With over seventy million users (in less than four years), and five million article pins a day, the site gets a ton of usage … and can drive a lot of traffic as a result.
According to a recent post on Mashable, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit combined.
But that’s not all …
Profiting from Pinterest
Use Pinterest as an important part of your Content Tree™
The referral traffic you receive is often more profitable too. Visitors from Pinterest are not only 10% more likely to buy something, but will also spend 10% more on average when they do so, compared to visitors arriving from other social networks (Tamba).
It’s therefore more than worthwhile – i.e. profitable – to add the social site into your content marketing strategy … especially when you’re only talking an extra minute or two to pin your blog post images, one of the easiest ways to get started with Pinterest.
Another Branch On Your Content Tree™
It also easily feeds into other parts of your content marketing strategy … for example, you can add your Pinterest feed into Hootsuite in the same way you can for your blog’s RSS feed to automatically update Twitter with your latest pin each and every time.
(To do this, your Pinterest feed is located at http://www.pinterest.com/[username]/feed.rss – or for individual boards, you’ll find it at http://www.pinterest.com/[username]/[your board name].rss)
Adding your Pinterest feed into Hootsuite
In brief, Pinterest is just one more part of a powerful overall content strategy where you grow a new Content Tree™ from each new root, i.e. each new blog post you publish.
But it doesn’t just stop with images you may use in your blog posts. As you grow your Content Tree™ further, you can also share infographics, ebook covers, video stills, key points from your content in visual form, images you may otherwise share just on Facebook and/or Twitter, and so on.
You can then supplement this with any other images you come across and choose to share, and other people’s pins that you choose to repin. It is after all a social network, and repinning should form some part of your strategy – simply repin content that your own followers would also find of interest.
As well as helping to increase your own authority, repinning also helps you connect with other Pinterest users through which valuable business relationships may start to form.
In fact, 80 percent of pins are actually repins – by falling into the 20 percent of people who pin original content, and on a regular basis, the likelihood of your own pins being repinned and reaching new audiences you wouldn’t otherwise reach becomes fairly high.
Your Pinterest Strategy
To make the most of Pinterest, try to ensure you add images to every new blog post you publish … in fact, every piece of content wherever possible. The more compelling the image (and therefore more share-worthy), the better results you’ll begin to experience.
In the same way that you leverage your written content to maximize the return you get from its initial creation, you can leverage images in the same way and can thus be a wise investment:
- Images help make your content more appealing, increasing the amount of time visitors spend on your site (which by reducing bounce rate can increase your SEO results), as well as increasing the amount of new traffic you attract, for example from referrals.
- You can use the same images not just on Pinterest, but also on other social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
- As you develop your Content Tree™ further, you can re-use the same images in your videos, presentations, ebooks, infographics, and so on.
You can either create your own images, hire a suitable graphic designer, or use stock photos and images from sites like iStockPhoto.com.
Finally, note that Pinterest’s users are primarily women, so depending on the niche you’re in, it could be even more advantageous for your business than others.
(You can find our own presence on Pinterest right here.)
