Pinterest has recently been lauded as a terrific method of boosting traffic and online marketing for small biz, but the social media platform has also made a number of changes. For some marketers, the drastic shifts in how the platform works have been enough to dissuade them. If you want to know whether or not you should stay with Pinterest, then you’ll need to take a closer look at how the changes made will affect your company.
Automated Posting Could Be Rejected
Pinterest has changed the way they are accepting posting. It’s very popular to use a pin scheduling software to save time, but when you use something like BoardBooster to arrange your pins and automatically post them, you could end up being marked as a spammer. Fortunately, Tailwind is approved by Pinterest, so if you want to keep things on the up and up, this is the option to use. It’s also a good idea to do some manual pinning from time to time, just to ensure things are legit. This can end up taking a lot of time, so you may want to hire a VA or Pinterest specialist to handle that side of things for you.
Interaction is Key
Pinterest is leaning toward making the site even more interactive and responsive than it already is. This means business owners need to focus on pinning regularly and sharing other people’s pins, as well. Again, this may require hiring help if you don’t have the time or interest in doing all this manual work.
Be Consistent
You’ve likely heard of the importance of consistency when blogging, but it’s just as important when you’re pinning to Pinterest. Your pins will be given more weight if you pin regularly. That means you should avoid dropping large numbers of pins once every so often, with no activity in between.
Instead, you should be pinning on a regular basis. This doesn’t have to be every day, but it should be a few times a week and every week. It doesn’t matter if you have new content or not . . . it’s completely acceptable to create a new pin image for a previously pinned post or piece of content. In fact, this can be a great way to test which pins tend to perform better.
Pin Codes Are the Future
Like QR (Quick Response) codes, pin codes allow you to share a simple code that people can scan with their phone to be taken to a profile or board. This feature is so new that most users aren’t yet aware of it, but you should certainly be using it now. Once it catches on, your website or blog will already be up to speed, so you can capture more traffic early on.
Register a Business Account for Better Stats
If you haven’t registered for a business account on Pinterest yet, this is something you must do with the new changes. The upgrade is free, but it lets you register your website, see who is pinning from your site, and gives you a lot more statistics. The numbers can help you turn out better content, so stay on top of them.
Having a business account also allows you to set up Rich Pins, which provide more value to the user and pull descriptions from your own content. This can be very beneficial to businesses and enables you to specify what you want the pin description to say.
Expect Reduced Views
One downside that Pinterest users have been reporting is the fact that their engagement numbers have dropped drastically. While this may appear scary, it’s happened across the board, so you have the same opportunity as anyone else to build your account back up.
Online marketing for small biz is rarely an overnight success and there will be setbacks along the way. Be sure to stay on top of things by studying new articles in OSP’s Knowledge Base and by attending OSP’s Facebook Lives. Just click on the link and “like” the page, and you’ll be notified for each Live. That certainly will keep you in the know.
