Five Tips for Power Pinners

Pinterest has taken the social media world by storm, but it's been less than a year since the destination went live. Even in that short time period however, many brands have learned exactly what it takes to use the platform to their marketing advantage becoming Power Pinners of the highest order in the process.

What's a Power Pinner? Someone that has a good eye, good taste, and a good sense of what attracts and motivates users. But that's not all. Those that experience the greatest success understand the holistic approach Pinterest demands if the aim is to deepen engagement and increase interaction. From our vantage point at Website Magazine, here's a few tips to make the social pinboarding site a catalyst for acqusition.  

5) Start by formalizing a conversion focused strategy. For example, what does your enterprise want to get out of participating? By defining the conversion metric (acquisition, sale), implimenting tracking on-site, and monitoring the results you will be able to determine if your marketing strategies on Pinterest are effective.

4) Leverage Pinterest on your own Web property, integrating sharing widgets which ideally will motivate users to share your products more often on Pinterest. They won't share if you don't make it available hwoever, so check with your existing ecommerce platform provider to see what's possible.  

3) Establish relationships with other Power Pinners. Develop cross promotions - wherein you promote anothers' pins and they promote yours - can be mutually beneficial. Cultivate the most effective (in terms of new pins or traffic or even conversions that result) and establish more formal relationships. 

2) Let the products tell their story. The usage of images is of great importance in social media but is the dominant characteristic of Pinterest. Brand marketers need to understand how individual image types will appear when there is both high and low activiity (repins), and ensure that any image shared meets sitewide standards.  

1) Treat Pinterest itself as nothing more than just another social media channel to participate within - at least for now. Should Pinterest ever become bigger and more viable in the future, resources can be redistributed to match demand.