Improve Your Pinterest Business Strategy Account Setup - Part 1 of 8 (Video)

Improve Your Pinterest Business Strategy Account Setup – Part 1 of 8 (Video)

Thanks again for joining my mini course about auditing your Pinterest account and marketing strategy. In case you missed it, I wrote an introductory blog post and shared the slides from a talk I gave at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. This post moves past the introduction and digs into an ideal Pinterest account setup.

I encourage the businesses I work with to convert from a personal account to a Pinterest for business account which is a smart move. Even influencers should use Pinterest for business. These free business accounts offer many more features than personal accounts including free analytics and audience insights. This tutorial will show you how.

There are eight parts to this Pinterest optimization mini course starting with a look at top account level settings. After that, I’ll move on to a review of Pinterest boards, what makes an ideal Pin, as well as video pins. If you are using Pinterest with a personal account some of these settings won’t be available to you, but the information here will be quite useful.

My Pinterest tutorials are mostly geared toward businesses with the goal of making more sales. Using Pinterest as part of an SEO strategy means you optimize your account to be found in visual and textual searches.

Pinterest search engine optimization (SEO) is always a topic business owners want to know about. Remember, Pinterest is not just a highly visual search social media channel, it’s a search engine too. Once you start using your Pinterest for business account features to increase your reach and engagement. you’re comfortable with organic Pins, and understand your audience, then Promoted Pins (paid ads) may work well for your business – helping to accelerate your account growth.

Let’s look at my Pinterest business account as an example and the features any business can use to get more reach from its content. The video with this tutorial shows the desktop version of Pinterest. Although most consumers use the Pinterest mobile app, we need to use Pintetest.com in a web browser to make some settings changes to tweak some settings.

Verify Your Website with Pinterest

First, let’s verify that your account is set up correctly as a Pinterest for business account. To use all the features of Pinterest for business, your business needs to have a website that can be verified with Pinterest. It’s the same process used to verify a website with Google Analytics. If you go to your account on the Pinterest mobile app or via the website, and have your business account set up correctly, you will see a clickable link to your verified website, if you’ve completed the process correctly. If you don’t see your website link or cannot click on it, follow these instructions.

While your editing settings, claim your other business social media channels.

How Do I Fill Out My Pinterest Bio?

Your account has a text area near the profile photo that gives businesses and brands the chance to introduce themselves. Be sure to use up as much of, preferably all of, the space as you can. Access and edit your bio by clicking on the pencil icon.

Keep that in mind that over 80% of Pinterest users access Pinterest on mobile devices so they’re only going to see the first two lines of your bio. Put the most important words at the top of your bio.

Your profile image should be clear and consistent with your profile photos on other social channels. A profile image is very important as this is the one image other Pinterest users see the most. Your profile photo appears on all of your Pins in the newsfeed.

Account Banner Image

Your account also has a large banner image on top of your home page. You can use this area to show off your latest Pins or get creative and use it for additional messaging. I set my banner image to be a collage of my latest Pins. It keeps my account home page looking fresh.

Board Organization

I’ll cover Pinterest boards in the next post in this series, but let’s talk about board order. Optimize boards by pinning thematically cohesive Pins. The order of the boards only matters for your human readers. So, go ahead, and drag to boards to the top of your account page that will appeal most to your viewers. Change the order to feature seasonal merchandise or promotions. It makes no difference to Pinterest’s search algorithm only for the people who are viewing your profile.

Like your profile, each board also needs a description based on keyword research so people can find your Pins. Boards can also be grouped by category.

75% of Pins are from Businesses

Businesses might be intimidated by the data that shows about 75% of Pins are from businesses, but the good news is the majority of searches are unbranded. That means if I’m searching for something like diamond rings, I’m not necessarily looking for a specific brand of diamond rings. A shopper is likely searching for unbranded terms like “two carat diamond ring” “Platinum setting” or other broad phrases. Optimizing for long tail unbranded search phrases leaves an opportunity for businesses to get a leg up on their SEO campaign.

Brands need to optimize accounts so they can reach the 300+ million global monthly active users. In the US, thirty-four percent of internet users aged 18 to 49 use Pinterest. Users are primarily women in the US, but globally the ratio is closer to 50-50. This audience likes to shop.

Pinterest followers use the channel to organize buying decisions, so they’re not put off by businesses selling to them. Like Instagram, Millennials use it to discover products and they use Pinterest every month.

It’s always a good idea to set goals and track them, so you don’t feel that you’re wasting your time or money. For example, use a KPI like website visitors, post engagement, sales and track it. You might want to try a third-party tool like SEMRUSH to help track metrics. (Iuse SEMRUsh and I make a small commission if you cdo too) After running Promoted Pins, you’ll collect data on your best Pins, and build a remarketing campaign.

When you take advantage of Pinterest business account features, you’ll see that you get a lot of useful information about your content marketing strategy and learn a lot about the audience you are reaching.