Pinterest is fast gaining popularity as the ultimate visual platform for you to be inspired and motivated. Besides finding great information and interesting images, Pinterest is also a wonderful place for you to market your business and your brand.

One of the biggest reasons why you should be using Pinterest to promote your business is that traffic from Pinterest can last days, weeks and years. While a post on Facebook can last just hours at most and a tweet on Twitter may have a lifespan of maybe 30 minutes, just a tad shorter than the lifespan of a Mayfly which lives for 24 hours, your Pinterest post can last like forever in comparison.

As a marketer, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not using Pinterest as one of the social media platforms that you should be focusing on to build your audience and draw the right kind of traffic back to your web property.

Lets look at some success stories of brands, publishers and businesses that are using Pinterest and rocking it.

• Made.com has collaborated with 60 designers to make unique and well designed home decor. They have been able to increase transactions by 106% and revenue by 173% by using Pinterest.
• The Grommet, a launch platform for unique and undiscovered products have seen revenue grown by 1233% and traffic going northwards by a spell bounding 336% in a matter of 9 months.
• Reiss, a British fashion company founded in 1971 have grown into a global brand and seen a 46% increase in Pinterest-referred revenue with their Pinterest strategy.
• Pura Vida, a San Diego based company offering bracelets made by Costa Rican artisans managed to increase their orders by 31% using promoted pins.

The list of businesses using Pinterest to generate more revenues and exposure of their business can go on and on. More companies are beginning to realise how important it is to incorporate Pinterest as part of their marketing strategy. What more with Pinterest having recently announced that they have reached a major milestone of reaching 100 million creative users in their community.

“Exploring interests is a huge part of how people use Pinterest” ~ Kevin Knight, Head of Creative and Brand Strategy at Pinterest

The number of Pinterest users are growing and we also need to know what they are looking for and what will they be looking for when they are on Pinterest. It has been found by the team at Pinterest that people’s interest generally fall into 5 main categories and they include:

1. A passion: Something that forms a core part of who a person is and it includes topics like music, photography and sports.
2. A vocation: Something that is part of a person’s professional being like an engineer sharing on the latest engineering discovery and a designer who have created a technique that many have overlooked.
3. A hobby: Something that you do for fun like kite flying and stamp collecting.
4. A project: Something that has an end in mind, like a party or redecorating your living room.
5. A preference: Something that can change with the trends and can involve fashion taste and involve certain colours and patterns.

Those are the 5 main things that people look out for and most likely your business can easily fit into at least one if not two of the categories mentioned above. The space is just waiting for you to come in. There are just so many people waiting for more pins to be discovered. This allows you to come in and connect with users visually.

Now lets compare between two searches. One made on Google and another made on Pinterest.

A search on Google would show some images in thumbnail format followed by the links and description of websites that Google feels is relevant to what you are searching for. A search on Pinterest shows something which is more visually appealing and catches the eye almost instantaneously. As such, it is imperative if you are going to share images on Pinterest, you need to boost your image engagement.

Here are some tips from Curalate’s Data Science Team that you can use to ensure that your images get some Pinterest love.

1. Tall images or also known as portraits gets more engagement on Pinterest than wider images.
2. Colourful images with more than a single dominant colour get 3.25 times more repins than one with a single dominant colour.
3. Very light or very dark images are not repinned as often and users seem to like images of medium lightness 20 times more than mostly black images and 8 times higher than images that are mostly white in colour.
4. Red images have a higher chance of getting repinned than a blue colour image.
5. Red, orange and brown images get twice the number of repins than images that that come in blue.
6. Images that have less than 30% background (whitespace for example) get the most repins.
7. An image that has 40% or more of background area gets 2 times or 4 times less repins.
8. Images that contain no human faces get 23% more repins and less than 20% of images on Pinterest have images of faces on them.
9. Images with a smooth texture gets 17 times more repins than images with a rough texture.

Besides images with the above characteristics, call to actions on images will also increase your engagement to more than 80%, according to Quicksprout. As such, put call to action words in your image to get more people to do what you would want them to do, make their way to your brand and your website.

Below are some call to action words that you can use in your Pinterest images.

1. Click here
2. Get this now
3. Register today
4. Pin it for later
5. Share this
6. Sign up now

Use these call to action words in your images and surprise yourself with the fact that people do take action when persuaded to. And if you look closely at the call to action words listed some of them actually get you to grow your list while others get your pins reposted and shared which means that you can get more traffic to all the great content that you have produced.

While we are still talking about Pinterest and why you should be using the platform to engage your audience and get new ones, I would like to bring you to one important aspect of Pinterest that have gotten the limelight lately: Optimising your pins so that they get ranked high.

In the past, pins that were new appeared highest in the feeds and if you had a ton of followers, you can bet your horses that your pins are going to be seen by many people. Now things have changed and Pinterest have substituted Pinterest Home Feed with Pinterest Smart Feed. What this means is that pins have to go through a few algorithmic hoops before they get ranked high. Lets look at the factors affecting your pins and how they get shown to others:

1. Only the top quality pins gets served to you
2. Only pins that are related to your pins will be served to you
3. Only pins related to your interest gets served to you

What Pinterest is trying to do here is basically not waste your time with pins that are irrelevant to you. The issue of “relevance” becomes an important buzzword here. As such you would need to apply some SEO techniques that can help you get your pins the relevance that they deserve. We can see this as a plus as your pins would now be served to people whom you most likely would like target.

Here are some of the actionable steps that you can take in order to optimize your pins on Pinterest:

1. Use descriptive keywords when you save your images. So if your image shows a picture of a red sports car, use the brand name of the car and some apt descriptive words as the name of that image. For example instead of saving the image as “IMG_213”, save it as “Red Ferrari Limited Edition 2016”. This will help your pin to appear when someone searches for a red sports car. In other words help Pinterest so that they can help you.
2. Include alt tags to your image. Use alt tags so that  Pinterest search engine can find your image better. Google on how to include an alt tag to your image and you will find many tutorials that can get you along the way.
3. Include key words in your pin description. Use some good descriptive words that can help Pinterest understand more about your pin. Also of course use the call to action words that I have provided to you above but don’t forget, just like a post that is SEOed for a certain keyword, your pin also deserves a good description so that it gets some good attention from the people that will want to see your pins.

I hope that some of the pointers that I have shared in this article will make you want to start using Pinterest. Its always great to see some new stuff on Pinterest from some of the newer bloggers instead of just the bigger players. Your thoughts and your ideas count. So wait no longer, get pinning!

– Ardy