The first thing about Pinterest is that it is not just a social media platform. It’s actually much more powerful than that because it works exactly like a search engine. Pinterest is a very visual platform where people go in, type in a few keywords about what are they looking for, and the results show up as images. Each of these images has a link linked to it.
Meaning that if someone sees a picture they like, they can click on it and they can be taken directly to your online store where they can purchase or learn more about your products.
But the best part is that your content is actually there to stay. Meaning that not only can people use Pinterest as a tool to search products that they’d like to purchase, but it also doesn’t matter whether you uploaded a pin six months ago, two years ago or yesterday because unlike on Instagram or Facebook, even if your pin was uploaded six months ago it might still be generating traffic to your store today.
As long as people keep on pinning it to their own boards you’ll get traffic from it and you can still generate sales and revenue from that one pin that you posted to your Pinterest account months or even years ago. And that my friend, is very powerful.
Secondly, Pinterest drives tons of traffic. Shopify and Pinterest partnered to look at some actual numbers and their findings were positively surprising. They found that Pinterest was a major driver of online traffic. It’s actually the number two overall source of all social media traffic to Shopify stores.
Two million people pin product pins every single day!
And it gets even better because Pinterest is not only able to drive a lot of traffic to your online store, but it is also convert your shop visitors into customers really well.
Meaning that they go into Pinterest with the actual intention to buy something.
Pinterest also wants to help business accounts sell more products and they’ve done that with a handy feature called Rich Pins. A Rich Pin looks like a regular pin but you can only use them if you have a business account on Pinterest, which is completely free. It allows you to put more information about your product and your brand in the pin including stock and prices. Meaning that your Pinterest users can get all the information they need directly on Pinterest board and then decide to click your direct link, visit your shop, and purchase your product! It makes it quicker and easier for a Pinterest user to translate into a sale than it would be on ANY other social platform.
Finally, Pinterest isn’t time-consuming…if you don’t want it to be!
Pinterest doesn’t work the same way as regular social platforms because it is a search engine.
You can automate Pinterest so that you work no more than half an hour a week on it as long as you take some time the first time to set everything up and make sure everything is automated properly. After that, it really isn’t a very time-consuming task to use Pinterest to get more traffic and more sales to your online shop. And how important it saving time, right?!
You can use tools such as Tailwind to automate your pinning, put your pins on loop, create campaigns and post your pins to group boards. All of this is au-to-ma-tic and would take less than 30 minutes a week. This is not like one of those things where experts say “automate your Facebook marketing” and you still end up having to create all the content every week and thinking about new post every day… Pinterest doesn’t work the same way! You can fully automate it and scale your strategies to a degree that you wouldn’t be able to have on something like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
Since Pinterest isn’t a social platform but more of a search engine, you don’t actually need to have a lot of followers for your content to be seen.
This is great when you’re just getting started and very different from how you would approach Facebook or Twitter marketing because on Pinterest people actually find your product through search and keywords and they don’t have to actually follow you and your Pinterest account to see your pins, interact with them, repin them, and click on your links. So it’s a great tool if you’re just getting started.
You can also use group boards, which is a great way to leverage the followers of other brands and other influencers to show your pin to a broader audience when you don’t have a big following yet.
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These are great tips. Thanks so much, Deb!
Most welcome Wendy!
Very informative. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you Kathy, I am glad you liked it!