Do you have your brand, whether personal or professional, on Pinterest?
Many people do, over 100 million in fact, and a large proportion of them are businesses, brands, bloggers and other organizations. Pinterest is popular because it offers many unique and effective opportunities to not only reach your core audience, but significantly expand it. Pinterest Marketing could revolutionise your brand.

Pinterest may be thought of as simply another avenue of social media marketing, but it is more than that, having its own ecosystem of notes and best practice that provide a platform to experiment and succeed in adding value to your prospects in fun and exciting ways.
When new to Pinterest, understanding what works and what does not is tricky, marketing strategies for this platform require a different approach, an improving what we offer to our audience is not only something we should all strive for continually, it is essential in the Pinterest environment.
Our friends at Buffer have in an intriguing and unique post where they tried and tested each of the well know Pinterest Marketing Tips. In true Buffer form they have produced a data backed and results based post the offers an intriguing insight into the world of Pinterest Marketing.
There are many Pinterest marketing tips out there, and all of them have something to learn from, but here are the eight that have worked for Buffer, they make a great starting point.

1. Pin frequently, and space them throughout the day rather than all at once

This is probably the most effective lesson Buffer learnt through their time on Pinterest, simply pin more often.
Buffer started out pinning a couple of times a day, and have now upped that to ten times a day, and it made a huge difference. In fact, they saw a 150% rise in engagement on their Pinterest page since taking this step.

Research shows that a schedule of between five and thirty pins a day is the most effective solution for Pinterest, but for the best effect it is not simply a case of logging in and doing them all at once, for the best Pinterest strategy a few things should be considered.

Schedule – This is essential for the most efficient way of using Pinterest. When looking for content and items to share with your Pinterest followers you will find that it goes in stages, sometimes you will find lots of great stuff. The key to long term Pinterest success is not to just pin it all at once. Schedule it so it is spaced out and covers a few days of content, at the 10 pins a day or whatever volume you have decided upon.
Distribute your pins – By spacing out your pins at regular intervals your strategy will be much more effective, it encourages your audience to return regularly to your site to look at the new content in small bites, rather than be overwhelmed by a dozen new pins all in one go.

Buffer offers a fantastic pin scheduling tool, you can try it for FREE for 7 days to see how great it is, and through their Awesome and Business plans, you can connect any number of Pinterest accounts for scheduling and other fantastic tools.

2. Use Rich Pins to gain more control

A free feature on Pinterest, Rich Pins allow you to add more information and details directly to your pin itself. They are, in effect, the Twitter cards or Facebook open graph equivalent for the Pinterest platform. They are cleverly designed, and improve the experience both for the pinned and just as importantly, for pinners themselves and in our experience double your click through rates.
Buffer saw an increase of 104 clicks per day—a 2x increase— from using Rich Pins.

There are five distinct types of Rich Pins:

Product Pins – These include real-time pricing, availability and where to buy.
Recipe Pins – These include cooking times and serving information as well as Ingredients
Article Pins – These add a headline, author, link and story description to your pins
Place Pins – These add a map, phone numbers and address to your pins
Move Pins – These add ratings, reviews and cast member information

Rich pins are accessible only on validated sites, however validation is not automatic, so here is a run-down of how you can go about getting access to those Rich Pins.

First, add Pinterest to your blog through its code. We use WordPress, and took advantage of the Yoast SEO plugin that can add Pinterest mete tag support for you. Simply copy your code from Pinterest into Yoast’s settings.
The next step is to validate the site, you can use this link to access the tool.
You then simply request Rich Pins from that validation tool.
After successful validation, you will get an email from Pinterest notifying you that Rich Pins are available.

3. Be careful with Image Size

It is always worth looking around the main site for any tips, and Pinterest’s own business blog has some very useful ideas, one of which is that vertical pins, at least 600 pixels wide and with a 2:3 or 1:3.5 ratio are the most successful. At a 2:3 ratio, that 600 pixel wide image would be 900 pixels tall, and at 1:3.5 ratio, the same image would be 2,100 pixels tall, just so you get the idea.
Creating images that fit this ideal size and dimension ratio is thankfully quite simple. If you use photo manipulation software such as Photoshop or Gimp, you can set both per pixel dimensions and ratio for your images during creation. If you prefer online tools, Canva has built in Pinterest templates that produce your images in the right format, 735 pixels wide and 1,102 pixels tall, which is the 2:3 ratio you desire. Sticking to these image rules can really help.
This is the Perfect Pin on Pinterest according to science:

4. Keywords and detailed descriptions

The structure of your descriptions plays a really important part in the success of any pin, and there are a few elements each must have.

Informative detail, ensure you add value for the reader
Keywords, this is essential here as with anywhere, keyword rich but stay informative
It doesn’t have to be overly long, just a couple of sentences is fine
Always give descriptions a positive outlook
Include follow up action for viewers, give them the next step to take and a link to follow
Be grammatically accurate, this is important everywhere not just on Pinterest
Avoid hashtags, promotional language (such as 10% off or 2 for $5!), direct sales talk nor any reference to Pinterest functionality, such as ‘Click here to pin’

Buffer found that keeping descriptions at 100 characters or less were the ones with highest engagement, however it is worth remembering that the longer, keyword rich descriptions are more easily found in the search system, which could prolong the life of the pin. This balancing act means that a mix of approaches is perhaps best.
We have found that pins with added links, either full or shortened, do better than those without, and is well worth doing.

5. Use multiple images in your pin

A lot of the most popular pins on Pinterest are collages or mosaics, so using multiple images per pin is definitely something to try.
However, how you accomplish that is not obvious, and so we began using Canva templates for simplicity, you can drag your selection of images and it will create a mosaic for you within the image size template. You can adjust the grid to for the best placement of the images, the standard Pinterest image size template will keep everything as it should be. We suggest using three or four images at once for the best effect.
In Buffer’s tests, multiple image pins received around double the repins of single imaged ones, so it is definitely worth the time to do.

6. Add text to the pins

Text overlays on the images are seen a lot all over Pinterest, the most common act as a headline or a description that references the pin description or connected article. This can be very effective for obtaining repins, and so learning how to do this is important.

The good news is that Canva, or if you prefer, Photoshop or Gimp, all have easy to use tools to do that, a great tutorial is available here.

7. Use ‘Pin it for later’ links

This is a great trick that lets anyone use Pinterest as a read-it-later tool for blogging.
The ‘Pin for later’ link allows any blog post you share to social media to be pinned to a special read-it-later Pinterest board that is full of the articles they have put to one side, providing an easy way for them to catch up with your content.

Accomplishing this is not obvious, so this is how Buffer did it:

After publishing a blog post or article
Pin an image from the new content.
Take the URL for the pin
Shared the URL as the ‘pin for later’ link.

By using this, we have seen higher engagement across multiple platforms, both Pinterest and other social media that hosted the article.

8. Ensure Board Titles are keyword rich

Keywords could be particularly useful when making boards of your blog posts, Buffer’s Pinterest marketing experience suggests that it helps with searches for people to find your content if everything is optimized well. However, how effective is it really when used on Pinterest?
They tried both keyword focused and not for board titles to see how much, if any, difference is really made. The results were not really conclusive, and further testing is needed to see just what effects are seen on Pinterest, so this is definitely something to come back to.

When you try anything new, there is a lot of trial and error involved when finding the most effective solutions with your Pinterest Marketing, this list is just the start, there are a variety of other things we need to explore, including the effect of categorizing your boards, adding logos, borders or brightening your images, and so forth.
You may have already tried some of these, how did you get on?

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