of audience classification we will end with basis like age, tastes, gender, professions and many more. The bottom line is pinterest is moving out from the stamp of women centric to a main stream social network in totality and its prominent.

If you wonder how to attract web traffic to your website using Pinterest here are a few guidelines to help you with your web traffic issue:

Don’t just Repin like others if you wish to stand out in the crowd: This a very common mistake people make while using pinterest as a tool to attract traffic, instead of creating an archetypical and unique content they Repin what others have pinned already. It will gain you nothing and you will only end up running in circles. Develop a content which is distinct and possessing some good element to it. For the sake illustration.

i. If you come across an interesting and useful application or information which is actually valuable, share the source in an attractive manner.

ii. Segment and target your audience intelligently by understanding them and create good content exclusively suiting their interests.

Use Fad’s to gain attention: A fad is anything that’s in, be it for a short span of time. People often underestimate the impact of Fad’s on masses which is actually missing a very easy opportunity to gain attention and thereby traffic to your website.

i) Data’s reflect adding captions relating fads and a product increases the clicks on the link by almost 90%.
ii) Apart from fads using cultural factors, regional sentiments for gaining attention is also a very good trick to seek attention.

The bigger the better: What happens is, when you pin an image and a visitor takes interest in it and click to open it, it’s the crucial moment because by making it large enough to be opened right there, you can redirect it to your website or blog.

i) Pinterest permits pinning very large size images and it’s a facility you can take advantage of to divert traffic towards your website.
ii) Make the image to be at-least 2500 pixels. It won’t be displayed on your pinterest full size and it will redirect the visitor to the website to view image in full size.

Keep it simple stupid: People often make the mistake of making the images too gaudy for concealing the shallowness of content and information which doesn’t really work because the audience is too smart to recognize this gimmick. Make sense in your pins and do it intelligently.

i. Take advantage of the caption space to put intelligent and sense making description which will gain attention.

ii. Creativity is very essential. Caption if put smartly, the people repinning your content won’t feel the need to change the captions and it will maintain the originality of your image and caption.

Know your visitors and get more exposure: With the help of tools like RSS feeds and word-press. Pool up your pins through them and know who is repinning your pins. It will enable you gain exposure by fixing a price for your pin. When you set price for a pin it will be visible in the gifts section which help it get exposure.

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