Pinterest Tips for Small Businesses

Here is OPTs 10 great  tips and strategies to make Pinterest work for your business, brand or product:

1. Install the “Pin it” bookmark to your browser

Adding the “pin it” bookmark to your bookmark bar is easy to do,visit: http://www.pinterest.com/about/goodies. When you pin a webpage, using the pin-it bookmark, it will show you all of the pictures associated with that page.  Then, you can choose the picture you’d most like to pin. Easy!

2. Use Keywords, Hashtags and @replys   

Just like Twitter, people on Pinterest can search for items based on keyword phrases or hashtags therefore, it is important to include keyword phrases and hashtags in your pin descriptions. This helps to ensure that your pin will show up in any related searches.

3.  Ask followers to pin themselves in pictures with your product

This is a great way to build engagement with your fans. You can also take this a step further and turn it into a competition.  For example, ask them to share their favourite location, bar, event, memory etc.

4.  Find out if your website has been pinned

To track the articles, posts, pages and pictures people most enjoy from your website is easy with Ointerest. Search with brand appropriate hashtags and keywords and off you go!

To find out which pictures have been pinned from your website, simply type in the following url:http://pinterest.com/source/ADD YOUR URL HERE

5. Keep it Sociable

It is important to remember that Pinterest is a social media platform.  Its main intention is to allow you to connect, comment and share.  Thus, keep it social and take time to comment on other people’s pins, and to repin or like what others have posted otherwise people will think you are all out for yourself!

6.  Pin directly onto your blog

You can pin a post directly to your blog or, you can create an entire blog post around that image.

To add the image to your blog post, choose the “Embed” button to the right of the picture. Then, copy the code that appears.  If you want to change the size of the image, you can do that too. See pictures below for details. 7. Collaboration

Pinterest is a great way to share ideas. You can create a project topic Pinterest board and add your team members as collaborators.  Then, when anyone gets an idea or wants to share a related article, they can pin it.

8. Viral Media

Pinterest is not just for images! You can also pin videos.  For a quick how-to tutorial, visit:http://blog.pinterest.com/post/8670310296/video-pins

9.  Test different words, captions and hashtags

If you are NOT already using the captions feature on Pinterest, now is definitely time to start.  Keep a list of the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn’t so you don’t make the same mistakes twice!

10. Use Google images to find a the original source of a picture

It is imperative that we give credit to the original poster/owner of pictures we find online.  Would you like it if someone took the credit for your artwork?!

Share, Connect, Create and Learn with Pinterest!

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