Getting more repins is a vital part of your Pinterest marketing strategy, as this can ensure that people are visiting your website weeks after you’ve initially pinned your content.  

According to one Pinterest study, 30% of click-throughs for a pin happen after the second day it’s posted. In the world of social media, that’s an incredibly long life span for click-throughs. Now imagine other people are repinning your content and their content also gets 30% click-throughs after day two, then the number of click-throughs multiplies indefinitely. This is why it’s vital to get as many repins as you can from the start.  

In this blog post, I’m going to show you 6 ways to increase the number of repins on your Pinterest account.

1) Design Your Pinterest Pins for Smartphones

There are some great tools out there that can help you design pins for Pinterest, but one of the key points you need to keep in mind is to design your pins for smartphone viewing.  According to Pinterest , 75% of daily Pinterest usage comes from mobile and tablets.[socialpug_tweet tweet=”75% of daily #Pinterest usage comes from mobile #SMM” display_tweet=”75% of daily Pinterest usage comes from mobile and tablets.”]

For the clients I have worked with, I have found that approximately 50% of repins from their website come from iPhone and Android smartphones. People love to repin on their smartphones.

You can find out where the majority of your pins are coming from which device by going into your Pinterest analytics and choosing repins and then the device:

So be sure that you are designing your pins to be eye-catching on a smartphone device.

The most common mistakes I see is a text overlay that’s too small to see on a mobile device. The right-hand side of the image below is a great example of a readable text overlay from travel blog, Bacon is Magic. As you can see, the fonts are nice and visible.

On the left is a horizontal pin with a font that is visible but it requires extra effort to clearly see what the text is.

2) Repin Your Old Content Again and Again

Did you have a pin that generated a lot of repins in the past? When was the last time that you repinned that same pin?

If you have a pin that receives a lot of repins and a lot of click-throughs, then you need to repin that pin again onto the same board, or onto a different (but relevant) board.

By doing this, new followers of your board, and old followers who didn’t see the pin from last time, have the potential to see the pin. Think of it like a retweet.

One of my clients has a pin that has received over 110,000 repins to date. I will repin that same pin once a month onto the same board, or to another relevant board, and inevitably it will receive between 40-60 additional repins each time it’s pinned.  

3) Encourage Your E-mail List to Repin Your Content

If you’re looking to get more repins, then consider sharing your pins with your e-mail list and asking them to repin. This strategy is not effective if you have a small e-mail list. When my e-mail list was 1000 people, not too many people repinned my pin that was within my e-mail.

However, Sephora implemented a pin it button into their mail campaign and they were able to generate 14,000 additional repins, which resulted in 60% growth in traffic from Pinterest.

4) Have Pinterest-Friendly Images Ready to Go On Your Site

There are many sites that have beautiful horizontal images but don’t have a Pinterest-friendly image. A pinner might pin that horizontal image, but the sharing stops there because the image is not eye-catching enough on Pinterest.

You want to ensure that you have Pinterest-friendly images on your site. There are ways to have a horizontal picture on your blog, but still host a Pinterest-friendly image, such as using the Social Warfare Plugin, which allows you to have a pinnable image pop up when someone clicks on the Pinterest button (in fact, you can try it on this blog post!). 

Here’s an example from Rebekah Radice’s blog post:

You don’t need a plugin to do this. You can actually do this with some coding. Pinterest’s provides you this information in one of their blog posts.

Remember, Pinterest-friendly images are:

• Long vertical images usually at a ratio of 3:2 or 4:3 (height:width)
• Images that are clean and crisp to view
• Text is clearly visible on a smartphone

Want to learn more about what makes a great pin? Click here to download Tailwind’s free guide.

5) Join a Pinterest Group Board

There’s been some debate about the effectiveness of group boards and whether they work or not. I can say, in my personal experience, that group boards have been extremely helpful in getting more repins and more traffic.

In the past, group boards were littered with spam, but Pinterest has done a good job of cutting out spammers from their system, making Pinterest a more pleasant place for group boards.

A great tool to help you find the right group board is PinGroupie.com, where you can sort groups based on keywords, number of repins and how many followers the group board has.  

Look for group boards where you’re able to contact the moderator directly, or where there are instructions to contact the moderator. Usually, these are easiest Pinterest group boards to join.

6) Pin at the Right Time

If you’re looking to get more repins, then pinning at the right time is extremely crucial, even with Pinterest’s smart feed algorithim.  And this requires a bit of work if you want to get more repins.

Tailwind, will tell you how the pins you pinned are performing on Pinterest based on each individual board. After pinning at least a dozen pins to a board, I start to look at the day and time the best performing pins were pinned.

Using this data from those individual boards, I will schedule pins to go out at those times.  

One of the group boards I participate in has over 130,000 followers. I thought that if I pinned to this food related board that it would gain a lot of repins over the weekend. However, the opposite happened. The pins actually did quite poorly compared to ones that went out on weekdays.

What I did notice is that by pinning on weekdays at 5 pm Pacific Standard Time, I was able to garner, on average, more repins than on the weekends.

Interestingly, another board I’ve joined based on appetizers performs best for total repins on Saturdays, Sundays and Thursdays.

I’ll review the process every 4 months to ensure that those days and times still work to get the most repins.

Last Words

Getting more repins can help spread your content on Pinterest and bring in new visitors to your site.  Another side benefits of getting more repins is that it can help your pins rank higher in Pinterest search results and the chances of a pin going viral increases with every repin.

This is why it’s important to have a repinning strategy for Pinterest.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you get more repins. Drop a line in the comments and share your questions or thoughts.  Happy pinning!  

Pin this post!

The world of e-commerce has been ever-changing since the dawn of the internet, and right now we’re stepping into uncharted territory. Purchasing is no longer limited to e-commerce sites. You can now purchase products directly from social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. However, the real heavy hitter in this new age of e-commerce is Pinterest’s Buyable Pins, launched in June 2015. 

Three months after launch, Michael Yamartino, Pinterest’s head of commerce, told Marketing Land about Buyable Pins in a telephone interview, “It’s not just people who were already going to buy this or who were already frequent shoppers at a store. So we are really helping businesses reach new customers. In a lot of cases, the data is showing that about 90 percent or more of the buyers are brand-new customers to the merchant.”

With 47.1 million users in the U.S. on Pinterest, this is not an audience to ignore.    

What are Buyable Pins?

Buyable Pins are pins that allow users to purchase a product within the Pinterest platform. All they have to do is tap the blue buy it button at the top of the right hand corner and fill in their credit card information, and the product is purchased like any other e-commerce site.

People who wish to buy products using Buyable pins can pay using Apple Pay or a credit card.

How Do Businesses Get Buyable Pins?

Buyable pins are currently not available for every e-commerce platform. The two major e-commerce platforms Buyable Pins are available on are DemandWare and Shopify. Other retail businesses’ sites such as Nordstrom and Macy’s Inc., also have Buyable Pins.

Shopify outlines a step by step process on how to get Buyable Pins, and potential reasons why Shopify owners may get rejected for Buyable Pins.

If you are using DemandWare, it’s best to contact your customer success representative about how to get started with Buyable Pins.

If you don’t use any of those e-commerce platforms, then you can still apply to be on the waiting list for Buyable Pins.

Which Businesses Can Get Buyable Pins?

Only businesses within the U.S. that are selling physical goods in US dollars have access to Buyable Pins.  

Who Can Purchase Products?

People in the U.S. have the right to purchase products through Buyable Pins. Once they have purchased a product and entered their credit card information, they don’t need to add it again the next time.

Are Buyable Pins Available on All Devices?

Buyable Pins are available on the Pinterest app for the iPhone and iPad, but Pinterest is working on bringing them to Android and to the desktop version of Pinterest.  

How Much Does it Cost For Businesses to Use Buyable Pins?

The good news is that Pinterest is not taking any commissions nor does it charge a service fee for businesses that have Buyable Pins.

What if You Can’t Get Buyable Pins?

If you can’t get buyable pins then the next best thing to do is get rich pins for products.

Rich pins for products list what the product is, the price of the product, as well as whether a product is in stock.

Rich pins for products are technically available to anyone in the world as long as you follow the proper coding needed and get your rich pins validated.

Rich pins do not allow purchases to happen within the Pinterest app or website. Instead users must click on the rich pin and visit the e-commerce site in order to buy the product.

If you have rich pins enabled on your site and you lower the price by at least 10%, the pinners who saved that pin will be alerted of the price drop through both a Pinterest notification and an email – depending on their settings. 

[socialpug_tweet tweet=”Use #Pinterest’s price drop alert to drive sales on popular products.” display_tweet=”If you notice that there’s particular product that gets pinned a lot from your site, then dropping the price may be a great tactic to increase sales of that product temporarily.”]

Pinterest is the only social platform I know that does e-mail marketing on behalf of businesses.

Upload Your Product Photos

The great thing about Pinterest is that pins that you upload can be linked back to any URL.

If you have a lot of photos of the same product that you can’t use on your website, you can upload them onto Pinterest and have all those photos linked back to your specific product URL.

One of my pet peeves is that Pinterest only allows you to upload one pin at a time, which can be excruciatingly time consuming if you have 40 different product pins you’re trying to upload.

If you are looking to upload a large number of pins at once, and then stagger them on different boards and times, I would suggest using Tailwind to save you a lot of time.

Make sure you don’t schedule all you product pins at the same time as this can annoy your loyal followers and they may unfollow you.

The great news is that once your site qualifies for rich pins for products, any pin that you upload and link to one of your product URL’s will also be a rich product pin.

Do you have any tips for promoting your products on Pinterest? Drop us a line in the comments and share your tip with others.

Looking to boost your business’s visibility on Pinterest? Want to know the secrets of truly effective Pinterest marketing and the tactics the pros use to realize exceptional results? Here at Tailwind, we live and breathe Pinterest. We’ve seen first hand how brands can use Pinterest to rapidly grow their sales, generate high-quality leads and connect with one of the most vibrant and active communities on the web.

Since Pinterest is all about sharing ideas and inspiration, we’ve put together a list of the 11 most effective Pinterest marketing hacks out there, based on the Pinterest Hacks webinar series we did with PostPlanner. Let’s take a look.

1. Focus on your Pinterest SEO

Pinterest is more than just a visually-focused social media platform. It’s also an incredibly powerful search and discovery engine, making Pinterest SEO a necessity. Well organized, SEO-friendly profiles, Pins and Boards are vital for getting your content get discovered, shared and repinned.

The Hack: Use searchable, relevant keywords in your pin text, board names and board descriptions. Discover word that work for your company by using Tailwind’s Domain Pin World Cloud showing the keywords users use the most when pinning your content.

2. Reuse viral content from other platforms

Sharing proven content across your social media accounts is a no-brainer. Not only does the smart feed favor posts that have performed well on other networks, but it’s also a safe bet that if your audience enjoyed the post on Facebook, the Pinterest users will enjoy it, too. But how exactly do you turn a highly popular tweet or Facebook post into Pinterest gold? What if there’s nothing visual to work with?

The Hack: Turn your popular tweets and posts into Pinterest images. This is often just a matter of finding a good stock image and using an image editor to add in some text. We love using Unsplash and Pexels for free stock photos and crafting Pinterest-perfect images using Canva, Share As Image or PicMonkey.

Free Stock Photos from Unsplash

3. Embed your Boards on your blog or website

Because most of your Pinterest content is locked out to people who aren’t logged in, Pinterest can seem like something of a walled garden. If a non-Pinterest user lands on your Pinterest account, they’ll only be able to view a couple of Pins before being asked to login to create an account. Thankfully, Pinterest provides some great options for sharing your Pins.

The Hack: If you have a website or blog, simply embed your Boards on a static page or blog post. While you’re at it, make sure to add a “Pin It” button to your site’s social media sharing options.

4. Speak to the dream

More than any other social network, people use to Pinterest to be inspired. It’s where people go to plan their future, not comment about what they are currently doing. From cooking tips and wedding ideas to powerful quotes and DIY art tips, Pinterest users strongly connect with emotionally resonant and imaginative content. In fact, 74% of pinners view Pinterest as a tool to help them plan for the future, and 67% of pinners will experience a major life event within 6 months according to a study by Millward Brown Digital and Pinterest.

The Hack: Even if your business doesn’t lend itself to visual storytelling, there’s always an emotion or idea you can evoke with the right image. If you’re an accounting firm, a photo of a tax form probably isn’t going to generate much excitement. But a picture of a stunning vacation setting tagged with “tax return” in the description will.

[socialpug_tweet tweet=”Even if your business isn’t visual, there’s always an idea you can evoke with the right image” display_tweet=”Even if your business doesn’t lend itself to visual storytelling, there’s always an emotion or idea you can evoke with the right image.”]

5. Give ’em what they want

Content on Pinterest has an exceptionally long shelf life. Even a pin posted months ago can easily be discovered by an influencer, or by Pinterest’s own algorithms, and go viral. By creating evergreen content that you know your audience will love, you’re greatly increase the odds that you’ll see higher engagement.

The Hack: Track the Pins that are already performing well, and then create similar content. Create follow-up posts, and repin across your Boards to amplify the trend. Pinterest’s analytics suite offers a few tools to help identify high-performing Pins, but to get a full range of data you’ll probably need to use a third-party service. As it happens, advanced tracking pin-performance data is a key piece of what we do here at Tailwind.

6. Steal from the competition

There’s no better way to grow your Pinterest following than by building strong relationships with people who are already looking for your product or service. And there’s no better way to do that than to win over your competition’s biggest fans.

The Hack: Visit your competitor’s Pinterest page, and check out their most active fans. This is easy to do. Just visit pinterest.com/source/[yourcompetitorsdomain.com] and start looking around. In the example below, we’ve entered “pinterest.com/source/target.com” to find who’s recently pinned from Target. From there, it’s just a matter of connecting with those power-pinners and letting them know how awesome you are!

7. Connect with your influencers

Do you know the names of your biggest Pinterest fans? These are people who regularly pin content from your site, and help to drive your Pinterest traffic. By connecting with these pinners directly, you can turn them from mere fans into true brand advocates.

The Hack: Unlock your Pinterest analytics by verifying your site, and use those reports to identify the Boards with the highest engagement. From there, it’s easy to find and connect with great influencers for your market. You can also connect with these pinners by using Pinterest’s guided search, keeping an eye out for popular Boards related to your business.

Alternatively, you can also find pinners based on top performing pins in the Tailwind dashboard. If a pin from your site has hundreds, or even thousands, of repins, there’s a good chance someone influential pinned it. Click through on the pin to see who pinned it:

8. Cross-promote your content to expand your reach

The great thing about content created specifically for Pinterest is that it’s easy to reuse. Image-based content tends to perform well on almost every social media platform, making your already great Pins perfect for sharing on Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

The Hack: Connect your accounts. Pin content from your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram accounts. When you share content on those platforms, don’t forget to share your Pins. This kind of cross-promotion can have a significant impact across all of your social networks. Need an easy way to pin from Instagram? Just sync your Instagram account with your Tailwind dashboard.

Cross promote your Instagram account on Pinterest using Tailwind

9. Run a contest

If there’s one thing that is guaranteed to generate instant interest in a product or brand, it’s a contest. Unlike more forgiving platforms like Twitter or Instagram, however, Pinterest has strict rules about what it will and won’t allow. A “Pin to win” style contest can all too easily result in your account being frozen (the dreaded “Pinterest jail“).

The Hack: Launch a creativity-driven contest with a trusted Pinterest partner. Not only do these kinds of contests remain well within Pinterest’s brand guidelines, but they also tend to perform well. If there’s one thing most pinners have in common, it’s creativity.

10. Pin regularly, and around the clock

What’s the single biggest secret to seeing steady success in your Pinterest marketing efforts? Creating a pinning schedule. Not only does this allow you to create a steady stream of content for your followers, but by pinning around the clock you can reach a truly global community.

The Hack: Get a pin-scheduling app. Pinterest doesn’t have pin scheduling natively, making it difficult to create a truly automated schedule. Using Tailwind, for instance, allows you create fully optimized pinning calendars and easily schedule repins of your content to multiple Boards. You can even track the results using our built-in analytics tools.

However, even if you do not use Tailwind for pin scheduling, make sure you’re using a Pinterest Marketing Developer partner and not a tool that schedules using your password. Giving away your password puts your Pinterest account and your bank account in danger with Buyable Pins on the market now.

11. Include your Pins in a newsletter

If you already have a regular email newsletter, you also have a fantastic tool for growing your Pinterest traffic. Those users who are opening, reading, and clicking on your newsletters are already interested in what you have to say, so why not show them what you’re doing on Pinterest? Highlight your popular Pins or a seasonally appropriate board in your next email.

The Hack: You want to make it as simple as possible for your newsletter readers to share your content, right? It’s simple to create an “add pin” pop-up in your email to enable simple sharing. All you need to do is go to the image you would like to promote on your website, and click the “pin it” button or your browser extension:

Once you’ve clicked to create a pin, the pop-up to create a pin will appear. From there, all you need to do is grab the URL in that pop-up window:

Use that link either on an image in your email newsletter or in a text link. When someone clicks on it, the window will open enabling them to pin the image with one click. Seriously – just click here to try it!

By putting these tricks and tips to use in your Pinterest marketing efforts, you’ll quickly see very real results. What other advice do you have for growing your Pinterest marketing presence? Let us know in the comments!

[sc name=”pinterest boilerplate”]

These 5 companies prove that it is possible to create great Pinterest B2B accounts.

At first glance, it’s obvious that Pinterest is a perfect platform for B2C companies to market their products. It’s still overwhelmingly product-image oriented, overwhelmingly female (though the percentage of men on Pinterest continues to grow)  and overwhelmingly an escapist network.  However, with the rising popularity of infographics, the Pinterest tech category and Pinterest as a marketing platform overall, many companies are quickly learning what it takes to have great Pinterest B2B accounts.

HootSuite

One of the ingenious ways HootSuite harnesses the power of Pinterest is through user generated boards.  So far they’ve created interactive community boards for over 10 countries, a board where you can create and pin your own owl-inspired designs, a “Hoot Club” board for members to pin whatever their heart desires, as well as many others. By allowing users to take the reins, HootSuite provides them with a unique Pinterest experience.

Organik SEO

Green-friendly marketing company, Organik SEO, uses their Pinterest page to showcase what’s important to their company. While they pin appealing graphic marketing content for the more “business-y” Pinterest user, they also have boards dedicated to “going green” – a popular topic within the Pinterest community. The mix of consumer and B2B content helps keep their page fresh and their followers happy.

GE

Since their creation in 1892, General Electric has learned that to maintain their status as one of the top B2B companies in the world, they must learn to adopt new media. GE does a great job of making their more technical offerings, such as their innovations in health care technologies, tangible to the average user through inspirational boards and pins.

Constant Contact

As one of the top names in B2B email marketing, Constant Contact does an excellent job marketing themselves on Pinterest. While much of their content is marketing related, they keep their Pinterest relevant by creating boards for major events – such as the 2012 Summer Olympics. Pinterest‘s inherently visual interface has also helped Constant Contact show off new email template designs to both current and potential customers.

HubSpot

HubSpot‘s Pinterest page has everything the B2B and B2C community desires in a Pinterest account. They’ve created boards dedicated to hilariously bad stock photos, memes, infographics and even the Internet’s favorite animal – kittens.  On top of that, HubSpot‘s content related to marketing is spot on.  They offer free eBooks, promote useful webinars and generally pin about all things marketing. Having a combination of informational and light hearted content helps keep their users engaged.

 Creating Pinterest B2B Greatness

Because no one Pinterest strategy is right for every brand, it’s important to keep track of what content is resonating with your audience. Just because your target audience is businesses on Pinterest, that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to see pins only related to their B2B interests. However, just because it’s Pinterest it doesn’t necessarily mean they only want to see adorable animal photos.  By tracking what resonates with users through Tailwind‘s Pinterest Analytics and maintaining a healthy mix of work and fun, you too can reach Pinterest B2B greatness.

This post was originally featured on the Tailwind blog as 5 Great Pinterest B2B Accounts.

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Healthy recipes, cleaning tips, cute clothes and even cuter cats are just a few of the more feminine concepts that come to mind when Pinterest is mentioned.  But it seems like very few brands know that there’s a veritable treasure trove for marketing to men on Pinterest. With typically masculine brands like the NHL and the US Army using the platform, it’s easy to see that Pinterest can be pretty manly too, dude.

Demographic Shift

At the beginning of 2012, women made up 80% of the audience on Pinterest. A little over a year later, (updated) Mediabistro is reporting that in April 2013 the male audience reached 30% on Pinterest. While women may still outnumber men on Pinterest, it’s a sign that guys are feeling more comfortable with the platform- that, and they might just want to see what their wives and girlfriends are pinning to their “For the Boyfriend” boards.

The popularity of “For the Boyfriend” boards on Pinterest can be a great marketing resource for “manly” brands.

Man-Brands on Pinterest

NHL

It may be surprising to some that one of the bigger brands using Pinterest, with over 1.3 million followers, is the National Hockey League. The NHL does a great job engaging fans on Pinterest with monthly hashtags (March is #HockeyLuck month, by the way) that provide followers the chance to have their photo pinned each month. With the fanaticism surrounding most sports teams, Pinterest is a great – and manly! – way for teams to interact with fans.

Men’s Health Magazine

 Men’s Health is another “manly” brand that is doing amazingly well on Pinterest. Their 17,000 followers get access to content on health tips, sexy ladies, great new men’s fashion and much more. They pin often and keep a good mix of content to keep the page from becoming stale.

Karmaloop

Although Karmaloop sells both men and women’s clothing, they saw an increase in their male following from their PinMail by PinLeague campaign in Q4 of 2012. By emailing only men’s content to men, it helped Karmaloop build their male audience on Pinterest. More information on Karmaloop’s success with PinMail can be found here.

The United States Army

One of the most traditionally “manly” organizations in American, The United States Army, is having great success with Pinterest as well.  With powerful pictures of war and of tearful home comings, the Army is engaging both the masculine and feminine sides of Pinterest.

While there are various “Pinterest for Men” sites popping up (such as the wonderfully titled Manteresting), there’s really no substitute for the original Pinterest. For brands marketing to men or women, adorable cats or majestic dogs, Pinterest can help you get your message to the right audience.

This post was orginally featured on the Tailwind blog as Hey Dude! You Can Market to Men on Pinterest, Too.

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