Earlier this month, I was invited to attend the first ever Pinterest Partners Event in New York City. The founders of Pinterest briefed us on some excited new opportunities for businesses and invited several major brands to present case studies on successful campaigns they’ve run using Pinterest. Although this event was for enterprise level companies such as Target, Sephora, Nordstrom and Sony Electronics, the lessons learned from their case studies can benefit small business owners and authors as well.
Verified Business Accounts for Pinterest
Verified accounts are accounts that have been set up as business accounts by going to the Pinterest for Business Pages and followed the directions to set up an account. You’ll need to verify your account by adding a bi of meta data or HTML code to your website. Once verified, you’ll see a little check mark next to your name on your Pinterest home page. This verification allows you to access two other tools on Pinterest; analytic tools and Rich Pins.
Analytic Tools
Pinterest now offers business accounts, rather than personal accounts. Those business accounts have a set of analytic tools to give account owners information such as most pinned, most reprinned, estimated reach, most recent activity. This information also includes the boards on which your items are pinned. From here, you can like, follow or repin as you interact with real Pinterest users who’ve already demonstrated an attraction to your product.
Rich Pins
Rich Pins were the hot new announcement of the event. Once you have a verified account, you’re eligible to turn on Rich Pins, which will be drop down overlays giving your pin viewer more information about your product such as ingredients or product specs. This will be an added layer of promotion available only to business accounts.
If you sell anything and have a website, you need to have a Pinterest for Business Account. This is the fastest growing social network in history, created and run by a very smart group of people who are proactively morphing the platform into a more effective sales tool for the very people who were already using it effectively – fashion, food, travel and design. And, I’d add there are enormous opportunities here for authors and publishers.
Want to see for yourself exactly how readers are already promoting books to one another. Think of your favorite author. Google them to find their website. Now enter this url into your browser bar: http://Pinterest.com/source/ (add your favorite author’s URL here). Pinterest will show you every person on Pinterest who has pinned a book from the author’s website to Pinterest. You’ll see what boards they’ve created and who has repinned them. This is a massive word of mouth network for authors. Here’s a real life example: http://Pinterest.com/source/MaryHigginsClark.com.
How could you use this; to find your fans and follow them, to repin from their boards to a board called “Favorite fans,” to monitor which posts from your website are most popular, to find other readers and reviewers, and more.
I’d love to hear how you’re using Pinterest in your business.
Oh Cindy! I’ll admit, I am so behind on Pinterest! While I see the benefits, I’m not using yet for a couple reasons — First, I can see how I could get sucked in and lose hours and hours of time just perusing all the cool stuff on there! Second, I really don’t want to have to manage ANOTHER platform! Hmmm … maybe the solution is to hire an expert?