How to Use Pinterest to Build Your Online Brand

By Lindsay Craig

In recent years, Pinterest has quickly become one of the most important tools for brand building. A recent analysis of just over 528,000 Shopify store orders showed that Pinterest was the second largest source (social) of online traffic, overshadowing Twitter. Plus, of those visits, Pinterest had the highest average order value, even surpassing Facebook!

Here are some Pinterest tips to accelerate the growth of your online brand:

1. It’s better to create a business account than a personal account

It’s critical to start with the right foundation on Pinterest. Setting up a business account is advantageous since it gives you access to analytics such as pinners, repins, repinners, impressions, clicks, visits, and number of pins. This allows you to monitor your performance and adjust accordingly.

Since presentation is everything when it comes to marketing, your first steps after setting up an account are putting up your logo as your profile image and kick-starting a few boards with your best images. This will help build trust with your potential customers, and with trust, comes business. Afterwards, be sure to add links to your new Pinterest account on your website, Facebook and/or Twitter profiles to increase accessibility to your customers. This goes a long way in building worthwhile traffic.

2. Use high quality images and create naturally pinnable content

Since Pinterest is all about visuals, cutting corners on image quality is really not an option. There are four factors that matter the most when it comes to determining what’s shared on Pinterest, namely:

• Color
• Saturation
• Aspect Ratio
• Lightness

There are lots of royalty-free images you can obtain online on sites like Pexels or Unsplash, but taking your own pictures is often the best option.

Creating naturally pinnable content is also key to market your brand on Pinterest. Etsy, a popular and still growing brand on Pinterest, generates about 66 percent of its pins from the Pinterest bookmarklet button. You could also repin images from other sites, but there’s a catch: it’s misleading (and even legally questionable) to link other images back to your own website, especially if you don’t credit the creator. If you choose to link to other sites, it’s important to always give credit, or just produce original content when possible.

3. Learn to tailor your content for your audience

Most visitors to Pinterest are very loyal to specific niches. To attract potential customers requires dedication to a particular niche, rather than trying to provide a mix of just about anything. Statistically, the three biggest niche categories on Pinterest include home decor, food and drink, and DIY topics. Other categories such as holidays and events, health and fitness, and design still receive a huge chunk of the traffic.

To be successful on Pinterest, your brand needs to align its content with the interests of the Pinning audience. Learn to inspire your audience by creating boards around beautiful lifestyle themes based on your products, and not just basic product boards. Inspiring images are sure to drive more traffic your way.

4. Make 'Rich Pins' your friend

In case you haven’t heard of them, Rich Pins are specifically designed to provide more information and context for your pins. Rich Pins answer potential customer’s questions before they’re even asked, making your pins more user friendly. The five types of Rich Pins are products, recipes, movies, articles, and places.

5. Pay attention to the seasons and pinning patterns

When it comes to Pinterest, timing is everything. If your brand deals in the holiday niche, pins start rising in August; health and fitness, on the other hand, is most popular earlier in the year. As seasons change, so should the trend of your brand’s pins.

The same also applies to day-to-day pinning trends. Though Pinterest is usually alive all day long, numbers show that about 30 percent of total pinning happens between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., with a spike noted in the evening hours. Pinning, however, tends to decrease during the night hours.

6. Run Pinterest contests

Two things are sure in life, everybody pays taxes and everybody likes winning. Contests can be key for increasing engagement with consumers on Pinterest. If done properly, contests can greatly increase your brand’s traffic and sales. All that's necessary is to be creative, offer a worthy incentive to your followers, properly organize the contest, and just let the magic happen. If you can’t do it yourself, apps like Wishpond are available to help.

In this day and age, using the right social media strategy is fundamental to building a strong online brand. For many businesses, Pinterest has proven to be an important part of that strategy.