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7 Costly Mistakes Businesses Make on Pinterest

Pictures to Profits Podcast Episode 16

 

Welcome to episode 16 of the Pictures to Profits Podcast, in this podcast I’ll be interviewing Alisa Meredith, and she’s going to be sharing with us 7 costly mistakes that business make on Pinterest.

Alisa Meredith is the senior inboud marketer at Scalable Social Media, and is the Pinterest Fanatic at OverGo Studio, and she’s big fan of Canva, and is in love with Pinterest. The podcast is based on her article 10 Reasons You’re Missing the Boat with Pinterest.


Costly Pinterest Mistake # 1: Too Much About Your Business

Making your Pinterest page all about your business. While this might seem like a good idea, it’s important to be able to have a Pinterest page that shares other pinners content. By sharing content that’s a resource to your audience, you’re able to gain more followers and become a valuable resource to your audience.


Costly Pinterest Mistake # 2: Your Business is Getting TOO Personal

Don’t get TOO personal. When you’re a business it’s important to remember that you are a business. You want to ensure you’re not posting pins that may offend your audience, or may confuse about how certain pins are related to the business.

If you are representing a business, and you want to pin more personal topics like recipes and home ideas (and these are not your business) then start a personal account for yourself and go nuts.

Alisa states that if you are a solopreneur, then it’s okay to mix who you are with what your business is about as this can help show off more of your personality.


Costly Pinterest Mistake # 3: Not Taking Care of Basic Housekeeping

It’s important to take care of the basics when it comes to your Pinterest marketing. This means ensuring that you’ve

  • Verifiying your Pinterest account
  • Adding your Twitter account
  • Optimizing your Pin descriptions

Costly Pinterest Mistake #4: Overlooking What’s Needed for Your Business Account

Alisa also talks about overlooking the obvious when it comes to Pinterest marketing. This means that you need to verify your account and switching it over to a business account so you’ll have access to the New Pinterest analytics.

This also means taking the time to fill out your Pinterest profile, and to fill in your board descriptions.

The new analytics from Pinterest provides wonderful data about how your Pinterest profile is doing, what the gender breakdown of your users are, and the top performing pins that are generating traffic to your site.

Also ensure that you fill out your Pinterest profile fully. People want to know who you are.


Costly Pinterest Mistake # 5: Why Won’t You Let me Pin From Your Website?

This is when businesses don’t invite great pinning. A business needs to make it as easy as possible for people to pin from their website, this means having a pin it button on your website, and to ensure that your business also has a pinnable image.


Costly Pinterest Mistake # 6: Ignoring Pinterest for Lead Generation

A big mistake that businesses make is to assume that Pinterest is not good for lead generation. She shares with us how Pinterest became the number one lead generator for her client by doing the following:

  • Used a variety of images as pins to lure leads to a landing page
  • Posting the pins on a variety of relevant boards and different times
  • Using group boards to help raise the exposure of the pins
  • Created different pins that focused on a different topics (eg. If there was a book about 7 smoothie recipes, she would create a different pin for each recipe.

Costly Pinterest Mistake #7: Using Boring Alt Text for Your Images

This mistake can easily be overlooked if you’re not careful and that’s not having a pinnable description in the alt text.

This is because for most pin it buttons, the alt text is used as the default description in the pin. Alisa suggests that you add the following for your alt descriptions

  • A great pinnable description that will make people either share, or click on the pin
  • Your Pinterst username such as @scalablesocial (this is what comes after www.pinterest.com/username, and the username is case sensitive).
  • Including your website, or a specific url you want to redirect people to.
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Written by Vincent NG

I’m a social media marketer, particularly for Pinterest, It all started back in 2010 when Pinterest was in beta. It was the fastest independent website to get 10 million unique visitors in the U.S. This really struck a chord with me, and it was then that I knew that Pinterest was going to be a powerhouse in the world of digital and social media marketing.