How Does Pinterest Work? How To Use Pinterest For Business?

how does pinterest work and how to use it

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social media platform where you can gather and share any image of anything you like. It is a discovery engine to help you search for ideas like recipes, arts, home decor, etc. You can also find new ideas and interests by browsing Pinterest. 

It was founded in December 2009 and has quickly become the most famous social network. With lots of pins on Pinterest, youll always find new ideas. Every idea is represented by Pin. Pinterest is great for increasing traffic and sales. 

Pinterest isnt just a social media for having an idea of different cool stuff. Pinterest comes with a built-in structure that helps you to organize your thoughts. New accounts are pre-named boards, and users can edit when they choose. 

What Is Pinterest Used For?

Nowadays, Pinterest has become the fastest-growing social media for online content sharing, said a report from online content distribution service ShareThis.

The report also said that the millions of monthly shares made through ShareThis in the third quarter of 2013 across more than 120 social media channels and two million websites.

Small businesses can use Pinterest to increase the market of their products and grow their consumer base. Pinterest is a highly visual medium, which gives businesses a chance to engage customers with eye-catching images and colorful infographics that increase deals and new products.

Pinning pictures of employees helps customers to know about the people who work at the company.

Small business people can be benefitted from Pinterest through conversations about their brands. These logos help the visitors to click and share content on Pinterest board easily. 

All said, Pinterest, like other social media channels, can help create brand awareness and increase sales and leads, but we still believe that, for many businesses, search engines can provide better ROI.

What are the pins on Pinterest?

Pins are like bookmarks on Pinterest that people use to save ideas they are interested in Pinterest. Each Pin consists of three elements:

  • An image
  • A link (usually)
  • A title
  • A description

People can look for them, save any pin they like and click on a Pin if they want to learn more. If youre a businessman, you can create Pins to present your products and ideas related to your business, and you can also link them back to your website. You can also create video Pins to display your images.

When someone clicks on a Pin, it will show them the pins full image and description. If they click again, they will be taken to the link that is related to the Pin - usually, a blog post or product page with related information about the Pin can be included on the Pin. Other users can save your pin.

The pin is the essential thing about Pinterest. It is similar to the tweet on Twitter. Pins consist of any image or video. Pins also have information related to the board in which it is pinned, the source (either uploaded or taken from the web), and an indication from whom it was repined.

What is a Pinterest Board?

A Pinterest board is a collection of different Pins. Pinterest boards are a great way to organize your ideas and pins.

For example, you can create boards to organize ideas about a sketch you want to draw, a vacation or trip you are planning, books you want to read, or recipes you want to try.

You can find the pins that you saved before on your boards. You can name your boards and arrange them on your profile, however, if you want. You can also invite other people on Pinterest to cooperate on Group boards to find and enjoy even more ideas.

If you want to organize your Pins within boards, create board sections. Add a Tents or Camping section to your Camping board to keep the same ideas in the same place. There are no rules while organizing the pins - you can manage your Pins in the way you want to organize.

If you want to keep your Pins private or your camping trip is a surprise, you can make your board a secret. Only you and anyone you invite people can see your secret boards.

One Pinner always possesses Pinterest boards, but you can share them. 

What is the Feed on Pinterest?

You must be familiar with the Facebook newsfeed, so you already know how Pinterest works. All the pinning activity from the people you follow on Pinterest is shown in your feed.

The reason why marketers love Pinterest is that they can research pins and profiles to know about what their target audience is looking for. Besides this, they also get a clear picture of services their audience might be interested in. Pinterest mostly works great for marketers who are focused on promoting physical products.

You are given two options when you create a Pinterest account:

  • Individual Account
  • Business Account

Though both of these Pinterest accounts purposes are different. 

How do group Boards work on Pinterest?

Shared boards are generally called group boards. Theyre useful for cooperating and getting feedback from friends, business partners, clients, and family. 

Secret Boards and the Pins on them are shown only to you and anyone with whom you share the Board. Theyre perfect if you want to plan a surprise party, sharing research, or for any other just between us purpose! A Pinterest Profile can hold a maximum of 500 boards.

What is a Pinterest Profile?

You can find all the Pins you saved before, boards you created in your profile. You can see who is following you and the boards, topics you follow. Anyone can see your profile, but your secret boards will stay hidden from you and from the people you share. You can see your secret boards when you visit your own profile.

Your Pinterest Profile carries all your Boards, your Pins, and all your settings. The following is a list of publicly available information:

  • Your username appears as the words after https://pinterest.com when you go to your profile.
  • Your first and last name or business name: appears in bold letters at the top of your profile.
  • The About You and website URL also appear on your profile.
  • Follower and Following counts.
  • Your picture.
  • Showcase boards

Your profile is not just a collection of the ideas you love - it reflects what kind of person you are. Your profile is where all your ideas and inspiration for projects past, present, and future live. Itll grow and develop just like you when you save every Pin.

How To Build A Pin?

  • Click (+) at the top of your Pinterest profile.
  • Select Create Pin from the dropdown menu.
  • Upload an image file from your computer.
  • Enter a destination link from which you want to save an image from that website.
  • Title your pin.
  • Add a pin description.
  • Choose a board to add your pinto.
  • Select Save to create your Pinterest pin.

How Does Pinterest Work for Users

People use Pinterest to save ideas, products, share with friends, and bookmark things that attract them. Pinning is typically an activity where users browse and save ideas and products that will improve the quality of their lives, work, health, and even their wardrobe or hairstyle!

Pinterest is different from any other social media where people share information and images about themselves and their personal, professional, or regular lives.

Facebook and Instagram are about showing the best version of you to your friends and family. 

Pinterest is an inspiring medium that helps you to transform yourself into the best version of yourself.

How Does Pinterest Work When I Follow People on Pinterest?

When you follow a Profile or a board on Pinterest, youre telling Pinterest you want to see more posts of them. So, their Pins will appear in your home feed. These signals you give to Pinterest also show you picked for you Pins you may like.

For example, If I Follow something related to cooking, I will see some of their Pins in my home feed, and Pinterest will know Im interested in cooking and will show more cooking Pins in my feed.

When someone follows me on Pinterest, what does that mean?

Its good to have followers on Pinterest - your Pins will likely get more traffic, and the social proof can be powerful.

Also, your Pins may be seen by people searching relevant to your pins -it doesnt matter if they follow you.

Followers are good - but traffic from Pinterest is way better. Do not worry about your follower number, and make sure to optimize your pins for search.

How do Pinterest Saves or Repins Work?

A repin on Pinterest is when someone sees a pin on the site and then saves it again to another board. Repins can also come outside of Pinterest, though this is not common. A picture can have an attribute added to it by a site administrator that tells Pinterest to count any Saves for that image. Repins are also called saves on Pinterest. 

How Can Pinterest Help You in Your Business?

Pinterest can help you in your business in so many things! Pin regularly, have a business strategy, utilize group boards, and keep an eye on your analytics.

If youre looking for a few surefire Pinterest brand marketing techniques, then Pinterest can help you. A survey says, as many as 50% of people who see a promoted Pinterest pin make a purchase! So, for business owners, Pinterest is well worth investing your time and effort into. Lets look at the strategies!

Create a Pinterest Business Account

Firstly if you want to set up a Pinterest Business account, make sure your profile is optimized to reflect your brands tone. Make sure your bio is filled with a lot of relevant keywords that reflect your companys name.

Branding Your Account

Add a board cover to your business profile on Pinterest. These are useful for making your Pinterest account more adhesive with your brand. You will also need to optimize for SEO-friendly board titles in your profile. Try to keep them short and neat. You can usefully; having optimized the boards description section to add more keywords and hashtags.

These hashtags are excellent for getting a better idea of what your target market is looking for on Pinterest. You can use this info to clarify your marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Website Images

It would help if you made it as easy as possible for your website visitors so they can pin images from your web pages into their Pinterest boards.

You can do this if you install Pinterests Save Button and allow your users to save your images into their Pinterest account.

Use Rich Pins

Utilize rich pins, which makes pricing info ideal if youre an owner of an e-commerce store. If youre running a blog, article pins can help you drive traffic.

You can use vertical images and scale them to boast a 600-pixel width and an aspect ratio of either 2:3 or 1:3.5. If you find it challenging to create Pinterest-friendly images, you can use Canva. Its a free resource that offers a lot of pre-made templates that are famous to Pinterest marketers.

The social media world is becoming huge day by day, with sites like Facebook dominating it. All this while Pinterest has quietly made fame and name for itself and earned a vast audience. Today, people around the world use Pinterest for many purposes. It is a social site where anybody can find inspiration for new ideas, find products to buy, or learn about a new brand.

According to a study, Pinterest is said to be the second-largest social network in the US after Facebook, which helps people to discover new products and indirectly influences their buying decision.

Lets see how Pinterest helps you in your business, building a brand, and generating more sales.

  1. Pinterest Increases Your Targeted Traffic

Are you looking for high-quality traffic without spending lots of money on advertising? If yes, then you must know how Pinterest works for businesses who want to build targeted backlinks to their sites. These links are vital because they help you to increase referral traffic consistently.

Compared to other social media sites, Pinterest is more likely to send you traffic relevant to your business if you use it correctly. If you can create and post high-quality eye-catchy visual content on Pinterest, you will have more users who share your content and follow your links.

  1. Pinterest Lets You Convert Better

Even though the Internet has grown huge, there are still people who are not used to making online purchases. Pinterest works to remove this hesitation. It destroys common sales barriers by decreasing the number of steps it takes for someone to convert.

It acts as a visual search engine and takes users directly to the sources they are looking for. That means people browsing Pinterest Pins helps in converting into a lead or sale.

  1. Pinterest Increases Real Engagement

The biggest facility of using Pinterest for business is that its pinners are used to sharing good content with a targeted audience that trusts their recommendation. So if you can provide people with what they are looking for, you can make your pins get seen by the targeted audience, and it can go viral on the social network. Thus Pinterest helps you to get real engagement from real people.

  1. Pinterest Helps You to Understand Your Audiences Mind

Every business owner wants to discover what their target audience wants and what they are looking for. If you use Pinterest for your business, it helps you get the audiences interests. 

You see what is currently trending and get into the shoes of your target consumer to understand what they like and what they dont. Knowing what is popular today is one of the most important data that you can use to customize your products and services and create demand that no one ever made before. 

It doesnt matter if you have used Pinterest for business or not; it is never late to use most of this powerful social media platform to increase your sales.

Here we are giving some of the most valuable tips for using Pinterest for business and getting the highest ROI and time investment.

Tip #1: Create Your Business Profile

You must prepare your profile and make sure that you dont leave your profile looking empty and unproductive. People on Pinterest will find your profile more attractive when they see your serious approach.

When using Pinterest for business, you have to keep in mind that you have to be professional. And giving your profile that professional lead is not so complicated. Here we are offering three things that need to be on point:

High-Res Logo: The first thing that users will notice when they visit your Pinterest profile is your company logo. It doesnt matter if you are a small or a medium-sized business; having a clear logo makes your profile look more unique and professional.

Attractive Bio: Even though Pinterest is a visual platform, it is essential to have a clean text bio. Having a description that is relevant to your business gives first-time visitors enough information about your company. It means that you took out the time to put in the right details about your brand. You can link your bio points to a relevant landing page for the best results.

Featured Boards: Anybody new visiting your profile should get a clear idea of what kind of content you publish. If you have a couple of featured boards showcasing your best pins, you display yourself as a brand that cares about its followers. 

Building your online presence on Pinterest and having targeted followers starts with a professional-looking profile. People should know what your business is for, its values, and the kind of content followers can see.

Tip #2: Keep Track of Relevant Trends

Creating great content for your Pinterest account starts with knowing what your audience likes and what they dont like. In other words, you have to focus on what type of content is trending on the site so that you can produce something on the same lines.

One of the best ways to know what to create is to spot a relevant trend and take advantage of it. Be a brand that understands how to capitalize on a trend before it becomes too late. Though it takes a little effort to keep track of trending topics, in the end, consistently, its totally worth it.

The idea is to study what kind of content Pinterest users are regularly watching and the type of topics they are interested in. You can use this knowledge to create original and relevant Pins that your target audience can connect with. These Pins must be informative so that it helps you to drive traffic back to your website.

Tip #3: Focus on Content Types that are Proven to Work

Without the right content, your Pinterest marketing strategy will suffer in the long run. As the content on Pinterest is different from other social networks, you need to ensure youre providing different types of content to your followers.

Pinterest is a visual social network, which has photographs that are being used in many unique ways. If you want to make Pinterest work for your brand, you must know what images you need to post and create a perfect content strategy.

Just the way it is essential to link to relevant sources, its also important to post the right type of image, which helps you to get the highest amount of traffic.

If you look closely at Pinterest, youll find that there is a lot of content proven to work. So if you offer a variety of different content to your followers and Unfollowers, try to use content proven to work.

Share Do-It-Yourself Tutorials

One of the main parts of a successful content marketing strategy is to educate your customers with informative content. Pinterest is all about posting the best images, and it is easy to inform people via pictures. Thats why educational content is so popular on Pinterest.

These days, many people dont like to read along with detailed blog posts; theyd rather bookmark it for reference. However, this doesnt mean that people dont want to be educated. If you use Pinterests unique image-based angle, your brand can craft DIY and how-to tutorials to teach people what they want to learn.

Share Inspirational Ideas

Pinterest has a lot of visual content that has many inspiring ideas. Users regularly follow Inspirational Boards to seek inspiration. No matter what market your business is in, you can create relevant, inspirational content to motivate your target audience and have them share your content with their own network.

Whenever you share anything inspiring with your Pinterest followers, make sure to get some traction. For example, if you are an interior design firm, you could post eye-catching images that share different decor ideas. You may share photos with inspiring quotations for business owners. Always strive to think outside the box.

Pin Infographics

Pinning infographics are highly popular in B2B circles. If you pin infographics to your Pinterest Boards, you can get more people to your content on their own site. If you want to build a large, targeted following on Pinterest and regularly interact with them with your content, then infographic-based posts are perfect. 

How Does Pinterest Help Marketers, E-commerce, and Bloggers?

People save and click on Pins about 90 days before they are ready to act. What helps early planning for marketers is that their products and services can become an option for consideration very early on in the buying process.

With 75% of all the content on Pinterest coming from brands, people are very open to branded content as long as it is useful and attractive to them.

Product Pins enables Pinners to purchase the right product from Pinterest. All you need is a Pinterest catalog that pulls from your product feed to take advantage of these.

Pinterest is the number two social media that increase traffic to websites. When you and others share Pins that link to your website content, youre adding more and more opportunities for people to find your website, thus increasing traffic.

Youre never too late to the game. While some well-known brands are having great success with their Pinterest marketing, 97% of all searches are unbranded - it means a relative unknown can be discovered by new customers who are ready to buy!

Conclusion

So you can do many things by using Pinterest! Pin regularly, have a goal, utilize your group boards for greater reach, and keep an eye on your analytics. With over 200 million users on the platform, making the switch to a Pinterest for a Business profile is a great opportunity, and you should not miss it.

Its the perfect place to display your brand, business, and products to an engaged marketplace with plenty of spending power. And here we gave all the hints and tips in this guide; youre already taking all the right steps to create a beautiful Pinterest account that is suitable to your target audience.

So dont be too late. Start Pinning! Contact us if you want to drive traffic to your website.

Read Next: