Pinterest and Tailwind Blog

Pinterest and Tailwind Blog

Pinterest is one of those tools to build that website traffic, and a lot of people think of it as maybe not a tool that’s right for their business. Often, they think it’s just for recipes or interior design, which yes, it is used for that, but think of Pinterest as a visual search engine.

If your target audience is mostly women 35 to 65, Pinterest’s demographics are your target market! It’s time to see how you can use Pinterest to grow your business!

Pinterest for business

Pinterest is a great tool to use to get people to your website. And you think about when they go to Google what are they typing in? Especially moms, they’re going to Pinterest and they’re searching for different things.

I want to show you what a Pinterest business account looks like, and a tool that we use to manage our Pinterest. It’s really important to have that consistency and that strategy behind, “What are you pinning?” And so, this is where that digital marketing strategy that we’re always talking about comes into play.

Looking at what blogs are you writing. If you’re writing one blog per week or maybe two blogs per month, and they are the longer cornerstone blogs, each blog can have four to six images for that one blog, and you can pin those to Pinterest with links back to your website.

Difference between a personal and business account

Let me just dive in and show you a little bit about Pinterest. If you go sign up and create a Pinterest account, it will ask you if you’re business or personal.

Here we have our Social Speak Pinterest account, and this is the business account. I wanted to show you our profile.

Get access to the analytics dashboard

How you know that it’s a business account is because it will have analytics here. We have a little over 170,000 monthly viewers, which is pretty good for us. We really have worked hard on building our Pinterest account probably about the last year and a half.

We didn’t really take it too seriously before and now we’re seeing that traffic to the website really increase from what we’re putting on Pinterest. That’s a really good thing.

Set up an account with your business name

With a business account, you can set up your account with your business name. Here, we also have our logo. You can change your header images to a different static image. I always have the latest pins for our Social Speak board.

You could have in here a link to your website, a little bit about who you are and what you guys do, and then the most important thing is your boards.

Getting Started: Pinterest Basics

Create a board

You want to think of your boards as those keyword phrases. When you’re putting together your boards, it’s important to look at what are those key topics that you want to be talking about? So, you can have as many boards as you want. I always recommend starting with between five and seven, because you don’t want to be so overwhelmed. But as you continue to grow you’ll always be adding a new board, and so that’s okay, too.

We have different boards for different things, and these can be very specific. Obviously, content marketing strategy is our number one board with almost 800 pins. That and the health care digital marketing tips, those are our two main focuses.

It’s important to make sure that when you are creating a board that you are filling out the description. You want to make sure that you have the title of the board, the description of the board – fill out those blanks that Pinterest provides you. If people search for content marketing tips, then you are more likely to be able to show up here.  That’s how that works.

Find and pin content

Now what I like to do is I like to follow certain brands and companies. For example, I really like CoSchedule. They put out some great content. We also utilize Sprout Social. They put out great content.

You can go-to activity and see what pins they have, the latest pins they’ve had. And then, you can either save them to the board that you want, or you can go into Tailwind, which I will get to in just a second.

I like to make sure that you know which brands you want to follow so you can re-pin from them. I love the image, and I think the content’s great. I’ll just click onto that image and look at the website, make sure that it’s something that I want our audience to click through to.

Track your performance to see what works

The most important thing is going to your Analytics. And again, this is just something to look at on a monthly basis. I always go to the overview, and then I look at the impressions, the total audience, the engagement. Any time this number is up, that’s a good thing.

In the past 30 days, we’ve had over 200,000 impressions which is up 36% from last month. We had 178,000 total audience engagement.

The number of engagements on your pins includes saves, close-ups. People that had either clicked onto one of the pins we put up, re-pinned them or liked them. And then your engaged audience is the number of people who had engaged with your pin directly. Meaning that they had liked it, or they had re-pinned it.

You can go down here and look at your top boards, and then you can also look at your top pins. So, we’re seeing that people looking for YouTube sizes  and “Seven easiest ways to create Instagram content.” These are our top two pins that we had re-pinned, and people are finding them on our account and re-pinning them.

It’s good to really look at what content is working, so then you can make sure that you are utilizing that data to put more of that content out.

Why you should use Tailwind for Pinterest

Pinterest Automation

Pinterest can be sometimes a little bit of a time consumer. What we’ve used is this app called Tailwind.

Tailwind actually connects to your Pinterest and your Instagram. This is a paid program. It’s only $14.99 a month, I highly recommend it because this allows you to schedule pins out.

What this allows me to do is schedule all of my Pinterest posts for the month if I want to. I’ll just click on a pin, then hit Add to Queue, and it’s going to automatically put it into my queue where it feels it needs to go.

Post inspector

What’s really cool about this, when you are on Pinterest and you click just onto the Home button, it doesn’t tell you how many times this pin had been re-pinned, but on Tailwind it does. So this has been re-pinned 115 times. And again, sometimes things will come up that are not aligned with your business, and that’s okay. You just scroll past them, but you can look to see which ones are getting more pins.

For example, I click on Instagram Strategy. Tailwind shows that this was re-pinned 341 times, and it’ll tell you that it’s 299 times on Pinterest and 42 times on Facebook.

Smart Schedule

With Tailwind, it organizes your posts based on when your audience is on Pinterest, and when you are getting the most engagement. That’s the one thing I love about Tailwind is it’s easy to be able to find that content. You can see the source right here. You can pick as many boards as you want, and then if you don’t like the content, if you don’t like those posts, you would just click More Suggestions, and more suggestions will come up.

Tailwind just helps keep everything organized. And that’s what I really like because it saves you time and it gives you the post that you’re looking for, it gives you the data on what the popularity is, and it also just helps with the Auto-Schedule.

Smart Loop

The other thing you can do with Tailwind is what’s called a smart loop. Now, this is great for your blog posts that are your cornerstone blogs, meaning those are 2000 plus blogs.

We’ve already used our 250 smart loops and what that means is it will pull all of these blogs that we’ve done from a year, two years, three years ago, and it’s going to keep populating them. So it will automatically schedule those out into our plan, and because I’ve said I want these blogs to be scheduled to these certain boards, it will do that.

Schedule Instagram videos

I highly recommend utilizing Pinterest and Tailwind together, you can get the most benefit out of your Pinterest account. You could also publish videos on here as well, that’s a great tool because videos are awesome on Pinterest, and it’s just a great way to really monitor what’s working.

Analytics

On your Google Analytics, you would be able to tell how many people have come to your website from Pinterest. That’s a great way to monitor those analytics.

Is your social media marketing strategy sorted out?

If you need help with creating this strategy for your Pinterest account and utilizing Tailwind and just elevating your digital marketing strategy as a whole, we do offer a free 30-minute consultation. That allows us to get to know what your goals are, what are you struggling with, and what are you wanting to accomplish with your digital marketing. And then we can put up a plan together moving forward from there.

We also just launched our online VIP community, and that’s a monthly membership that allows you to see different handouts, tutorials, trainings on all different things in digital marketing. It’s a great starting point if you are wanting to do things on your own. If you really need help with that next step with your digital marketing strategy, go to socialspeaknetwork.com and click on the “Contact Us” button for a free 30-minute consultation. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Pinterest and Tailwind Blog

 

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Monitoring Pinterest Analytics

What’s so special about your Pinterest business account, you ask??? Well, first of all, you can get access to some AWESOME analytics! The Pinterest analytics show so many things, from how many daily viewers you are getting to impressions, engagement, most popular posts and more! They give you so much data, that this is a great tool to really find out who your target market really is. Is this video we will just go over how to check your analytics and what each area really means.

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Setting your Pinterest Strategy and Tracking your Success

pinterest strategy and goals

Pinterest, just like any other network, requires care, commitment, and attention to detail when it comes to implementing your strategy and measuring your results. In today’s blog and this week’s Growth Prompt, we are building your Pinterest Strategy and Setting Goals for measuring your success.

Earlier in the month we’ve explored the in’s and out’s of what Pinterest is, as well as, how to create images, manage your boards, etc, but today we are taking that deeper dive into the strategies to use to optimize Pinterest for your business.

In addition to the information provided in this blog post, be sure to download this week’s growth prompt HERE. This PDF includes space for you to create your Pinterest Strategy and to Establish your Goals on Pinterest.

Download Growth Prompt.

Part 1: Creating your Pinterest Strategy

Step 1: Be Consistent.

On Pinterest in particular, it is of utmost importance to be consistent with your pinning. Why? Pinterest will show your followers a collection of recent and popular pins when they sign onto Pinterest. Imagine that none of your pins appear for days and then all of a sudden 10 branded images pop up at once.

First, the person isn’t going to know who you are and second, they are going to feel like you are spamming their Pinterest feed.

Rather than only signing on one time per month, instead we recommend trying to have a consistent flow of pins to your boards that consist of both your pins and those of other people.

To build Consistency into your Pinterest Strategy, you want to make sure that you have a clear understanding of:

  • When you can pin (ie, can you only commit to pinning on your computer at 10pm while watching Netflix or can you carve out time during the day)?
  • If you would benefit from a 3rd party application to pin and repin on your behalf?

3rd Party Apps to Help Manage Pinterest

Yes! These apps do exist and there are 2 in particular I recommend utilizing.

Tailwind:

The first, Tailwind*, has a robust pin-scheduling tool for your own pins and allows your to set schedules to pull from other pins, as well. Tailwind also includes Tribes, which are groups of people who have agreed to share each others pins on a specific topic.

Boardbooster:

Personally, I utilize Boardbooster* for my Pinterest management. With Boardbooster, you create Secret Boards and pin images to these boards rather than your public boards. In boardbooster, you then create a schedule for how many pins you would like to move from the secret board to your public board and what time of day you want these pins to be published. Boardbooster also has a looping function to repin old pins from your boards at a set schedule.

One downside of Boardbooster is that you can’t really visualize the order of publishing your pins, so let’s say you make 3 images for a blog post, when you pin them to your secret board, you also need to pin other images.

I love boardbooster, however, because I can spend one movie just pinning other images to my secret boards and not worry about Pinterest for a month.

Step 2: Create Multiple Pins for your Blogs.

Rather than just creating one pinnable image for your blog post, change the design and wording slightly so you have 3-4 images for each blog post. This especially works well if your blogs are 1000+ words long as you can create a pin for each topic you cover.

To manage this, I recommend creating a few layouts and templates in Canva that you can just swap out words and images. Then, as mentioned before, rather than pinning all the images at once, add them to your secret boards (if you use Boardbooster) with other images between and try to space out their publishing dates (or at least times).

You’ll also want to make sure the images are rotated into a board specifically for your brand and website. I recommend calling this board “From the XYZ Blog” or “Company Name Pins” – just something that makes it very clear that these pins are only from your website. Put this board at the top of your Pinterest boards as a featured board and you are good to go!

So, how do you incorporate multiple pins in a blog post without being overwhelming? Get your hands dirty with HTML and you’ll be good to go! 🙂

I recommend the following process for adding multiple pins to your blog post:

  1. Create images and name them with your blog topic then upload the images all at once to the end of your blog post.
  2. When you upload the images, add individual ‘alt tags’ to them with the following formula: BLOG/PIN TOPIC, keyword 1, keyword 2, #firsthashtag, #secondhashtag, keyword phrase 3, #thirdhashtag
  3. Drag and drop or copy and paste images to where they fit in the content (for example, if you have one topic at the start of the blog and it flows into another topic, you may want to include one pin that includes language from each of these sections rather than using the same language on every pin.
  4. With the remaining images that are at the end of the blog, you will now want to HIDE them!
  5. Just into the HTML for the blog post (in WordPress this is the Text tab above the content editor) and scroll down in the text editor to the end of the post. You should see the html code for the images here. This looks like: <img src=”URL” alt=”info you added to the alt tags”/>
  6. Directly before the first image you want to hide, add the text: <div style=”display:none;”>
  7. At the very end of the post after the last image you want to hide, add: </div>
  8. Click save and you are all set!

Step 3: Incorporate Pins from other Websites.

The last core piece of your Pinterest strategy is to include the Pins of other accounts and to pin images directly from other websites.

When you pin from other accounts, be sure you are looking to find popular RICH pins that include keywords in their descriptions and are frequently repinned. Typically, when you search for a topic, these pins will appear first in the search results.

Why do you want to only repin rich pins? These are often shared more frequently and if your account is posting pins that are shared frequently, you will tend to show up more frequently in Pin search results.

You also want to pin images directly from different websites because then you have the added benefit of having your profile link appear alongside the pin rather than only appearing when someone clicks to expand the pin!

Part 2: Setting your Pinterest Goals

There typically are two main goals businesses set for Pinterest. The first is much easier to accomplish than the second, but both simply require that you are consistently active on Pinterest.

 Goal 1: Gaining Name Recognition and Exposure.

Gaining name recognition and exposure is a great goal for Pinterest and is actually fairly easy to accomplish!

With my Pinterest account, I was able to grow from 100 followers to 60,000 pin views in a matter of 3 months. How? I wrote blogs and used Boardbooster to consistently pin new images, my images, and repin for me while I worked on other aspects of the business.

You can do this too, if you follow the strategy steps outlined above.

 Goal 2: Growing Traffic to Website.

Though to reach the first goal of gaining exposure doesn’t necessarily require you to blog, growing the traffic to your site ABSOLUTELY requires that you blog for your business! This makes attaining this goal a little more difficult as you need to build time in your schedule to blog and create pinnable images.

Once you create your schedule for writing blogs and the images, then, as long as you are using keywords in your descriptions, sharing the pin to group boards, and testing out different pin designs, you can be fairly certain people will click through to your site.

Final Thoughts: Freebies

So, as I wrap up, there is also the important notion to remember about what to do once people get to your site!

I always recommend including Content Upgrades in your content as a way to capture the names and email addresses of those who click through the site. This means in addition to creating the blog post and images, also creating a download and a form to add even more information to your post. Once someone signs up to download the form, you ‘own’ their email address and can send them weekly tips and news to continue helping them on their educational journey in your industry!

We’ll be doing an entire section on the ins and outs of Content Upgrades (Freebies) and Welcome Series, so stay tuned!

 

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Creating Infographics With Canva [Video]

Infographics are a HUGE part of Pinterest and those who love Pinterest absolutely adore infographics.  Infographics are an easy way to consume and learn new information.  A good infographic can take you step by step through a message with lots of visual content and a minimal amount of text.

In this video tutorial, you will learn how to quickly and easily design infographics by using Canva.

 

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How to create the best infographic for Pinterest

One of the best visual tools to use on Pinterest is Infographics, over the past few years, infographics have become a big deal. They are a great way to visually explain data to people. These images can really be used for just about any industry and I think that’s why they work so well.

People can get too caught up in making an infographic, what data do you use, where do you find that data, how do you create the image, what colors do you use etc. The list goes on and on.

We have created a 5 step system for you to follow to create the
BEST infographics for Pinterest!

 

  • 1 – Picking the right topic
    • Does it relate to your business?
    • What topics in your industry do people find interesting?
    • Is this topic something you are passionate about?
    • What data do you want people to receive?
    • Can you tell a story within the graphic?
  • 2 – Be creative, funny or useful
    • Can you get a reaction out of people
    • Explain something to your audience that will resonate with them
    • Explain the data you want them to learn on their level
    • Will your image be shareable?
  • 3 – Keep it simple
    • Have a simple and clean image
    • Keep your infographic to 3-5 points
    • Using text and images within your infographic
    • Have a good Call-to-action within the graphic, don’t give it all away in one image
  • 4 – Look and feel
    • Make sure you are using clear fonts that your audience can read
    • Tie your infographic into your brand colors only use 2-3 colors per image
    • Put your sources on bottom and your logo
    • Keep you infographic consistent with your brand
  • 5 – Size
    • Make your image longer rather than wider
    • Infographics should be 735 pixels wide and under 2,060 pixels long
    • Remember with mobile if they are longer than 2,60 pixels they can get cut off

Wonderful, now you know how to create your infographic, what it needs to look like, the things you should have and shouldn’t have, but now the BIG question is where do you get all the data?? I know as an entrepreneur I am always looking at infographics on Pinterest for our company and for our clients, I say WOW that is awesome, I want to create something like that. BUT where did they get the data, how do they know the key points they want to talk about??

We have put together a FREE download here for you with 6 key techniques to collect data to make the perfect infographic. As you can see there is a lot that goes into making just ONE image, right? This is a process. It’s really about finding that perfect topic that you really want to share with the world and being able to explain it in such a way where everyone gets it! You have to do your research with each infographic, make the process fun. As you think of these ideas for your infographics, keep a journal or word doc to start collecting your data. 

Conclusion

Remember you are always going to analyze your data and try to create a story with that data. Once you have your data, story, and image complete you can craft together a successful launch. Where will you place this image first? Each infographic needs to have your call-to-action, visually appealing and clearly branded. Here are a few steps we recommend for a successful launch:

  • Write a blog post about your Infographic with the image within the blog content
  • Share to Pinterest, Google, Facebook
  • Make another image that is the correct size for Instagram and share on Instagram

When you follow these steps to create the best infographics and implement our techniques to your data and design process you will be able to deliver an infographic that will resonate with your audience. An image that they will want to share and will build your brand.

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New to Pinterest?   Get The Skinny On The Best Graphic Sizes and Hashtags To Use On Pinterest

Did you know?  Pinterest is the 3rd most popular social network and it has become a huge search engine!  People turn to Pinterest on the daily to:  shop, find information, ideas, educate themselves, organize themselves and so much more.  Once you get to know Pinterest and all that it can provide for you, the love affair begins 😉

To make sure your brand’s content hits the ground running, there are some basics you need to have in place, especially when it comes to graphics.  Pinterest is a highly visual platform.  Understanding the best graphics to use on the site is key to making your account perform its best.

We want to make sure you and your brand look your best on Pinterest, so, we put together this helpful 2018 Pinterest Image Size guide.  Download it, print it out, and keep it handy so you can have these image sizes available at-a-glance!  Download the guide HERE.

Part of being successful on Pinterest requires your ability to be found!  That’s where hashtags (#) come into play.  Once you have an understanding of how to utilize hashtags, you will notice an increase in your Pinterest traffic.

Hashtag Know How!

Here are 3 strategies you can use to get your hashtag game in place for your brand

STRATEGY #1:

Know the number of hashtags you can use one 1 pin.  A recommended rule of thumb is to use no more than 20 hashtags per pin.

STRATEGY #2:

Always use hashtags on the pins you post.  When people search hashtags in the search bar, Pinterest will compile the latest pins chronologically, placing the newest pins at the top of the list. That’s where you want your pins to live.

STRATEGY #3:

Organize a list of hashtags for your brand.  Categorize you hashtags into 3 buckets:

  1. Branded Hashtags:  a list of hashtags that only relate to and describe your brand
  2. Trending Hashtags: a list of trending (popular) hashtags on the topics you post about (these hashtags will frequently change based on the topic and current trends you are posting about)
  3. Content Related:  a list of content related hashtags to use in order to describe the post you are pinning

Best Practices When Selecting Hashtags:

  • Avoid using very broad hashtags, be more specific and try to think like your audience.  What hashtags would they use to find your pin?
  • Don’t be afraid to use hashtag phrases if they help to define your audience even better.  For example, we may use a hashtag phrase like #SocialMediaTraining as a hashtag to reach our audience.
  • Do some research!  When adding a hashtag to a pin on Pinterest, Pinterest will populate a list of suggested hashtags.  Next the hashtag, you will see how many pins are using the hashtag you are considering.  If the number is HUGE, your pin may get lost in the shuffle.  Try to determine how you can make your pin more niche with a more specific hashtag or hashtag phrase.

When working with Pinterest, our best advice is for you to get started, have fun, and experiment with different ideas, strategies, and tactics.  Happy pinning!

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Pinterest for your Business [Plus Download]

We are going to be talking about Pinterest for digital marketing for your business. Now is such a great tool for businesses to use for their marketing because it allows for your business to gain a broader audience without necessarily having to always wear to grow your network. Pinterest works much more like a search engine in this capacity rather than a social media Network.

What is Pinterest?

First and foremost, what is Pinterest? Is an Application that utilizes images to help people find things online more easily. So you can think of it almost like a visual search engine. Imagine if you did a Google Search and rather than having websites come up in text and phrases, the websites all appeared as images. This is Pinterest. Now with Pinterest,  users are prompted to search for items of interest and organize them in elements called boards. Board is a collection of that all relate to a certain topic. As a business you are able to Showcase elements from your own website as well as related pins from other people’s website so that your followers and the people who come across your account can more easily find information regarding the topic of your expertise without having to search around for related website and phrases.

The download for this week is to help you organize the boards on your own business Pinterest account so that they relate to items that your target market will be finding online. The link for this is at the bottom of the blog.

Now you might be thinking that Pinterest is only for a DIY, crafts, and Home Improvement projects, but in reality, it is for so much more! We have found that everything from business services and tips to graphic design and accounting for businesses have garnered lots of great feedback and traffic to our client’s websites. In fact once a pin goes viral, you can find that you consistently get leads that come from one blog post image on your website month after month.

We haven’t really discussed in detail the use of lead capture forms on your website, but Pinterest is a great traffic source if you have a lead capture form and free giveaway on your website as a way to attract new people to your email list.

When you utilize Pinterest it is important to make sure that your pins correlate with a Content that you find on your website and that your pins and board description include the keywords that you need to be found just as you would a search engine.

How do Search Engines Work (How Google Ranks Pages)

How search engines work is through matching the search user’s intent would be words that appear on a specific page on your website. If the search user intent and the keyword phrases that are used match the content that is found on your website you are more likely to appear in organic listing.

The same is true for Pinterest. As you are creating every single pin from your website you need to make sure that you are thinking about words and phrases that somebody might be using on Pinterest.

How to Organize Your Business Pinterest Account

We’ve recommend following these steps to ensure that your Pinterest account Boards are set up for success.

First step is to create boards that align with the interest of your target market on Pinterest. You want to make sure that these boards closely relate to your own business so that you can include a combination of pins from your own website as well as from other resources online.

When you create your boards, think about the different aspects of your business. For us, for example, we can pin about:

  • Blogging,
  • Business Tips,
  • Productivity,
  • Email Marketing,
  • Web Design,
  • Branding,
  • Social Media, etc.

Each of the boards we will want to pin very specific pins to that align with the board theme.

From here, you will want to make sure your Boards have descriptions that align with what a user will find pinned, as well as a list of the keywords that will help someone find the board.

Then it is time to get pinning! Don’t only pin from your own website, you also want to search for popular pins on Pinterest to Repin to your boards. It is best if these are popular pins because they will then help boost your own engagement and reach on Pinterest. Best of all, when your boards are well organized and the descriptions include keywords, your boards may even show up in Google Organic results, too!

We’ll be sharing more tips about including Pinnable images on your website and blog, but as a quick refresher, these should be tall images (735px x 1104px to 2061px).

I’ve put together a guide for you to create your own outline for your boards on Pinterest. Within this guide, think about the keywords you would expect someone to use to find this board (you’ll want to include these keywords in both the Pin Descriptions and in the Board Description), the Topics you want to include in the board (for example I group all social media together rather than having a board for each network), and your goals for the board with how frequently you hope to pin to the board so you can keep consistent.

Download your Weekly Prompt Here

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