Yesterday we talked about what Pinterest is and today we are going to talk about how to set up a great Pinterest strategy. The difference between Pinterest and all other social media networks is that this is an image-based social network and you need to gear your content that you pin to have the best effect on this network.
Because all of the posts are visual, that means you need to change your blogging or website strategy so that all of your posts have a visually appealing element that encourage click throughs. If done well you will see a giant leap in traffic to your website as momentum builds on Pinterest. Here are four tips to have a successful Pinterest strategy:
- Build a community. We already wrote a list of 25 things on ChurchMag you should not be doing to keep as many followers as possible. Two of my favorites are “You pin the same type of thing over and over again. I can only look at so many recipes for deviled eggs” and “You re-pin one of my pins into the “Follow _______ back.” Avoid these two and the rest of those in the article with everything you have got!
- Make your images enticing to click. It is good that we will always be using images, but that does not guarantee click-throughs. To be great, all images need to make the viewer want to click the link and see what we are writing. This means that many of your images are topic-relevant, have minimal or no text in them, and very creative. This very point alone can mean hundreds or thousands of clicks for you. (We should know!)
- Have the correct boards linked to the right categories. There is nothing more annoying than seeing the tech or geeky categories filled with recipes, book reviews that have zero to do with nerdy stuff, and “home how-to’s” because someone’s board is not properly setup. When you pin something from your blog, you need to have enough correct boards each linked with the proper category. Miscommunication on Pinterest will not yield any results and become a waste of time for you, so get it right.
- Pin everything. To maximize Pinterest, we need to make sure that we are pinning every day from our article. That also means that every article needs to have a features image to be able to pin. If your blog article has several screen shots of the latest iOS app, pin everyone of them. If you have a slideshow of your youth group, pin them all. The more thorough you are, the better chance of re-pinning and Pinterest-driven traffic.
How do you try to pin effectively?
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