5 Tactics for Owning Pinterest: How to Get Your Pins Shared
First welcomed with a great deal of enthusiasm, then reviled for its propensity for spam, and now celebrated as a social network with a lot of potential for brands, Pinterest hasn’t had a moment away from the spotlight ever since it first emerged. However, it’s worth noting that the brand’s approach to using Pinterest is laden with discrepancies: while some companies seem to have found the secret recipe for harvesting all the visibility they can from this social network, others staunchly refuse to even be on.
Pinterest will even pursue users of the image-sharing platform to have their copyrighted content removed. In the meantime, though, it certainly looks like brands stand more and more to gain by being on Pinterest instead of ignoring its existence altogether. Here are five tactics that your brand can use, too, in order to garner more visibility on Pinterest.
Tell them a story
… in pictures. It’s the easiest, most fun, and most socially-oriented way to tell a story, by supporting it with images that explain, illustrate, or add to the narrative. If your brand has seen some interesting recent developments, even if they’re not entirely positive, feel free to create the narrative of those events through a Pinboard. It could be something as potentially arid as a company merger, but it can also be an occurrence that calls for the use of visual support, such as a key rebranding.
Get cute
This one is almost a no-brainer: Pinterest, like all image-based platforms, thrives on cute. Whatever you’ve got and can associate with your brand, from puppies and kittens to babies at sunset and flowers, you can be almost sure the images are going to be shared from here to kingdom come. However, there is such a thing as a ‘cute overload,’ and that’s what happens when you abuse the power of cuteness. The rule of thumb is that you should only use images that are even remotely connected to your bra;d, otherwise, you would be (perhaps unwittingly) sinning quasi-spamming visual pollution. There are enough babies and kittens on the Internet as it is: we only want to see yours if they are part of your brand story.
Associate with iconic imagery
As long as you know the core values that your brand stands for, it shouldn’t be too difficult to put together a collection – or Pinboard, in Pinterest lingo – of iconic imagery associated with it. Colleges that are present on Pinterest, for instance, will often post images of famous places and items that can be found around campus or around the university town they hail from. A food delivery service could always put together a collection of vintage film stars eating some of the foods they deliver; the potential here is limitless, and the takeaway is that the power of association with classic images, which are easy to recognize, never fails to yield good results.
Don’t shy away from videos
Though not all users are aware of this, Pinterest also allows video content to be shared on its boards. This has been recently put to great use by a chain store account, which decided to embed some videos of recipes from its YouTube account. The decision was as wise as they get, since Pinterest is well-known for its penchant for food and since the food channel is the fastest growing one on the social network.
Be informative
If your brand is not the kind to bear an association with kittens, there’s no need for you to feel like you need to ‘dumb it down’, simply because you’re on an image-based platform. On the contrary, a classic information portal such as The Wall Street Journal has created an incredibly useful resource in Pinboard form, where they use visuals to illustrate key economic concepts and recent news.