So Pinterest. It’s every girl’s favorite social media platform, where we all aspire to lives of perfection full of mason jars, DIY crafts, and recipes with intricate steps.
It’s also the holy grail of social media marketers because if you can get just a few people to pin your recipe, product, idea, you can get a ripple effect that could drive great, qualified traffic to your site.
Like any social media platform, it doesn’t count just to have it. It’s about having the right content, creating a brand, a story, and engaging with your fans.
Here’s a Case Study:
Here is an example of a company that might make a lot of people hit the snooze button. Notarizations? Really? This is what their Pinterest boards looked like a month ago. Lots of stock photos, boring images, and guess what – not a lot of repins. They have awesome, relevant content for notaries but it’s not presented in an engaging way on Pinterest.
So why weren’t any of these images doing well on Pinterest? Since Pinterest is primarily images of food, weddings, fashion, and DIY home improvement, I’m not surprised that people aren’t repining pins about new Notary laws.
This content does amazingly well on their other social platforms, but on Pinterest it was a bit of a flop. Pinterest is hugely competitive, and even professional, gorgeous images get lost in the shuffle.
Knowing what I know about the Pinterest crowd, I brainstormed to see what sort of content I could curate that would attract more followers and improve their presence on Pinterest. Here’s what I already knew about this market: many notaries are self-employed mobile notaries, primarily women who work from a home office or own their own business.
This is what resulted:
- I cleaned up some of the boards, replacing unappealing board covers with better ones, and I created 6 new boards.
- A board for home office organization
- A board for entrepreneurial tips, saving money, marketing, accounting tips
- A board for old vintage Notary supplies, signs, etc
- Two boards: one for men and another for women for business casual and office attire (for those who work in offices)
- A board related to real estate (a lot of Notaries work closely to the real estate business)
I also created a map board for their 2014 Conference (held in Phoenix this year) and highlighted things to do, places to eat, and more near the conference, and more. (That’s another blog post altogether.)
What Can You Do?
- First, start by looking at your Pinterest boards and mentally delete everything that you pinned from your own website. If there isn’t much left, that’s your first problem. Pinterest is about curating boards of everyone else’s content (as well as yours).
- Fill up your boards with beautiful images of relevant content to your business. And try to stay within your niche – you don’t need a wedding inspiration board or a DIY crafts board if your business has nothing to do with them. Stick to what you know.
- Figure out what order you want your boards displayed and what board covers you want. I’ve seen some neat examples of brands doing custom covers. For example, this linens company in California did custom covers, which I really like.
- Once you have great content in place as a foundation, it’s important to keep it up. Log on to Pinterest every few days (at least once a week) and pin some new items to your board. It has to be an ongoing process and it requires dedication to keep it up.
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If you are considering implementing a Pinterest campaign in 2014 but need a little help from a social media marketing agency – get in touch with us!