How to use

for your business

Pinterest is a fast growing social network in South Africa with 150K

users.

“Based on Alexa.com traffic data, Pinterest is the 19th most popular website in South Africa. South Africa has the 12th most Pinterest users globally and is responsible for 1.6% of all Pinterest page views worldwide.”

In January alone 328 000 South Africans visited the social platform.

Currently 80% of Pinterest users in South Africa are female, ages 25-34

and predominantly fall into the middle - to upper-income bracket.

A few facts

The most followed person on SA Pinterest has more followers than the

most followed South African on Twitter – Aimee Sawyer.

Primary interests of the top accounts are design, travel, cooking, arts

and crafts, weddings and personal development.

Pick ‘n Pay is the top brand on Pinterest.

A few facts

It is easy, current and free!

It does not require a specialized management team like Facebook and

Twitter and it is as simple as clicking or uploading a picture.

When it works really well is when the business is product based or

targeting a specific industry; particularly fashion, food and furniture to

name a few.

Nothing sells quite as well as an image. What is it that they say, “A

picture is worth a thousand words”?

Why Pinterest?

to help you maximise your Pinterest

account and make it become more

relevant for your business

Now for some tips and tricks

Step 1: Set up a Pinterest Business account

Think about setting up a Pinterest page for your brand. It is a great way

to show that you are active online and help to spread that WOM for

your brand. It will help you to understand what your audience likes and

doesn’t from what they are pinning and what they are checking out.

It especially works if you are wanting to sell products online and via

Pinterest. Just like other popular social sites, having a Pinterest page for

your business will make you appear far more professional and give your

brand credibility. Engagement on social media is key and just like other

platforms, this will either set you back or bring your forward depending

on how interactive you are with your followers.

Take this first step

and get

started: http://pintere

st.com/

Alternatively if you are

thinking of opening up

your own Pinterest store to

sell your products, take a

look at Shopinterest– you’ll

be able to set up shop in a

matter of minutes.

Step 2: Use tools to help

Like all digital platforms, the techno wizzes of the world are already

hard at work creating tools and devices to aid us in maximising our

Pinterest experience.

This can be used for a more complete Pinterest dashboard (including analytics

and pin scheduling). Like all online sites, analytics play a vital role in

determining what is and isn’t working for your brand. You can track things like

how many people have been pinning from your website and how many people

have viewed your pins. This can also help you to redirect your pins if they are

not getting the correct engagement. You can then redirect your thinking to suit

your target market. Pinterest does offer its own analytics, but they aren’t always

as credible.

- Piqora

This is great if you want your boards to be more fun and exciting

- Pinstamatic

This is ideal if you want to calculate your Pinterest influence.

- Pinpuff

This can be used to keep up to date with the most popular pins and

boards.

- Repinly

Step 3: Make your website pinnable

This is important if your website has a lot of traffic and you want people

to start pinning directly off your site. This is a really effective way of

spreading the word about your brand and if anything will help to

increase overall brand recognition. In order to do this you need to

ensure that your website/ blog are as visual as possible. This means

regularly sourcing the right images for your business. This can be

challenging in itself, but luckily some of those techno wizzes have

helped us out.

Here are a few relevant free sites that you can source images from (don’t forget to give

your images credit):

Flickr

Photo Pin

For paid royalty-free stock images, check out:

iStock

Fotolia

Shutterstock

Step 4: Get the ‘goodies’

Like all social media, the addiction will set in and you will be trying to

find ways to improve your site. You can visit Pinterest Goodies to help

you out. Pin It Bookmarklet is a very handy tool that will enable you to

pin any image or video to the web. Pin It Button can be used for your

own website – this will allow readers to easily pin anything they like

from your website. Also make sure you get Board Widgets so that people

will be able to start following your boards directly from your website.

Step 5: Pin to win!

We all know that there is nothing to engage with a consumer better than

a competition. Contests are great promotional tools for your brand/

business and Pinterest offers the perfect platform for running a contest.

This is a great way to get engagement quickly if you are just starting out

and want to get followers.

There are many apps that you can use to help you run a contest on

Pinterest and here are a few of them:

Woobox Votigo

Example of a

Pinterest contest

Thank You