How To Use Tailwind To Explode Your Pinterest Account [Guest Post]

In this guest post, Austin Iuliano of dscience.co outlines his favorite strategies for using Tailwind to reach explosive growth on Pinterest. Keep reading to learn his secrets to success!

How To Use Tailwind To Explode Your Pinterest Account

For those who don’t know, Tailwind is the best Pinterest analytics and scheduling tool on the market. Their affordable Plus plan (starting at $9.99 a month for an annual account) lets you schedule an unlimited number of pins every month. What a time saver! Scheduling pins will only take a couple of hours, and then you are done for the month.

How to use Tailwind to explode your Pinterest account strategy.

Before we can use Tailwind to it’s fullest, we need to lay out a solid Pinterest strategy. This is the stuff that has been shared time and again. It still holds true.

#1 Pin high-quality content

#2 Pin on a regular basis

#3 Create boards with amazing keyword-rich descriptions

#4 Share your Pinterest account on other social medias

#5 Connect with other Pinterest users

#6 Follow and engage other users

#7 Create Pin-worthy content

#8 Enable rich pins

Yep, you need to do all of the above. But, to increase your Pinterest game, you must do a few more things that I’ll explain below. If you need a quick checklist to run through. Check out this handy dandy article.

Understanding Pinterest Algorithms

Pinterest is a massive business that is building a visual search engine to rival Google. My prediction is that within the next 18-24 months, Pinterest will take a decent chunk out of Google’s visual search and by proxy—their revenue. With 100 million users, Pinterest isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Think about it this way: Pinterest (as a company) wants its users to spend more time on Pinterest: searching, pinning, and sharing. The more time they spend on Pinterest, the more money Pinterest makes through advertising and brand awareness. Their goal is to to make the best experience for the user. That means if you also think “How will the user have the best experience?” you’ll be rewarded.

Pinterest uses their Smart Feed algorithms to help rank pins and provide you with the best experience possible.

There are three main things Pinterest looks at that we can work on improving. They include your account as a whole, the individual boards, and the pin’s themselves. Using the Smart Feed, Pinterest views your account and determines how to show your content. Depending on these factors, Pinterest will show your content to more (or fewer) people. Pinterest also ranks each pin individually. Great or “Pinworthy” content is promoted while crappy content is ignored at best, punished at worst.

How to Increase Your Virality on Pinterest

To start, do some spring cleaning on each of your pins, your boards, and your profile. See if you can move your boards around, update the cover photos, or improve on your descriptions.

Second, sign up for Tailwind, and use their analytics tools. Tailwind should be a key component on building your Pinterest account.

After you have an account, click on Profile Performance under the “Track Your Brand” page section. There are two main metrics to be looking at, virility score and engagement score. They look like this:

Profile Performance by tailwind

Remember how I said Pinterest looks at your account as a whole? Well these two numbers are a great representation of your overall Pinterest account’s health. You will want to boost these two numbers as high as possible.

Remember how I said Pinterest looks at a board’s performance? Well Tailwind is awesome and they rank each board’s performance for you.

Under the Board Insights section, you can see what boards have the highest level of engagement and virality. These are the boards that are most likely to generate you loads of traffic. Your virality score is based on how many repins per pin are on that board, calculated by the boards (total repins) ÷ (total pins).

If a single board had hundreds of thousands of repins and fewer pins, the board is probably a highly sought after one (hint-hint wink-wink, Pinterest thinks this way too).

A great way to boost a boards ranking is to promote the high performing pins on that board so it receives even more traction.

Pinterest most Viral Boards

Next, go to the Pin Inspector tab under “Optimize Content”.

This awesome section will show you the pins that are performing the best.

In the Pin Inspector report, Tailwind can organize your pins based on pins with the most engagement – either by Repins, likes or comments. These are your top pins.

Pin Inspector by tailwind

Ask yourself these questions after looking at the pin inspector.

  • Can these pins be combined together into one board?
  • Are these pins your original content?

When I saw my top Pins, I moved relevant pins from one board to combine them all into one board. This created a board with a much higher virality score.

How to Receive More Repins, Clicks, Likes, and Comments

The simple answer to more engagement: pull out your checkbook for Pinterest. I know we all love that social media can be free, but let’s be honest here. Pinterest is a business after all, and will promote you MUCH more with a small amount backing each pin.

Imagine, you have two clients: one that pays you well and another one that asks for everything for free all the time. Who would you promote and support? Simply put, most business people would give attention to the client that pays well.

Triple Your Website Traffic with Pinterest

A friend of mine recommended that I jump on Pinterest advertising. I was skeptical at first because it’s a new platform and I hadn’t heard TONS of positive testimonials.

I took the leap and tried it out. I tested a few of our pins with “Pinterest promoted pins.” I only started with $50 bucks. I figured this amount would be high enough to see results, but low enough to not break the bank.

The $50 in promoted pins bought me 122 unique clicks to my website and 40% of those clicks converted to an offer to join my email list. The clicks averaged out to cost $.47 and $.97 per lead. Not too shabby!

The awesome price per click and leads weren’t even the best part. I jumped for joy after I saw this…

I also received 97 repins THAT DIDN’T COST ME A PENNY. Yep, Pinterest didn’t charge me for the repins. They only billed me for the people who clicked on my promoted pin.

Every repin is another link back to your site that can drive traffic. This is exciting because you’ll see repins in two months that resulted in your initial advertising boost. It’s the gift that keeps on giving pinning.

My suggestion is to take all your original content and promote it for more repins, likes, and comments. This will not only send your virality scores through the stratosphere, but it will also get you a nice bump in referral traffic.

I have been doing this on one of my boards—the board with my original blog post content and the results are amazing. I am receiving an ever increasing amount of followers and traffic.

The benefit of the pinning-cycle is it has a complete snowball effect. Once the pins have some backing engagement, interest and traffic, they go even farther. And you don’t have to do any more “work.”

Now that’s my kind of platform!

In Summary…

To Use Tailwind to explode your Pinterest account you must do the following:

  • Pin content, share content, and engage.
  • Perform housekeeping on your Pinterest account.
  • Track your virality and engagement scores for your boards with Tailwindapp.
  • Advertise your board and pins to give your original content the boost it deserves.

With these simple tactics, you will give your traffic and engagement a much-needed boost!

After you are done following this advice, share your results in the comments. How much did your virality scores increase?

6 Ways to Get More Repins on Pinterest

6 Ways To Get More Repins on Pinterest

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:

Pinterest Analytics

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.

mobile pin (1)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:

Social Warfare Plugin

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.

PinGroupie

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.

Repin Count in Tailwind

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!  

6 ways to get more repins on pinterest- pin

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How to Get Buyable Pins

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. 

How To Get Buyable Pins

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.

Buyable Pins

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

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.

Uploading Pins

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

Optimize Your Account for Pinterest Growth – FREE Download

Since you’ve been using your Pinterest account for a while, you probably have a few boards that are gathering digital cobwebs. Maybe it’s your “Halloween 2013” board or that regrettable “I <3 the Jersey Shore” board – those boards that just aren’t getting the same love they used to. Well, now is the time to dust off and make sure your account is optimized for growth with our optimization checklist.

Pinterest Growth Checklist

Account Fundamentals
❑ Check that your bio is current and uses relevant keywords for your niche.
❑ Confirm that your website verifies your account (Click the gear icon on your profile, “Edit Settings”)
❑ Update your account photo to stay on brand
❑ Link your account to your other social media accounts (Click the gear icon on your profile, “Edit Settings”)
❑ Make sure boards you have in the top two rows of your profile are in line with your brand and niche

Growth Prep (Repeat for Each Board)
Click edit on each board and:
❑ Improve the board name if you can. Skip a clever name and be descriptive, use keywords instead. Make sure the name explains what the board contains to increase its likelihood of appearing in search and in front of the right audience.
❑ Improve the board description if you can. Use as much descriptive, keyword rich text as possible.
❑ Make sure the board has been assigned a category
❑ Change up the cover image so your profile stays looking fresh!

Account Health Check
❑ Which three boards have the fewest pins? Remove any that are off brand, outdated or stale – or make a note to give them some more love!
❑ Which boards have the most pins? Consider splitting them into multiple boards. For example, a recipe board could become three different boards: Appetizer Recipes, Work Week Recipes, and Desert Recipes.
❑ Are you on any shared boards? Search out shared boards in your niche, or start your own by inviting influencers in your niche to pin with you. (Remember, you should know someone before you invite them. Don’t cold call on Pinterest!)
❑ Re-arrange your boards overall position to keep your most important boards close to the top of your profile and to keep your account looking fresh.
❑ Install the Tailwind Publisher browser extension for Chrome or the official Pinterest bookmarklet, so you’re ready to pin when you’re out in the wild.

And just like that, your account is primed to attract a whole new set of fans. What are you waiting for? Get pinning!

Want more tips? Click here to download our Pinterest Growth Checklist to make sure your pinning perfect!

11 Pinterest Marketing Growth Hacks That Work For Every Business

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.

11 Pinterest Marketing Growth Hacks That Work For Every Business

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.

11 Pinterest Marketing Growth Hacks That Work For Every Business

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!

Use the Pinterest source URL hack to steal away pinners from your competition

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:

Connect with pinners driving repins on the Tailwind dashboard

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

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:

Add a pin-it pop up to your email newsletters

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:

Grab the URL from the Pinterest pop-up to create a new pin in a newsletter

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”]

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

In the world of Pinterest marketing, you are required to not only curate the best-written content for your audience but also find content that is visually stunning. Doing this is not easy, especially if you are pinning 10-15 times a day.

If you’re pinning content on a daily basis for your business or for your clients, then you definitely know good Pinterest marketing can take up more time than Twitter and Facebook.

With time being a valuable commodity, you want to be as efficient and effective as possible with your social media marketing. This is why I’m going to provide you 5 Pinterest marketing tips to help save time on pinning and curation.

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

1) Visit Your Pinterest Page at Most Twice a Day

Since the dawn of smart feed, Pinterest tries to surface pins that they believe are most relevant to you based on what you’ve pinned in the past, among other factors.

If you login to your Pinterest account multiple times a day, you will start to see the same pins over and over again, with the chances of seeing some amazing pins becoming less and less. If you happen to login two hours after you previously logged in, then you will see more relevant content from the past two hours and may find one or two great pins.

However, if you login once a day, then you will see more relevant and popular pins from the last 24 hours giving you a wider buffet of great pins you can choose from to pin or schedule for the upcoming day or week.

2) Put Relevant Pins in Tailwind’s Drafts

The brain is a complicated organ and can get easily exhausted when it has to switch back and forth between tasks that require the different parts to function.

You can imagine how exhausting it gets if you have to find the right pins, and then you have choose the right boards for those pins, and then ensure that the pins have great descriptions and a relevant hashtag or two. It can be incredibly draining, especially if you’re trying to do this for 10-15 pins each and every day.

When the brain gets exhausted it loses productivity. Instead of trying to get everything done at once, consider putting aside 40-50 pins as drafts with Tailwind.

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

That way you can put dozens of pins in draft mode at once and then worry about the fine details, such as which boards they belong to and what type of pin description you want to give, later. This allows you to streamline the process one step at a time.

Once all your drafts have been given a board, and the pin descriptions are optimized for your audience, you can click on the schedule all drafts button at the bottom to have them lined up in your Pinterest queue with Tailwind.

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

3) Have Your Go to Pinners or Boards to Defeat Pinner’s Block

You can spend lot of time trying to look for the best content to repin on Pinterest. And if you’re like me you might use the search bar to look for specific pins, only to see the same results for the same keywords day after day.

Or you can spend time looking through the different categories only to find pins that lead more to Flickr then a valuable resource for your audience, making your efforts feel like a waste of time.

This is why it’s important to be able to have specific pinners that you can go to discover relevant content that you can share on your own boards. These pinners will curate content that you may not see on your own Pinterest feed.

For me, Social Media Examiner’s Pinterest account is a great go-to resource for finding social media marketing articles that I feel my audience will enjoy. Since they provide articles on a daily basis, I know I can turn to them to pin social media pins whenever I get the dreaded pinner’s block.

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

I suggest that you have at least 10 go to pinners you can rely on in the case you can’t seem to find great pins on a given day.

By no means am I suggesting that you get lazy and just repin every single pin that they pin. I’m saying that it helps that when you just can’t seem to find great content, these trusted pinners can help get you over the hump.

The other option is to have a group board on Pinterest that you can turn to. I guarantee you that there will be pins on a group board that you have never seen before that will be valuable for your Pinterest audience.

My suggestion is to look through the group board and see what types of pins are receiving more engagement compared to other ones. This will let you know what types of pins are popular and give you a hint of what you should pin or schedule.

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

4) Keep Scheduling Pins if You’re “In the Zone”

Athletes often refer to the “zone” as a place where everything flows naturally, effortlessly and they are performing at their best. Sometimes it can be a struggle to pin even 3 pins in one day, but you may find yourself in a state of wanting to pin more even though you’ve met your daily quota.

I highly suggest you take that momentum and keep pinning until you no longer feel like you’re in the zone. There are times when I will fully schedule 35 pins in a row for a client because I’m in the zone. Taking advantage of this momentum frees up time for other projects the following days and reduces pinner’s block.

5) Content Discovery by Tailwind

My friend, and Tailwind blogger, Alisa Meredith loves this feature, and it can definitely help you save time with pinning.

Tailwind has a feature in beta called Discover Content. This feature allows you to add your favorite blogs and a list of images that come from the blog. Imagine it like a visual RSS feed.

If your favorite bloggers are producing some great pinnable images, then you can use this feature to keep track of when their new articles come out.

Tailwind will automatically update the pictures available each time you use the future. You no longer technically need to go to the blogger’s page or Pinterest account to see when they’ve updated their latest pin related to their blog post. This is a huge time saver!

This feature is available to paid Tailwind customers and can be asked for by customer service since it’s currently in beta.

5 Time Saving Pinterest Marketing Tips

I hope these Pinterest marketing tips will help shave days off of your pinning schedule over the next few months. If you have any tips on how to reduce your time spent pinning on Pinterest without killing the effectiveness, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Myth Busting Online Marketing

We’ve all fallen victim to common myths. Despite what you may have heard, a watermelon will not grow in your stomach if you swallow a seed, your face won’t get stuck in a silly position if you hold it that way for too long, and, wait for it- it is NOT necessary to wait 30 minutes after you eat to get in the pool.

While these myths are easily debunked, there are many myths out there about online marketing that many still believe. Are you wanting to begin your online marketing experience but are unsure of what hype to believe and what hype not to believe? Maybe you’ve already have some online marketing but you’ve run into some confusion along the way. We want to make your life a little bit easier by busting open some of the most common myths in online marketing.

Myth Busting Internet Marketing

Myth #1: You Need A LOT of Web Traffic for Your Marketing Efforts to be Profitable

Yes, of course, it never hurts to have a lot of traffic going to your web site. Generally speaking, more traffic equals more sales, which is always a goal. However, with traffic, the key is actually quality over quantity. So, instead of trying to get everyone to view your content, make sure to get a targeted group of select consumers that make sense for your business. While you may not drive everyone in, you will be spending less and pulling in meaningful consumers that deliver results. 

Myth #2: The Key to Great Internet Marketing is an Awesome Website

Obviously, you are going to want your site to look as polished as possible, but the design of your site will mean nothing if you don’t have a clear-cut idea of your product/service, what your marketing goals are, and who you are marketing to. Just as is the case with traditional forms of marketing, design and aesthetics come second to the meat of your campaign- the content. Clearly worded descriptions of who you are and what you want to convey, along with articles, testimonials, and other useful information, all tailored to your hand-picked audience is what will really sell consumers. Once you have all of this down, you can then shift your focus to the look and feel of the site.

Myth #3: Online Marketing is a One-and-Done Type of Thing

So you’ve created your website, set up your social media accounts, and reached out to others online. You can check your online marketing campaign off the list, right? Wrong. What distinguishes the Internet from other forms of media is it’s constant evolution and the opportunity for interactivity that it provides. Your online marketing efforts will require upkeep in order to truly be successful. Providing fresh content, feedback to your consumers and other updates are great ways to keep consumers coming back to you.

Myth #4: Your Online Marketing Strategy Should be Left to the Pros 

Having an expert to help you with your online marketing strategy is always helpful, but you should be hands-on as well. If you hire someone else to help you with your online marketing, make sure you have the option to edit and/or control your site. The key is to keep your message and brand voice true to your company and reduce the risk of dilution.

These are four of the many myths that still remain at large today about online marketing. Have any other myths that you think require some busting? Be sure to let us know in the comments!

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5 Great Pinterest B2B Accounts

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

5 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

 HootSuite's Pinterest B2B Account

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

Organik SEO's Pinterest B2B Account

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

GE's Pinterest B2B Account

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

Constant Contact's Pinterest B2B Account

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 B2B Account

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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Hey Dude! You Can Market to Men on Pinterest, Too

Pinterest may have the stereotype of a typical female audience, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great marketing opportunities for men on Pinterest too.
Hey dude! You can market to men on Pinterest too!

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

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.

The NHL uses hashtags to interact with their 1.3 million followers on Pinterest

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.

Men's Health Magazine shares useful information on health, clothes and more with their followers

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.

Karmaloop used PinMail by PinLeague to help boost their male Pinterest following

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.

The US Army uses Pinterest to show powerful images of war as well as heart-warming photos of reunited families

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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3 Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing

Improve You Email Marketing

It can be easy to forget the importance of email in a world full of social media marketing. Learn how to improve your email marketing with simple our tips.

Email marketing can be difficult to perfect. Figuring out how to collect emails, what content to use and what actually works for your audience can certainly seem like a daunting task but, dont worry! We’ve outlined three tips that can help improve your email marketing and get you the results you desire.

1. Build Your List

Whether you’re starting from scratch or just trying to capture a few more users, there are a few simple ways to quickly build a valuable email list.

Special Offer on Site: Everyone loves free stuff, and your website visitors are no different.  By simply adding a CTA offering a free eBook, coupon or exclusive content to your site, users are more likely to enter their email addresses. However, you must ensure it’s relevant to your audience. If your company specializes in wholesale dog food, don’t offer a free eBook on Etsy Marketing. Think about it from your consumers point of view and they’ll be more likely to connect.

Le Bunny Bleu Uses a Lightbox to Capture Emails

Le Bunny Bleu Uses a Lightbox to Capture Emails

Require an Email Confirmation: What good is an email address if the person doesn’t check their inbox? By sending a confirmation email, or by employing “Double Opt-In“,  you find out if the user is likely to engage, and your future message are more likely to get through. This also allows you to ask the subscriber to check their spam folder and put your email address in their address book; then the spam filter will no longer catch it.

2. Send Good, Relevant Content

Now that you have a list built up, make sure to supply great content to keep open rates high and to prevent unsubscribes.

Get Away from Sales-Centric Emails: If a user subscribed to your email list, then they want to hear from you! Many companies make the mistake of only sending out emails when they have something to sell. Of course, subscribers want to know about special deals your company may have, but they also want to rely on you for valuable, relevant insights into what your company specializes in.

Keep it Short: Your subscribers are busy people. While users do want the special insights your company posses, it’s better to provide a snippet of enticing information with a link back to your website. It’s also important to keep emails short because so many readers use their mobile devices to check their inbox. The shorter the snippet, the more will fit on a tiny smart phone screen.

Target Content Where Users Spend Their Time: With the ever growing popularity of social media, you can improve your open and click through rates by including information from their perferred social network. Brands like Karmaloop, Xyron and Minimus saw their metrics greatly improve by using socially targeted email campaigns from PinMail by PinLeague.

3. Test & Analyze

Finding the right timing, content, segments and subjects takes some time. By testing and analyzing your user data, you can optimize your email campaigns and make them even more effective.

Find the Right Time: Timing can make or break an email campaign, and not all users are created equal.  While many brands may find that users open emails on Wednesdays at 11 am, your audience might prefer reading them after 10 pm on Sundays.  A great way to gauge your timing before the email campaigns begin is to look at your Google Analytics visits. There you can see what days and what times might work best for your audience. You can also easily A/B test campaign times to see what works best for your users.

A/B Tests: When deciding on an email subject line, body content, timing and so on, it can be difficult to tell what will resonate with your audience. When testing email subject lines, try using different calls to action, including the individual’s name in the email, rhetorical questions or anything else you think might grab the readers attention. In the body of the email, it’s good to test different headers, content and picture-to-text ratios to see which will best lead the user to your site. For more in depth information, KissMetrics has a great article on how to start using A/B testing.

 

This article was originally published as 3 Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing on PinLeague at https://www.tailwindapp.com/improve-email-marketing/