Consumers are using Pinterest more than Facebook or Twitter to engage with merchants including their favorite brands or online merchants to the tune of being 79 percent more likely to make a purchase of a product they found pinned compared to purchasing from Facebook. This high percentage has an average order value at around $80 per Pinterest shopper. This amount is twice as high as the amount of purchases made by Facebook users. Knowing how to leverage this information for your own business building interest has the potential of greatly enhancing your quarterly sales profits.
The mistake many Pinterest marketers make is to pin their products without interacting or creating a variety of Boards that will help keep pinners interest. Pinterest is a social site, and even if it is mainly about images, if you come across as blatantly advertising, it will cost you favor. Instead, sprinkle your products on an occasional basis while “liking” and repining other people’s pins and adding pins from other websites to your boards. Getting innovative with this could be to create a board about “Garden Wedding Ideas” and posting, of course, garden wedding ideas if you are a landscaping company. You could also create a board that has images of “Outdoor Entertaining”. Any business can find boards that will be relevant, but not strictly about their product or service to create, even if it is just a board of “Motivational Quotes”. Make sure that you add links back to your site or back to the site whose image you are pinning. This is as easy as clicking “edit” on the image and pasting the URL. This happens automatically if you click the “Pin It” button installed on many websites or if you repin from another pinners board.
Another way to capitalize on the success of Pinterest is to host sweepstakes and contests. For example, if customers follow your Pinterest Boards, comment on pins or repin images from a specific board you will enter them into a drawing. Or you can have a hashtag contest where followers pin images using your products to their own boards with #yourbusinessname as a hashtag.
You can also upload and share videos to Pinterest and many businesses are finding that pinning “how to” videos or step by step tutorials are a big hit with pinners. As with any other social media site, make sure and engage with customers and respond to their comments in a timely manner. Pinning three to six images or videos per week (With one or two of them being a product or service you sell) might be all you need to reach Pinterest Success in a short amount of time.
