Establishing A Brand On Pinterest - 8 Strategic Moves To Get You Going Today
After my last post, "Pinterest Generates More Conversations..." about the huge growth of referral traffic generated by Pinterest, I thought I'd post a quick follow-up article specifically about launching your business brand on this new social media .
These Pinterest tips are a collection of some fantastic ideas published by Mashable and a few tricks I've learned from friends...along with a dash of personal experience. Remember, Pinterest is an invitation-only social site. You have to receive an invitation from a member to get started. Ask around, you probably know someone who is using Pinterest today. If not, email me and I'll send you an invitation, and I'm happy to trade ideas on interesting Pinning and Board ideas.
1) Grab Your Brand Name - You have your Brand on your business card, email, Facebook page, Twitter account, etc. Now, make sure your customers find you and follow you easily on Pinterest. Reserve it even if you don't have time today to do much with it. Here are mine Stowe Meadows Hall NH-Realty
2) Be Your Brand - You're a restaurant that specializes in farm-to-table menus? Show it by creating Boards for the farms you purchase from. Pictures of the farmers and grazing lands or fields full of the produce you buy and serve. Show pictures of your menu items. Offer buying guides or locations for spots your products can be found in retail stores. This concept applies to every business. Don't understand this concept in Real Estate? Try this to get going, add Boards for:
Local recommended dining, Local Neighborhoods worth exploring, Curb Appeal Concepts, Staging Ideas, Landscaping ideas, Organizational concepts, etc.
Get creative about yours. Make a page and boards people want to explore.
3) Add The Pin It Button - Add the Pinterest Pin logo to your website and to your signature line in email. This has two impacts. You allow website visitors to Pin pictures from your site AND you show people how to find your Pinterest account. 
4) Make Your Website Pin-Friendly - This is a big one. Pinterest needs to see images to Pin. I've visited lots of websites that use Flash images vs images so there is nothing available to Pin. It is frustrating to find a site that you want to share with other people, but there are no images to add to your Board...so no referral for you!
5) Include Hashtags, @ signs, $ signs and URLs - Help folks find you by adding #hashtags just like you do on Twitter. Callout other users with @ just like in Facebook. If you add prices with the $ symbol, Pinterest will add the price to your Pin making it easy for followers to understand pricing. Pinterest links are "no follow" links from an SEO perspective. But you can add URLs to the item description for SEO and click-through traffic.
6) Be A Great Community Member - Give credit to others, follow others in the community, re-pin information that your followers may find helpful. Don't self-promote. Here is a fabulous article from Wild Hair that talks about how Whole Foods uses Pinterest to promote their brand. Check it out, there is A LOT of stuff on the Whole Foods Boards that I'd like to re-pin....and that promotes referral traffic to them. 
7) Load Your Own Pins - Who says you have to find and use other people's Pins? Upload photos and descriptions of places you've been, neighborhoods you want to highlight, house design examples. You can also add links and embed pins in your blogs or other HTML. Each Pin has an "embed" tag allowing cut/paste of HTML.
8) Commercial Sites vs. Personal Sites - Pinterest hasn't yet distinguished between commercial users and individual users. Be careful when you use copywritten material for commercial purposes. Err on the side of caution.
There are lots of great articles to explore on this topic. Here is another terrific one from Social Media Examiner that I used in my research. Enjoy!
Caroline
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