Booby Trap Your Pinterest Pins
We LOVE to get the notification that someone has repinned one of our Pinterest pins.
We know we're a short attention span society, and Pinterest fully understands that!
While we don't use Pinterest much from the social aspect, we are finding it to be good for multiple uses as we've discussed before (gathering consumer interest, reference boards for ourselves, attracting new construction builder attention, etc.).
For the most part, EVERY real estate photo or collage on our Pinterest boards is shot by us AND Pinned from a blog post or Worpress page. We just completed updating our IDX search capability so every subdivision Pin no longer leads to a blog post with a "we hope you'll click this link and search for homes on our other website" link, but instead leads straight to our WP site with the home search results right there. And we ARE seeing traffic from Pinterest to our WP site. It's not huge (yet), but it's there, and we've closed business directly from Pinterest.
Yesterday it became VERY apparent that not everyone understands how a Repin works. A local agent repinned 42 of our Mason subdivision photo collages in the space of a few minutes to HER Mason community board.
If a consumer did that, I'd be ecstatic, but a local agent? Not quite the same feeling. While technically within the terms of service for Pinterest, I personally consider it a breach of professional etiquette to repin community posts from another LOCAL competing agent.
Fortunately in our particular case, the Repins could be considered booby trapped. What the other agent didn't realize was that all 42 of those repins would lead any Pinterest user who clicked through those photos for more information right to OUR website and OUR search pages. Major OOPS, right? Instead of building her own business, she's most likely leading them back to us.
(And since she was a rookie agent, I cut her a break and called her to let her know what she was inadvertently doing and she promptly removed the Pins---I know, if I was totally ruthless business wise I'd have just let it ride, but that's not how we want to be)
So bottom line, if you're going to use Pinterest, if you're creating ORIGINAL content, place it on a blog post or web page and THEN Pin it to your boards. That'll drive traffic back to you and not let your competitors benefit from your hard work. Those subdivision posts we mentioned are a MINIMUM of two hours each invested labor for us, so if anyone should be gaining business from them, we expect it to be us.
Keep on Pinning and Blogging!
Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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