Using Pinterest for E-Commerce Marketing
While Twitter and Facebook take the reigns on using social media as a customer service tool, Pinterest wins the race for e-commerce social media marketing. As an e-commerce merchant, you’ll find that Pinterest has some excellent qualities to help draw attention to your products and site. However, if you’re new to Pinterest, it may look confusing—but don’t let it fool you. Pinterest is easy to navigate and easy to conquer.
Imagine yourself standing in front of a wall and you fill this wall with corkboards. You sort each corkboard into categories and pin images that interest you to the corresponding board. In essence, this is Pinterest. Now, let’s break down the site into its main components: boards, pins, likes, comments, and follows.
Boards
As an e-commerce merchant, think of Pinterest boards as different departments in your store. If you sell clothing and accessories, you can create boards for men’s shirts, women’s dresses, children’s shoes, etc. But you can even take it a step further and create boards for seasonal lines, promotions, sales, and holidays. The opportunities are virtually endless.
Pins
This is where the fun really begins. A pin is an image that you attach to one of your boards. You can pin images from websites or upload them from your computer. Pins found on websites automatically link to the webpage where you found the image. If you upload a pin from your computer, you can edit it and insert a URL for where you want the image to link. Since pins can link product pages, you can keep the image description short and sweet—simply explaining what the pin is representing.
Pinterest users also have the ability to re-pin images that already exist. As an e-commerce business owner marketing your own products, you’ll probably find yourself doing less re-pinning while customers and fans re-pin your pins. Having users re-pin your images is a great way to turn your customers into word of mouth marketers, getting the word out about your business to even more people.
Likes
Similar to Facebook, users can like pins on Pinterest. There isn’t too much to this feature, but you can use it as a way to analyze how others react to the images you pin.
Comments
Similar to adding an image on Facebook, users have the ability to post comments to your images on Pinterest. Don’t expect too many comments from other users—they show their love by re-pinning.
Follows
What social media website is complete without the ability to friend, like, connect, or follow? On Pinterest, users don’t follow you—they follow your boards. They have the option to select what boards they want to follow, or they can simply follow them all. For e-commerce merchants, having users follow your boards is a great way to let them know you have a new product when you pin a new image.
Facebook and Twitter
Two great tools on Pinterest for your e-commerce marketing campaign are the ability to tweet pins to Twitter and also like them on Facebook. Connecting your Pinterest account to your Twitter and Facebook accounts will help create a much more robust marketing campaign. It also gives your fans the ability to like and tweet your images, adding yet another level to your word of mouth marketing.
