How small businesses can use Pinterest for a content marketing boost

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Posted 17 September 2012 11:08am by Ryan Sommer with 2 comments

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Being from San Francisco, I've always had a soft spot for the underdog small business or high street boutique, and coming from a social media background, I love to stay on top of new ways social can help this market segment.

In the past, we've looked into how Pinterest can be used for link building and blogger outreach, as well as some of the big players getting involved with the new niche social network.

But can Pinterest still even be considered niche?

Our recent Adobe Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Managing and Measuring Social found that 37% of marketing professionals from agencies and the client-side (a near-equal mix of B2C and B2B across industries in Europe and North America with a concentration in the UK and US.) are currently active on Pinterest, proving it is a real driver for big retailers especially.

Here is how that break down worked across the socials polled:

I think the argument for Pinterest needs to be made beyond SME and Enterprise, and that it's high time small business started championing how they are using the "repin" to align themselves around particular content in the wider "taste graph" (meaning beyond Facebook) and social discovery movement.

Here at Econsultancy, our Social Media Manager Matt Owen maintains a board, and we've even already seen revenue, not surprising as our studies have already shown higher ROI via Pinterest per click than Facebook.

With this in mind, Matt and I have prepared these takeways for how small business should approach Pinterest.

Five small business success tips for Pinterest

• Search similar users. Take the time to find users in advance who are properly aligned with your audience and industry, and remember an individual's network can easily exceed an organisation's. Click through to profiles and look at how many likes and followers a board creator already has for a smart targeted list.

• Define your content. Don't think your business suits for images? Think again, many high level stats or takeaway principals can be turned into infographics with tools like visua.ly. Here is an example of a freelancer using more advanced infographics on digital marketing.

• Focus on quality not quantity. Much like Twitter, you want to manage your signal to noise ratio by not over doing it on repins, and by only pushing content you created that you really get behind.

• Think like an online retailer. You are creating an online brand around the content you choose to repin, so make sure it is products and services you yourself would see in an online catalogue if you don't already have one. 

• Drive a call to action through imagery. Here's an example of a product from a small online retailer Ohgizmo.com -- an arcade joystick lightswitch. Instead of the product sitting alone on a countertop, the imagery shows it being installed so people get it when they run across the repin, and are more likely to click through to buy.

 If you are a small business using Pinterest and seeing great returns, we'd love to hear from you! Let me know below, or give me a shout at @RyanSommerHQ