Cute kittens and retro artwork: Pinterest and SEO – Soton Digital Presentation
So after a very eventful morning last Friday (car crash – long story, but everyone was fine!) I made it in the nick of time to Winchester for my presentation at Soton Digital in the Discovery Centre. With a quick hello to Dan Harrison the organiser, a check that my presentation was functioning as it should and the microphone I quickly got stuck into my presentation about SEO and Pinterest.
You can find the presentation slides here: http://portal.sliderocket.com/AXVNP/Pinterest-SEO
The aim of my presentation wasn’t to tell people what Pinterest is, where it came from and why it is so popular but rather look at how you can use it as part of not only SEO but your content and social strategies too – which as we all know, also forms a key part of the whole search marketing story overall.
What is Pinterest?
From the outset I thought it was pertinent to highlight what Pinterest wasn’t from an SEO perspective. So we discussed a few points to get things into perspective:
- It’s not your answer to SEO
- It’s not a direct SEO tool
- Does not give you overnight success
- Arguably more beneficial to B2C than B2B
We all then took a look at some of the interesting facts including those related to the commercial potential that lies in Pinterest.
As promised in the presentation the sources for these are listed below:
- mashable.com/2012/03/12/pinterest-most-popular-categories-boards/
- blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32362/35-Statistics-That-Fuel-the-Battle-Between-Pinterest-and-Google.aspx
And here’s where things got a lot more interesting! Once I had made a point about Pinterest’s well promoted high female user base – I decided to take my clothes off!
This certainly made the talk more interesting and I hopefully brought a new level of entertainment to the crowd as I then moved forwards to continue to deliver my presentation complete with skirt!
The key to success with Pinterest
One of the several important points that I noted throughout my presentation was the fact that the key to being successful was creating a visual representation of what your brand stands for and using images that demonstrate your products and services in their ideal use or situation. In doing so, you promote your products and services visually, in a more emotional and appealing way which the Pinterest user would find far more interesting and shareable than a bland, corporate image of whatever it is you sell.
Some ideas you can use
An important part of the presentation was to look at real-life examples of B2B and B2C businesses of how you could use Pinterest in your marketing strategy and physically implement some of these ideas. Here’s a roundup of them:
Ideas for B2C:
- Vouchers
- Sales pin board
- Competitions
- Encouraging conversation
- Using Pinterest’s price display
- Using hashtags and @ mentions
- Categorising pin boards
Ideas for B2B:
- Infographics
- Instructographics
- Adverts (video)
- Brochures
- Software screenshots
Monitoring
As with any strategy, a key component is not only the planning and actioning, but also the monitoring, so we also had a look at a few tools including making a note of the fact that Google Analytics provided some great data on what traffic was coming from which individual pinned image.
PinReach – Monitoring software specifically for Pinterest which provides some great insight into reach, popularity and many other aspects of Pinterest.
iGoDigital – A nice cross platform tracking package that includes Pinterest, great for e-commerce
The future of Pinterest
As we drew to a close on the presentation we took a look at what the future may hold for Pinterest. I raised a few in the presentation:
My final message of the day which wrapped up everything as a whole was that there are lots and lots of ways of using and leveraging Pinterest for SEO, content strategy and social. You just have to be really creative in how you do it. Pinterest and it’s users dont like spam, but they do like creative marketing.
And for those whom are also interested, there are some additional resources:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/26-tips-for-using-pinterest-for-business
http://mashable.com/follow/topics/pinterest/
http://pinterest.com/mshahab/brands-businesses-blogs-on-pinterest/
A big thanks to those there, there some good questions were asked after including how did Pinterest start and can you put your trousers back on please! Which I did …
I was not aware about the power of Pinterest….
After reading your article….I am planning to take Pinterest seriously