A couple of weeks ago we talked about how Instagram could be used in business, but according to the latest stats from AdCorp the real visual platform champion for business is Pinterest. Pinterest has the seventh highest social media user base in Australia behind Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter and Wordpress and offers business-specific tools.
Businesses are proving that Pinterest isn’t just for planning your dream wedding and drooling over food porn, but what are they pinning if not centrepieces and cinnamon buns?
In a recent interview with Constant Contact’s Corporate Community Manager Danielle Cormier, Business2Community asked what the B2B tech company is trying to accomplish with their Pinterest account. Cormier said the goals are to show off their offerings, improve search engine rank and humanise their brand.
Pins to Improve Search Engine Rank
There are many ways businesses are using Pinterest to improve their SEO rankings. Make sure you follow Pinterest’s instructions to verify your website so that you can list it in your profile and in your caption, driving traffic back with every piece of content. Also noteworthy is that whatever you enter as a description for your image serves as an alt tag, so make sure you’re incorporating keywords in that section. Hubspot has some excellent tips on setting up your Pinterest account for business.
KISSmetrics, a B2B marketing software organisation, checks out who’s pinned them by using this URL: http://pinterest.com/source/KISSmetrics/ which anyone can use simply by replacing KISSmetrics with their domain name. They recommend doing this to see what images are most popular, to thank people for re-pinning, and for reputation management to see what types of boards offerings are being re-pinned to.
Humanising Pins
I’ve noticed that while business Facebook and LinkedIn pages seem to be very industry focused, business pages on Pinterest cover a very diverse range of categories and tend to focus more heavily on that brand humanising component. Cormier said their most pinned posts are motivational and funny, with a simple inspirational quote ranking as top pinned:
Constant Contact also has a “Life at Constant Contact” board showing company events, funny signs around their office, employees and more. The board invites the public to have a glimpse at the day-to-day activities of the humans behind the company and the space they inhabit.
One of my favourite humanising boards is Hubspot’s “Awful Stock Photography” board. While it may have little to do with marketing automation software, it’s a humorous bridge to Hubspot’s audience of marketers, most of whom have likely been tasked with sorting through hundreds of tacky stock photos.
Web Content Pins
Using Pinterest to showcase offerings is a great way to drive traffic back to your organisation’s website. Constant Contact breaks up content from downloadable offerings that serve as teasers and link back to a landing page for downloading the whole piece. Hubspot screenshots e-books and whitepaper covers and pins blog photos that are visually engaging representations of the content.
Many B2B products aren’t particularly eye-catching, but that hasn’t stopped Cisco from pinning glamour shots of their servers, or as one commenter put it “the cutest suite of enterprise-grade networking equipment I've ever seen! (also comes in royal plum).” But if you’re going to pin ugly products, make sure it’s a high quality photo and attempt to add elements of interest or engaging facts to the image to make it interesting! Show your product being applied in a unique situation and link it to a case study.
Conclusion: Stick with a Theme
I’ve seen some businesses go nuts on Pinterest. No B2B company needs 238 boards that include everything from marketing advice to hairstyles to gluten free recipes. Pick a theme that’s broad enough to offer you flexibility while remaining within a framework that makes sense for your brand. General Electric ties together their board categories, which range from highly brand relevant “Badass Machines” to brand irrelevant “Cancer Pintherapy” with a mission statement at the top of their page: “Pinning things that inspire us to build, power, move and cure the world.”
