Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 When most people think of Pinterest, they think social media marketing, not content marketing. But the truth is Pinterest can be an extremely useful tool for enhancing your content and providing direction for your overall content marketing strategy. With over 27 million unique visitors and 220 million page views a day, Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social media sites out there, so it’s all the more important to leverage it in all aspects of your online marketing efforts. Here are 5 ways to use Pinterest as part of your content marketing process. 1. Use Popular Pinterest Pins for Inspiration Finding the most popular pins on Pinterest can serve as a springboard for your content brainstorming sessions. On any given day you can find popular pins by browsing different categories and seeing which pins are being repeated, which can help you if your website and content is in a particular niche. There are also sites like Repinly which display the most popular pins currently on Pinterest, as well as boards, individual pinners, etc., which can help you see what’s trending and where you should direct your efforts. 2. Use Pinterest Analytics to Track What People Like and Are Repining One the best features of Pinterest is that it offers free analytics. Once you verify your business account, you can have access to their analytics data. Additionally, there are free and paid tools that you can use for Pinterest Analytics. One of the best analytics tools I’ve found is Pinleague, which evaluates not only the popularity of your pins, but allows you to track the images from your site. With PinLeague you can see which images on your account have been pinned, how many times, and by whom. It offers an impressive range of metrics that can help you evaluate what content is most successful. You can correlate this information with a more all-inclusive benchmarking dashboard like Cyfe, which allows you to track data and traffic any website or social media account. This way you can monitor the progress of how well your content does on multiple levels. Maybe articles on certain topics get shared on Facebook while others see more activity on Pinterest. Therefore the content that see the most activity on Pinterest should be more visually-oriented, or accompanied by strong graphics. In the same vein, if you were to create a series of infographics on social media marketing, but while the graphics on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin gain 30 unique pins each, the Pinterest marketing infographic garners 100 pins and 300 repins, you can safely say that creating a series of articles about PInterest would be of great interest to your audience. You can create an entire board dedicated to Pinterest marketing, which would enable you to track the success of that content in varying forms—pins, repins, board followers, general followers. No spike in traffic, no matter how small, should ever be overlooked! 3. Use Pinterest As A Bookmark For Popular Stories The best thing about this tip is that by pinning stories that people are already talking about, it ensures that your content will be relevant and buzzworthy. Pinning articles on timely stories, such as anything focused on the fallout from the latest Penguin update, would be a great way to get a quick boom of traffic to your page. These articles can then be shared or curated for your website. You could also repurpose the pin as content by writing an opinion article based off the original pin, providing either a rebuttal or supporting argument in order to keep up interest in the topic and encourage engagement in your content. 4. Create Blog Content Based On Infographics Found On Pinterest In much the same vein as bookmarking articles, infographics make for great repurposed content, and it helps that Pinterest is full of them. In fact, Pinterest’s whole platform is just a reflection of just how popular and important quality images and visually-driven content like infographics have become over the past few years, thus making it one of the best places to find infographics. Find an infographic that strikes your interest and consider it an outline for a future article. As you write the article it might branch off from the infographics statistics, or you might do your own research and find a different side to the argument that you want to discuss. Ultimately the content will be unique, delivered in your own words and in your own voice; the infographic simply serves as inspiration. 5. Pin Your Own Content This is one of the most crucial elements of using Pinterest for content marketing. Of course once you produce content you’re going to share it with as many outlets as possible, and with Pinterest you can use keywords to help optimize your pins. This is important because the Pinterest community is driven by repins rather than unique pins—nearly 80% of all pins are repins, compared to Twitter in which retweets constitute less than 2 percent of all tweets. In short, your pins are much more likely to be shared on Pinterest than any other social site, so you need to be pinning on a regular basis. You should also create boards for you content in order to drive traffic to your site. This doesn’t mean that the boards should be entirely made up of your own content—you can seed popular boards for pins that are likely to get you followers and repins, and then put your own content in among them, increasing the likelihood of your pins being (and thus, your website) being seen, liked, or followed. The potential for exposure for your content is huge, and if you consistently pin valuable images and articles, you will most definitely see a boost in your traffic. You’ll be able to glean inspiration and ideas from Pinterest, which can a valuable asset in developing original content. By taking all this and evaluating your results from Pinterest Analytics, you can gain valuable insight into your audience and find yourself on the path to content marketing success. Learn how to use Pinterest to drive referral traffic and boost brand awareness. Watch the tutorial—How Pinterest Can Help Your Brand—and walk through the necessary steps for getting up and running on Pinterest. You’ll discover how to leverage the network to drive significant referral traffic, and learn exactly how to create pins that people will love, share, and visit. Access it FREE with a 7-day trial to the Online Marketing Institute. Activate trial now. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on OMI Blog and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Author: Marcela De Vivo Follow @marceladevivo Marcela De Vivo has been marketing online since 1999, and is knowledgeable on everything related to starting a business online, including SEO, Social Media, Analytids Reputation Management, and much more. She offers content marketing and link building strategies for Gryffin Media and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, … View full profile ›More by this author:Instagram Stories Emerges As A Powerful Marketing ToolBlack Friday RetroGage: Cultural or Economic?Is the Government’s Support of Bitcoin Insane… or Genius?