Tag: pinterest tips

Why You Should Bother Building A Visual Identity on Pinterest!

Post author By Guest Post
Post date May 9, 2018

Are you aware that, according to the 2018 Social Media Statistics, there 200 million monthly active users and 100 billion of Pins being created?The chances of your Pins being seen and clicked is low particularly if you don’t have enough followers, you’re not part of any board groups, and you don’t optimize your Pins for search.

The importance of having a consistent visual branding on Pinterest is in order for your target audience to instantly recognize you in a pile of visuals.

Let me give you a good example.

Aside from using it for work or marketing, I love going to Pinterest to find the usual stuff like outfit ideas, easy-to-do recipes, travel tips, and, of course, quotes.

Here’s an example of what my home page looks like as I am writing this piece:

Now for you, this may seem like bunch of visuals and you probably can’t even tell who made them. However, for me, there’s one visual (oops make that two) that stands out the most – the one inside the red square.

I can straight away tell that this picture quote is from Word Porn because of three reasons:

They always use the same font which is a typewriter font.
They always use the same background which is white.
Their name is always included in the visual.

Suppose one day, they stop creating their quotes using one of these three, I think I won’t be able to recognize them. They’ll just be another random quote I see on Pinterest. Now, this is the main point and definition of branding: to make your entire self or company stand out from the others. As defined by Business Dictionary, branding means…

Visual Brand Consistency Examples on Pinterest

There are some visuals on Pinterest that whenever I see them, their name instantly pops into my head – with or without logo. You can take inspiration from these ones.

Lauren Hooker – Elle & Company

Just look at how creative entrepreneur, Lauren Hooker, does her Pinterest game. Not only can you see the similarities of the Pin images she makes, she also used them to create cohesiveness by using them as board image covers.

Lauren is consistent using:

The same font – a sans serif font
The same template which has a small rectangular shape at the bottom

If you’ll go to Lauren’s Pinterest page, you’ll see how she uses different colors. Nonetheless, I can recognize that the images are from her because the colors she use are soft and pastel like.

My Five Acres

Just like Instagram, Pinterest has a lot of users sharing content about travel and pictures of beautiful places. It’s no brainer, we love seeing photos of different places and country.

With all of the beautiful travel photos and tips I see, My Five Acres stands out the most for me because of how they do their visuals.

My Five Acres is consistent using:

The same template (square around the top and small rectangular shape at the bottom)
The same type of orange for the shapes
Their logo inside the small rectangular at the bottom

Polyvore

Ah yes, outfit ideas. One of the reasons why I and most women go to Pinterest is to look for what to wear to a certain event or what should we pair with our newly bought black jeans. There are plenty of style ideas but there’s one page that stands out the most to me, Polyvore. It’s basically how they do their visuals.

If you’re habitually looking for fashion ideas on Pinterest, I know you’ll agree with me.

Polyvore is consistent using:

The same template – white background and black text in the middle
The same fonts – a combination of serif and sans serif fonts

Social Media Examiner

If there’s one thing I see on my homepage every single time that would be marketing tips. I’m pretty sure all of them are helpful but Social Media Examiner’s visuals, with no fail, are the most noticeable to me which I end up clicking.

Social Media Examiner is consistent placing:

Their URL at the bottom
An icon or object at the top that is related to the topic

They may use different colors but you’ll see all of them are kind of vibrant to the eyes. You’ll also notice that they use different fonts.

PureWow

Again, one of the reasons why I and other women go to Pinterest is because there are lots of cooking tips and recipes.

There may be tons of helpful food ideas appearing right before my eyes but PureWow perfectly captured my attention with their Pin images.

PureWow is consistent using:

The same template – white background, showing six pictures, and black text at the top.
The same font – a serif font

How To Be Visually Consistent on Pinterest

Use the ideal image size

The go-to Pin image size is 735 pixels in width and 1128 pixels in height.

But, of course, you are free to creatively use any size you want just like what Polyvore and PureWow do with their Pin blog post recipe images which are longer than usual.

Whatever size you want to use, simply be consistent about it.

Use at least 2 branding elements in your visuals

According to visual brand strategist, Orana Velarde, there are four visual brand assets you should be using if you’re dead serious about building a visual brand identity: logo, colors, fonts, and visuals.

When you’re making picture quotes or blog covers for Pinterest, use two or all four of your visual assets like clockwork – just like the examples I mentioned earlier.

What if you’re not the only one in your team creating Pin images? How do you keep yourself and the others on the same page?

Fortunately, there’s an exact tool for this. Visme’s Brand Kit allows everyone in your team to have an access to all the visual assets and templates your brand is using.

There you have it. Everything you need to know about building a visual identity on Pinterest. Well, almost. Let me know if I missed something.

Either way, I hope I got my point across.

AUTHOR BIO:

Belle Balace is a Growth Specialist at Visme, an online visual tool where you can create engaging visuals in less time.

Tags pinterest marketing, pinterest tips, tips and tricks for social media marketing

Pinterest Tips

Guerrilla Marketing Tips for Pinterest

Post author By Alex
Post date April 4, 2017

Guerrilla marketing tips — Guerrilla Marketing Tips For Pinterest

So without going into lengthy and useless words and phrases, we are going to draft out essential marketing tips which can ACTUALLY do wonders for your business.

Pinning & Integrate

Make sure that your account is set up properly and that it is branded with your logo, also remember to create boards that would interest your target customers, especially the ones in your industry. It is extremely important to integrate Pinterest with other social media platforms.

There are a few perks to cross linking your different social networks. First off, linking your you social networks will keep your customers abreast of your progress and your brand identity. Moreover, you can (and must) pique your customer’s interests. Share a cool little montage featuring your products on YouTube or a use-based post on Facebook.

Simple. Effective. And minimal (do not overdo it!).

Participation is Key

Make it a rule to comment, and interact. That would mean, liking other pins and tagging other pinners by mentioning their names. A simple ‘Thank you’ can take you a long way in terms of customer goodwill.

Customer engagement could be increased by running contests, extracting user-generated content or jumping into customer forums and groups. All of these 3 options have their own pros and can significantly improve your Pinterest views and results.

Beware the Copyright!

It is vital that you are not pinning images that have copyright. If you do, then make sure you have permission and always remember to mention your source. Pinning copyrighted images without mentioning the source can get you into legal troubles.

Generate Interesting Pins

Being an entirely visual medium, Pinterest requires a constant input of high-quality images. Add images of your products, related to your products, images highlighting your products. Then add some images of your product’s habitat ie How the product would look in a real (customer-oriented) setting. Create an assortment of appealing images.

This would help you create an organized, enticing collective of your boards and pins, which in turn would pull your audience to your boards, hopefully amounting to a purchase.

As for ‘Interesting‘, you need to post images that connect with your audience, reflects their interests and map the current trends. Posting images that are aesthetically pleasing and relate to your customer’s wants (research, fellas!) will pull your audience to you boards ans eventually your website.

Create and Curate

It is better to curate other users’ quality images rather than just re-churning your images. Collaborative sharing of their quality images and photos can be mutually beneficial. This is where you can leverage Pinterest’s repin feature to collect pins related to your product.

Curate separate boards that outline your brand identity and motif. Avail a possible opportunity to co-brand your product with other services. The possibilities are endless. Just remember to use quality images for your pins.

Optimize Search Engines

Google keeps a track of fresh content and monitors social signals. By optimizing your pins with hashtags, links, categories and keywords, you can get yourself into Google’s good books, that is, on top of a search result. It is imperative to pin images and content directly from your website. Pinterest can bring back a lot of hits to your website- if you connect it properly.

Apart from a regular search, you need to optimize Pinterest SEO to feature in Pinterest search results. Here a few quick tips to ace Pinterest SEO –

Optimize your profile – Pick a right username, the one that reflects your product or activity.
Optimize your boards – Curate your boards. Pick images to reflect the content present in your Pinterest boards. Choose a succinct title as well.
Use Keywords – Perform some extended research for keywords associated with your brand. You can try Viralwoot’s Pinterest analytics to select niche keywords to potentially feature in several thousands of search results.

Evaluate Your Traffic

This is the best and most basic way to find out what works, and what doesn’t work for your website. It is also wise to monitor what your competitors and other brands are doing. You can learn a lot from your competition.

For updated on information on using this platform, take a look at our updated guide to Pinterest.

Tags Guerrilla Marketing, Guerrilla Marketing Tips For Pinterest, how to increase your pinterest followers, pinterest advertising, Pinterest analytics, pinterest ideas, pinterest marketing, Pinterest monitoring, Pinterest sales, pinterest tips

Pinterest Tips

How to Pin on Pinterest?

Post author By Alex
Post date March 14, 2017

Branding on Pinterest always goes in hand-in-hand with the way you pin. You could create a niche board or just pin randomly on your Pinterest profile. Nevertheless, there are several direct implications to any pinning method that you employ.

Well, this is the basic steps to guide you on how to pin something by yourself on Pinterest, how to pin from a website and how to pin someone else’s pin.

1. Pin Yourself

Clicking on it will give you options such as upload a pin and pin from a website. To add images from your computer just click on upload a pin.

You will be directed to choose the file from your computer to upload. As soon as you select the image, a thumbnail format of the same will reappear.

Just select the board you want to choose the image or create a different board by clicking on ‘Create a board’. Add a description below the image thumbnail and click on save it. Your image will be pinned in few clicks!!!

2. Pin from a website

I will prefer to my readers to install & use ‘Pin it’ or ‘Save it’ button on your bookmarks bar. After adding the save button, open the image on the website you want to pin.

Just click on the ‘Pin it’ button on your bookmark page and all the available images will appear on your screen. From those, select the one you want to post. This will redirect you to the ‘pin boards’ drop down menu in a new window. Choose the relevant board, fill in the description and click on pin it button.

Also, Pinterest will link back the image to the original website automatically.

Although this is a bit direct way, Pinterest also provides you another way to Pin from another website.

Alternate Way

Open the image on website you want to pin
Copy the URL
Open Pinterest Page
Log in
Click on ‘+’ button and then click on ‘Pin from a website’
Paste the URL

After this a fresh new window will open, displaying a number of options for the link. Choose your image, select the board and click on save it. Your pin is posted right away!!

3. How to Repin

This is the simplest one.

Just log in to your Pinterest Account and stay on the home page. Go through all the pictures available on the home page and select the one you wish to repin.

Click on the save button on the left top corner and add the description.

You will also get an option to choose from your own boards.

Select the most relevant board for it.

You can simply add or edit the description as per your liking.

After this, just click on save and you are good to go!!!

Tags Content marketing, Create a Board on Pinterest, how to pin, Pin, pinterest marketing, pinterest tips

Others Pinterest Tips

Why Pinterest for Indian Brands?

Post author By Alex
Post date March 12, 2017

In an earlier time, people could not even think of an e-commerce as a platform for buying products and services. Whereas today, we’ve come to a whole new arrangement, where shoppers are just choosing what to buy on their mobile sitting in their living room.

This immense shift in shopping style has occurred almost everywhere on the globe. Even in India, 292 million people use smartphones and even more use E-commerce services on their laptop or desktop.

As you may know, Pinterest is a visual platform, where images are pinned on boards and can be liked & repinned. Users extract images from different sources and pin it on Pinterest. Followers see this pin and can like or repin the post depending on their preference.

So essentially Pinterest acts as a catalog of images, in which each user has their own personal collection. This collection is intimate and can give a pretty great perspective into the lives and likes of the user.

A fun fact about Pinterest is that “number of people who see your pins is larger than number of people who follows you”. That’s Pinterest for you. Still need more reason? Ok, here they are.

As per a study, 88% of the users who pin a product on Pinterest, make a definite purchase. That’s a pretty solid percentage when you compare it to other social media networks where even ads are unable to pull these kind of numbers.

For example: 80% of the Pins on Pinterest receive a repin compared to 1.4 % retweets on Twitter. This gives us a basic view of Pinterest’s efficacy when it comes to business oriented aspects.

And if we look at the Pinterest ads; my God! Aren’t they beautiful?

You cannot ignore the fact that how exquisitely South African Airlines have given a beautiful impression along with the promotion of their airlines.

User loves what they see and that is why Pinterest can be seen as a galleria of several gorgeous images pinned on variegated boards.

Well, let’s see some listed reasons, why Indian brands should use Pinterest as their marketing platform.

Demographics and Stats

Out of 1.23 billion people, only 243 million uses the internet. It’s good because 243 million still uses the internet and we have 81% of prospects left.

As per predictions, total users may increment up to 500 million. What does it mean for marketers like you?

A totally new customer pool of 250 million users is under process. There will be millions of users to reach with such a simple and elegant platform, where you can simply promote your products by pinning images.

Talking about mobile integration with social media platforms, around 92+ million active users are there on mobile. Much to your amaze, this is only 41% of total mobile internet users, which means a huge chunk is still left to tap (which is already predicted to come to play in next 2 years).

Alongside, Digital media market in India is also increasing at a swift rate. With already 8.9 million active users in India, Pinterest is swiftly penetrating the Indian markets with ease.

As per the research, around 58% of the digital marketers are still focusing on customer acquisition, which means there is huge untapped customer-pool. It also, means 42% of total digital marketers have controlled the market.

Predictions

Many marketers are predicting that Pinterest’s buying user number will see an increase of 24% till 2019; i.e. reaching 60 million. In the month of November 2014, it was studied that this impeccable platform has doubled up the number of men signing up as compared to 2013.

Since times have changed now; Marketers are now assessing social media by not seeing the number of followers but by actual sales conversion done there.

You may say that Facebook has 66% bigger customer base than Pinterest. But have you accounted that people come on Facebook with a purpose to interact, do networking and see the news. Facebook too has not set its focus from being a social networking site to a marketing-focused platform.

This has opened a gate for Pinterest in India since India ranks 2^nd in Facebook users across the Globe, U.S. being the first.

A Toddler now Maturing

Pinterest was started by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp as a closed beta in the year 2010. In the preceding years, Pinterest has matured a lot in terms of user engagement, UI and design parameters.

Many brands still talk of Pinterest as a ‘Toddler’ in the context of advertising but no one debates about its immense potential. The introduction of promotional pins has been an open declaration from Pinterest of their arrival in the field of advertisement.

Pinterest has always been a bit different and quite visionary when it comes to social networking mediums. Comparing to the existing social media platforms, one could say that Pinterest is ‘the best’ platform available for users to product sales. The same goes for the sellers; as a marketer you get ample space and audience to communicate the intended message effectively.

Compared to Indian user number of 2.1 million in 2014, now Pinterest has been able to tap 8 million users in 2016. That is just not a sign of toddler anymore. Showing an increase of around 400% is just another example of saying that Pinterest is going to be “The next big thing” on Internet very soon.

What Does Pinterest Offer?

A lot has been already said for the Indian market and users. We’ll discuss more about Pinterest and its offerings.

This image-based social platform is becoming more than what it was aimed to be. Owing to its elegant UI, large user base, and shopping-oriented design, Pinterest is becoming a major tool for shoppers of today.

Let us go through some of the basic terms related to Pinterest:

Pins: It is simply the pins posted by you
Boards: Collection of pins categorized as per your preference
Followers: People following your profile, pins or boards
Repin: If someone likes your pin, he/she can repin it.

Some more terms are there; go here for further clarity.

Since social media is considered as the best form to perform research on products/services, so how should you use it?

Just put an image of the product as a pin and ask the customers for their feedback.

Mentioned below are few offerings by Pinterest that can surely help you are a marketer to promote your brand and increase the sales:

Boards

A board is a collection of images or pins on your profile. Once you log in to your Pinterest account, just create a board by clicking on your account name on the top left side of the page.

The main advantage of having boards is that if your business is targeting a specific group of audience, you do not have to promote your product like a blind marketer. Instead, you can select what sort of boards covers your audience, make that category and cover a larger client pool.

Brands having niche marketing goals should take Pinterest as their mentor because a board simply solves all the bottlenecks that were previously available in all other social media platforms.

For example, if you are selling luxurious watches, just make a board naming it relevantly and selecting groups such as luxury, fashion, men’s watch, and watches. You will cover a larger segment of users who are following these categories and will be interested in purchasing the product.

So, Pinterest filters out a large group of people and lets you target users relevant to your brand or product.

Action Oriented

Do not get misinterpreted by the fact that Pinterest is a place, where users just give an impressive look to the images and move on. No. As said earlier, most of the shoppers get influenced by Pinterest to make a purchase. Also, most of the pins on

Pinterest pins are themselves action oriented.

Recipe pins aid users in figuring out what to cook, home décor pins helps people decorate their place as per their preference and fashion pins enable the user to decide what to buy.

Serving as a mechanism of discovery, Pinterest has users who tend to spend more money. Pinterest users are 10% more likely to make a purchase on e-commerce platforms than users who are referred from other social media platforms.

Another important feature of Pinterest is that users can save the pins they like for later; thus serving as a bookmark for products. For a bride, who is planning her marriage Pinterest can serve as a digital wedding planner, where she can save whatever she likes and can review the options later to make a purchase.

Advertising Platform

Pinterest has been taking a special interest in the promotion of brands. The introduction of promoted pins or Rich Pins has been a major step in advertising by Pinterest. Rich Pins are total of 6 kinds:

Recipe
Product
App
Movie
Article
Place

Each meant for the different purpose, these paid/promoted pins are utilized for getting a better & effective user engagement. For example, app pins include an install button, which enables users to download the app without even leaving Pinterest.

For people who love traveling, Place pins tell them everything about a place such as providing a map and giving address & phone number.

Indian brands who wants their products to be showcased on Pinterest can use product pins, which makes it quite convenient for the buyers to reach and purchase your product.

Campaigns

It is quite hard to engage customers with your brand on social media platforms, especially when there are so many. Pinterest includes Campaigns, where you as a marketer can start a contest or campaign to bring more and more users at a single platform to discuss.

You can see here, two different kinds of campaigns are available; Engagement campaign and Traffic campaign. Either you can choose to engage customers by boosting the interaction with your pins or you can direct a motivated audience towards your content.

Brands that are finding it difficult to start a conversation or do not know how to tap the client pool, can utilize this feature and benefit themselves by engaging with users at a macro-level.

Pinterest Analytics

It is every marketer’s dream to track even the minutest activity of their strategy to assess its performance accordingly. Pinterest has made this dream come true for marketing professionals. Although, many social media platforms have their own analytical tools, but none has such a huge shopping enthusiast users on their platform.

So a combination of millions of users (80% of them) who just want to shop and a tool, which can help brands to monitor their activities in order to promote the product in accordance with the consumer behavior, can be a deadly one.

Not only analytics tells the performance of your Pinterest profile, but it also gives insights on small issues such as what kind of pins are performing best & worst, when are your target audience online most, what does your target audience like most (which boards and pins), and so on.

However, there are some third party tools also available for managing the business account of Pinterest to fill some uncovered issues. Viralwoot is an M&M (management & marketing) suite of Pinterest. Using a simple UI that users can handle, monitor and track, Viralwoot is able to tap around 70000 users and associate itself with 4000 brands across the globe. Some of the brands that are using Viralwoot are listed as following:

Industry: Company
News: Buzzfeed
Knowledge: Wikipedia
Travel: Trivago and Cleartrip
Clothing: Wrangler and Lifestyle
Retail: Infibeam
Jewelry: Nakshatra
Movies: Bookmyshow

This M&M suite Viralwoot has following main attributes:

Pinterest Scheduler
Promotion on Pinterest
Pinterest Analytics
Content Manager
Influencer Manager

Top 10 Indian Brands on Pinterest

I will now list the top 10 Indian brands that are using Pinterest as a platform to market and promote their products:

1. WedMeGood

WedMeGood is a new wedding planner destination for all the to-be brides & to-be grooms. Incepted in 2014, this firm has been using Pinterest solely for the purpose of marketing their services and reaching a larger audience.

This is one of the few companies in India, which is wise enough to utilize the potential of Pinterest in order to reach their sales target. With 35k followers, WedMeGood is quite popular on Pinterest and hence it remains active by continuous engagement with the customers.

2. Myntra

Launched in 2007, Myntra is an e-commerce platform for branded apparels. Ranked as top four startups for India, Myntra is aggressively using Pinterest for increasing their visibility.

With 3000 followers, Myntra is surely using Pinterest as a booster to increment its sale and build a bigger customer base.

3. Jabong.com

Incepted in the year 2012, Jabong.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites in India, has been able to mark its presence on Pinterest. Seeing the Jabong.com Pinterest account, you can simply figure out that it has been effectively using this exquisite image-based platform to ensure a proper customer engagement.

Jabong has been using promoted or Rich pins continuously to showcase its product for the target audience.

4. Times of India

Pinterest has been a wonderful place to start a discussion; i.e. interacting with customers on a large scale. Times of India, country’s leading print media player has been taking full advantage of Pinterest. With around 10k followers, TOI has been gaining a competitive edge as it started before everyone else.

5. ScoopWhoop

ScoopWhoop is a new-bee internet media and news company launched in the year 2013. Started as a viral content generating and sharing website, the company is now providing news on the portal and also acts as a medium for discussing & sharing social concern issues. Pinterest has been an active stage for ScoopWhoop altogether with approximately 1.4 thousand pins and 2.5 thousand followers.

6. PepperFry

One of India’s most eminent names in online Furniture and Home & Living destination, PepperFry is making the difference at Pinterest. With around 6ooo pins, PepperFry is drawing the attention of customers quite smartly.

7. FabFurnish

Started in 2012, FabFurnish is making its name in the online furniture, furnishing, décor, and kitchenware. If you see its Pinterest page, you will know how FabFurnish is highly involved with the customers by pinning different pins.

8. Swayam India

Swayam India is an online store for home furnishing products, which is covering around 70 cities in India at 400 plus counters. This E-store has been promoting its product line effectively on Pinterest. Different boards of varied categories show the diverse products Swayam India can offer.

9. Utsav Fashion

Shipping to over 200+ countries, Utsav Fashion is a leading online name in Indian Ethnic Fashion. Utsav Fashion’s exclusive designs and appealing color combinations have been exquisitely exhibited on Pinterest, so much so that it has more than 30 thousand followers.

10. Fabindia

Being an Indian chain store, which is involved in the retail of fabrics, garments, ethnic and furnishing products, Fabindia is truly a treat to watch on Pinterest. With its followers reaching two thousand, Fabindia is surely cashing the sales opportunity at the Pinterest platform.

Conclusion

A lot has been discussed about why Pinterest is important for Indian brands for various marketing purposes. The Indian market is still nascent in social media and marketers should leverage this opportunity to scale their businesses. Then only you can be termed as a smart marketing professional. So, Pinterest gives you an opportunity to engage large customer pools. You can sit back and use the traditional mediums or let Pinterest reel in the sales. Choose wisely!

Tags Content marketing, etsy marketing, Indian Pinterest users, Pinterest Advertisements, Pinterest for Indian Fashion brands, Pinterest in India, pinterest marketing, Pinterest marketing for Etsy, pinterest tips

PInterest News

How the Pinterest Shopping Cart Implementation Affects Marketers

Post author By Stephen Jeske
Post date March 11, 2017

If you thought Pinterest was just another social media site, think again. In June, the company released information on “new ways to shop with Pinterest,” cementing its position as a viable purchasing platform. Granted, it’s been about year since they introduced a way to buy stuff found on Pinterest right from a user’s phone. However, this new release raises the bar for convenience.

How Pinterest’s Shopping Bag Works

First, a quick look at some terminology. Pinterest doesn’t call their new thing a shopping cart, but rather a shopping bag. It’s not just a question of semantics, or the company trying to position themselves in the marketplace.

The name change makes a lot of sense. In the physical world, a shopping cart denotes something that’s big, bulky and restricted to use at one store. A shopping bag, on the other hand, is lightweight and can be carried by consumers on shopping trips to multiple boutiques.

That’s how Pinterest’s shopping bag functions in the online world. Now users can put any buyable Pin that catches their fancy into their shopping bag, regardless of the merchant. These Pins stay there until the shopper is ready to check out.

On Pinterest, buyers only have to enter their check out information once. This data can then be used by any merchant with which a consumer wishes to conduct business. I should point out that this sounds a lot more like Amazon than Facebook or Twitter.

Here’s another soon-to-be-released shopping bag related feature. Consumers will be able to search for similar items in a post. If you see a hat that you like on a Pin, you can search for comparable items on Pinterest. In the future you can also expect to see items related to the ones you’re considering purchasing. That’s along the lines of Amazon’s “customers who bought this item also bought” feature.

What Pinterest’s Shopping Bag Means to Marketers

While there has been lots of coverage regarding this recent release from Pinterest, there’s been little, if any, analysis of its potential impact on marketers. So here’s a few things to consider.

Anything that increases convenience typically leads to greater rates of adoption. So it would not be surprising to see a substantial growth in Pinterest users over the coming year.

More people buying more stuff on Pinterest translates into potentially greater rewards for marketers who spend the time and energy to master this platform. Companies can gain a competitive advantage by being “first to market” and having a greater standing of how to make the most of Pinterest.

Pinterest isn’t a social media platform. It’s a shopping platform with built-in social network features. Look at it another way, Pinterest is one big shopping party where anyone can tell everyone the things in which they’re interested, what they’re thinking of buying, and what they’ve bought.

Inbound marketers have characteristically used social media as a promotional avenue for content designed to match specific points on the buyer’s journey. However, it can be challenging to show how social media activities contribute to an organization’s bottom line.

With Pinterest, things are different. Here on the platform, people exhibit more “commercial intent” than those on your average social media space. It’s a lot easier to justify spending time in a place where people are more likely to make a purchase. The ease with which consumers can buy items increases the likelihood that they will do so.

Whereas the lifespan of social media content is usually measured in minutes, if not seconds, Pinterest Pins usually have an infinite lifespan. So unlike social media, your investment in Pinterest advertising and marketing isn’t fleeting.

Keep This In Mind About Pinterest’s Shopping Bag

Pinterest isn’t making it easier for consumers to buy your stuff. It’s making it easier for the public to buy things, period. That means the playing field is essentially level for all marketers. Well, sort of. As mentioned earlier, your competitive advantage comes from an intimate understanding of how Pinterest operates and how consumers use the platform.

If you’re competition still views Pinterest as a social media platform, that’s good news for you. Since you already know it’s a shopping platform with social media features, you can focus on marketing and selling to active buyers while your rivals are busy analyzing their vanity metrics.

Pinterest’s shopping bag makes it easy to collect things from the competition. Although shoppers can’t really conduct product comparisons, you’ll still be vying for their attention up until the moment they check out. Like Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over, till it’s over.”

Ultimately, you don’t control your patron’s shopping experience on Pinterest; only Pinterest does. Your job is to figure out how to tie your efforts in with their goals.

The whole shopping bag concept helps buyers discover products they wouldn’t have otherwise uncovered. But that’s only if you’re one of the 20,000 or so brands with which they have partnered. Currently, Pinterest is working with “a few major brands and 5 commerce platforms;” namely BigCommerce, Demandware, IBM Commerce, Magento and Shopify.

If you’re on a different platform or using one that’s customized, you’ll need to sign up on the waiting list. Unfortunately, there’s no word on how long the wait will be for future integration opportunities. However, we do have a short guide on “How to Promote Your Etsy Shop,” which readers on that platform should find valuable.

Ultimately, if there’s one place where marketing and sales can work together, it’s on Pinterest. Although shoppers don’t come to Pinterest specifically to make purchases, many consumers make decisions based on their interaction with the platform while an increasing number are actually buying right from within Pinterest.

Tags Etsy marketing on Pinterest, pinterest marketing, Pinterest Shopping, pinterest tips