How To Use Pinterest For Online Sellers
When it comes to driving sales through social media, Pinterest is a vastly underused tool that can help you build your online store empire while having fun at the same time. Let’s face it, when your livelihood depends on online commerce, you need to have the online presence to match!
And with Pinterest, which is growing with blazing speed, your online presence can translate into increased sales faster than you’d think.
In 2011, Pinterest accounted for just 1% of all revenue driven by social media. In just one year, that number shot up to 17%.
What is Pinterest?
Think of “pins” as online bookmarks, arranged into categories called Pinterest “boards,” and then made public for others to like, re-pin on their own boards, and comment on. Pinterest is basically a user’s archives for everything interesting, funny, useful, or beautiful that they’ve seen on the internet and want to remember.
Why use Pinterest?
When you see 20 pictures pinned on a Pinterest board, remember that each of these pictures has a weblink to the blog post, how-to instructional video, or online store that housed the picture originally. This means that any time one of your products is pinned to a board is an opportunity for users to re-pin your picture and easily find their way to your ecommerce store.
"You can tell a lot about a brand by the things that they pin..."
When it comes to driving new business to your online store, Pinterest is second only to Facebook. That’s right -- while Twitter is the second largest social media platform in the world, it ranks third after Pinterest when it comes to getting users to put items in their shopping cart.
In fact, Pinterest is responsible for more traffic to online shops than Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Google+ combined!
Interested yet?
How to use Pinterest effectively
Hopefully, by now we’ve convinced you to tap into the millions of sales that Pinterest facilitates each year.
Luckily, SupaDupa has done a lot of the initial work for you by allowing every image on your website to be pinned to Pinterest. SupaDupa makes it easy to link your Pinterest account with your store, and verify it with Pinterest so that your customers can easily tell that your pins are really coming from you.
Find others, and interact
Social media users are savvy, so they know when a business is just using a platform to make money. The last thing you want is for your Pinterest account to seem like one big advertisement for your online store.
To help combat this, make sure you’re not just re-pinning relevant information, but really interacting with the people that you hope will come to your store. Comment on their pins, and make comments when you’re re-pinning so that people can understand why you thought something was interesting.
To keep informed with what’s most popular and trending each day look at Popular and if relevant to your business leave interesting comments.
Find your niche and embrace it
After following the best Pinterest users and interacting with users, it’s time to get serious about curating your Pinterest presence.
Of course, you don’t have to pin your own material exclusively -- in fact, it’s much more desirable to pin your own products mixed with others’ designs, blog posts, recipes, infographics and more. Just be sure that everything you pin makes sense with your brand. If you curate boards that are both relevant to your brand and a source of useful information for your customers, they’ll start to see you as an authority in your specialty area.
Ask yourself: what would your customers come to you for advice about? If you offer high quality leather goods, your audience and area of expertise will differ vastly from that of, say, a food blogger or lifestyle brand. What tips or tricks would your customer not just ‘like,’ but rush to share with their friends?
No matter what your niche, you can build it by starting Pinterest boards with different subjects that all contribute to your brand. Often, more is better -- Martha Stuart has over 100 different Pinterest boards, and took the social network by storm with this strategy. For example, if you’re selling jewellery, you can start one board just for wedding looks, another for up-and-coming trends, and one just for interesting ways to repurpose old accessories in modern ways. If you find that your latest collection has several pieces in the same colour family, start a “Mad About Turqouise” board and fill it with the best pictures of your products, as well as other accessories that fit the theme. You’ve felt the pleasure of scrolling through image after image that fits in the same colour story, now you just have to replicate it.
Check out how Amy Sia uses her Pinterest boards to attract new customers
Once you do the hard work of finding your niche, understanding what your customers want, and curating your boards so that they make sense, you’ll find that Pinterest is as much a visual feast as it is a marketing tool. The key, as always, it so provide useful and relevant content to your customers so that they learn to trust you with their time and clicks.
Money talks
Contrary to what you might think, your pins are more likely to lead to a purchase if you have the price listed than if you keep it a secret. In fact, you can probably remember a time when you were shopping online, only to close the tab and move on to another page when you couldn’t find the prices of anything. It turns out most of us are this way, pins with prices included received 36% more likes than posts without.
Knowing your price could tip someone from admiring your goods to making the purchase a reality. Affordable prices make goods seem surprisingly attainable, while high-end pricetags for high-end goods are not only expected, but can boost your brand’s status as well.
Find what works, and replicate it
Once you see that a few of your posts have gotten more re-pins than others, consider what makes it so popular and try to offer more content that hits the same targets.
While Pinterest is known for beautiful photography, not everything that gets thousands of re-pins was shot by a professional photographer.
Most popular images do have in common, however, that they are memorable: people pin because they don’t want to forget an image, which means that they want to come back to replicate it, draw inspiration from it, or share it with their friends. Make sure the pictures on your boards either are visually appealing, appeal to a hobby or interest that’s relevant to your customers, help solve a problem, or have content attached (for example, a blog post) that makes the post useful.
Useful resources:
For Pinterest analytics check Piqora & Pinterest analytics
Get inspired by top brands using Pinterest well
To find out what Pinterest users are pinning from your site
A great infographic on how to increase your Pinterest followers
View what's trending on Pinterest every day
