Pinterest is the newest social network on the block, having gone from a small audience just six months ago to the third largest social network on the Internet. They also just landed 100M in VC funding from Rakuten and other companies. So how can you use it for your business, and how can you ensure that your page is converting well when users land on your site?
Let’s be honest; organic traffic takes a while to accumulate in order to see any conclusive conversion data, but sometimes you don’t have a lot of time. Instead, you need to get a sample size large enough to draw good conclusions that your page will convert when targeted users come to it. After all, what’s the purpose of driving a lot of visitors to your site and not selling anything? You’d be wasting your time, right?
Pinterest traffic can convert, but you have to do the pre-work to see if it will be worth your time to pin photos and products on Pinterest. So let’s explore what that pre-work is and how to get the most bang for your valuable time.
Know Your Demographics
According to this infographic on Mashable, over 68% of users on Pinterest are female. This means that you need to know if your products will sell to the female demographic from age 25-55. How do you do this?
The best way to test this is to run Facebook ads against the female demographic. Using Facebook’s Ad Creator, you can target by location (if you are a local shop), age (both “exact” and “broad” just like Adwords), and categories. For example, if I were targeting my own photography site to see if females liked my photography and were willing to buy it from my site, I’d run it with these settings:
Test Your Pictures in Ads First
Just like you should test how well the demographics convert on your site, you should also test photos for click throughs. Pinterest users love beautiful professional images, and using Facebook you can test different images for click throughs. In order to be able to better track which photo gets more clicks, you should keep the text and targeting the same in the different ads, only changing the picture. To keep with the above example of testing my photography site, I wonder if an image of Ireland or an image of the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul would convert better.
So I’d run the following ads:
Post to Pinterest at Key Times
Pinterest can drive key traffic to websites, but only if done at the right times and with the right photos. According to research that has been done, the best times to post to Pinterest are in the mornings and evenings, especially weekend evenings when most people are logged onto social networks instead of at work. Apparently, most Pinterest users do not use it while at work, so they log on in the evenings and spend hours perusing the photos. So capitalize upon these times by submitting your content once into the relevant category. By not submitting an image too often, it will not be caught in the spam filters.
Learn More
Pinterest is a great tool for users and marketers alike, and can be used to drive great targeted traffic to your website if done right. Pinterest is a fairly simple tool, but like any social network has its own lingo to learn to become a true power user. Luckily some good resources exist where you can learn all about Pinterest.
This guest post was written by John, who is a blogger working with Grovo, an exciting new startup in New York City that creates online video tutorials about the best cloud based products, covering companies from Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook to Evernote, SoundCloud, and more.
