TEAM GUIDE TO PINTEREST - How to get the best off this powerful promotional tool

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If you don’t already know, Pinterest is believed to be one of the most effective ways to promote your Etsy shop outside Etsy. It’s fairly easy, it doesn’t take a lot of knowledge or effort, it reaches a very wide community and it’s free!

So if you’re not promoting on it yet, it is time that you start considering it seriously.

These are general instructions that should help you on your way to successfully using Pinterest and we will publish them in 6 separate daily instalments.

Let’s assume that you don’t know anything about Pinterest and start with the basics.

For the sake of making examples easy, we will assume that you sell jewellery on Etsy.

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1. YOUR OWN PINTEREST ACCOUNT

The first thing you need is a Pinterest account. That is very easy to do. Just search for Pinterest and follow the instructions. Please note that Pinterest requires that any account used to promote a website, including an Etsy shop, must be a business account. It is free to do it, so please follow their terms and conditions to the letter as you would with any other service.

You will now have to open a few boards and populate them with the most beautiful images you can find. Start, of course, with a board where you can feature your own products.

Here opinions are divided, with some experts suggesting that you should have a board exclusively for your products and others that you should feature them in various boards together with similar pins. For instance, you could have a ‘My shop’ board with all your products or you could have boards for necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc., and pin your items accordingly together with other necklaces, etc.

Then you’ll have to try and think as the audience you are trying to reach and figure out which other things they may be interested in and how you could enhance the appeal of your products by matching these boards to them. In our example, you could have a fashion board featuring images that complement the style on offer in your shop, or maybe hair styles that would show your earrings at their best.

A few inspirational/aspirational boards won’t go amiss either, so for instance: nature photography, jewellery boxes, style boards with small items and details. You better stick to style details, at least to start with, as an image of a gorgeous desirable home does not directly link to a pair of earrings, while maybe some lovely cushions in colours or a design that matches them can be a much better approach.

While you are searching Pinterest to populate your boards, do follow any pinners that show interest in items that relate to you. You will need a few hundred followers to ensure some activity and the first step to get these is to follow some people yourself. There is no need to go crazy, though. Pinterest’s algorithm works in a very particular way and you don’t need thousands of followers to get repins. But more on that later.

Pinterest also offer business accounts the opportunity to showcase some of your boards at the very top. I am not sure how this is done if you are just opening your business account as the change happened after I had my own. If, like me, you already have one, go to your home page, choose Settings (the 1st icon on the left above your shop name) and scroll down until you see Showcase. You can pick up to 5 boards that will flash in turn at the top of your home page whenever anyone views it and it’s the perfect place to advertise those boards with the products you sell.

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2. PINNING YOUR LISTINGS

Etsy makes it easy to pin your listings. Just open the item, click on the Pinterest icon and save it to the appropriate board. That is pretty much it! The main image of your listing will be added to that board.

You will notice that Pinterest only chooses the first few characters of your item’s title for your pin’s description. You do not need to stick to that! Before you save your pin to your board, you will be able to see the little pencil icon at the end of the description and you can change whatever you need at this point!

You can:
a. Make sure that your full title is included
b. You can add as much or as little detail about your product after or instead of your full title
c. You can use as many of your keywords as you choose

One thing to bear in mind is that Pinterest will only show the first few words under your pin in people’s feeds and in your/their boards, so choose those wisely!

Pinterest (and Google) are keen on content, so don’t go just adding keywords to your description as a list! Include these in colloquial, well-thought sentences. These will appear when a person opens your pin and you want to attract and involve them, not to put them off with something that’s clearly written for a robot to find and not a person to enjoy!

Don’t copy your whole Etsy blurb here! You want to attract people to your Etsy page, so what you need is maybe a couple of carefully phrased comments that will make people want to go and find out more.

If you have several images of your products that show them from different perspectives, or perhaps you offer a bracelet in options of black or blue, you can pin the secondary image (or as many as you like) as well.

Probably installing the Pinterest button is the easiest way. Search on Pinterest and you will easily find how to do it. Then open your listing and instead of using the Pinterest icon below the ‘Favorite’ button, press the one that will be on your tool bar at the top of the page. This will open another tab showing several images. Choose the one you want by pressing save, edit the text as above and pick your board. That is it! More views of the same listing will now be available to repin and promote.

If you don’t want to install the Pin button, you can still save secondary images that link to your Etsy listing. Go to the board where you want to pin this image, click on ‘Save a pin’. For the purpose of driving traffic through to Etsy, choose ‘Save from your device’. Choose your pic, add the URL link to your listing and press continue. Write a description and save to your chosen board.

If you want to change the description of any of your older pins you can do so by choosing the pencil icon that shows on the top of the image when you hover over it. Please bear in mind that, although anyone looking at your pin on your own board will see the new description, this doesn’t change anything on any saves your pin may already have had. Those will still show the original description.

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3. PROMOTING YOUR PINS ON ETSY TEAM THREADS – THE BASICS

To enable you to take part on Pinterest promotional threads you will need the Pinterest links to your listings. I would suggest that as soon as you are done pinning for the day you recover those links and keep them in a safe place for easy access.

To do so, open your pin by clicking on it. You will get an individual window with your item. Click on the address bar at the top (starting with http…) to highlight it, <CTRL>C to recover the link and paste it using <CTRL>V onto your chosen file or directly on to the thread you are taking part in.

And you are ready to start promoting on Pinterest and back into Etsy!

When choosing the best team threads to promote in there are 2 basic things to consider:
a. How many times you’d like your pin to be repinned and, therefore, how many Pinterest views you are interested in getting for your listing
b. How much time you have available

Bear in mind that a Pinterest thread, although usually very straightforward, takes longer to complete than a simple clicking thread, for instance. You will have to open Pinterest links and save the pins, at times also like them. Then you will have to open the link back into Etsy (by clicking on the image) and in most cases fave/refave the listings and sometimes the shops too.

There are threads based on catching a certain number of links above yours. These are usually the quickest. Others require that you catch all links on the thread. These can take a considerably longer time, but can bring in dozens of repins and Pinterest views in one single day.

Choose and plan accordingly and you will see the results! Never forget that Pinterest threads are very easy to monitor and are usually kept on a very tight leash. Like with any other team thread, follow the rules and you’ll have no problems.

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4. USING PINTEREST TO ITS FULL POTENTIAL

Pinterest is an awesome promotional tool.

- It is very visual, which is what internet shopping is about,
- the clear majority of users are female and that reflects nicely the proportion of actual internet shoppers/buyers, and
- your pins have a much longer shelf life than any other post on social media.

Some interesting figures:

- Exact percentages vary but it’s believed that approximately 80% of Pinterest users are female and that approximately 70% of all internet commerce is female driven, so there you go.

- A tweet’s shelf life is estimated at about 1 ½ hours, an FB post’s at about 3 hours. A pin gets approximately 20% of its movement on the 1st day, 70% in its 1st month and the rest treacles down becoming almost insignificant after 3 months. How about that for a long life!

Pinterest is more of a search engine than a social media platform and that’s why you don’t need to keep touting for more and more followers to successfully promote on Pinterest.

A quote from Pinterest’s own CEO might help you to understand better how the site works:

‘Our job is to help you discover ideas for yourself. Those ideas come from other people, but the objective is not to get a lot of followers or to impress others.

There are a lot of really valuable services that are always pushing you to communicate with other people. But there are relatively few services that are about helping you to be the person you want to be and fulfilling your ambitions.’

Based on that, you do not need therefore to actually engage with your target market, just to try and make sure that your products are placed in such a way that these people can find them for themselves.

Queue Smart Feed, the name given to Pinterest algorithm: it displays pins as best (repined by others) first, not newest first and it’s based on information of what you repin, what you search for and what the people you follow share.

[LallmanCreations]

Thank you Graciela for the info on a business Pinterest account - I immediately converted to a business acct. I'm new to Etsy and like what I see on your team's activity. Looking forward to learning from you all and being an involved member. THANKS!! Nancy

[Former_Member]

Thank you Graciela :)

[RogueHandcrafts]

Great Info!

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First of all, my apologies for having disappeared on you for such a long time. Real life took over for far too many reasons to go into, but here are the 2 last instalments of our guide!

5. PRACTICALITIES OF PROMOTING ON PINTEREST

Taking the information on Smart Feed into account, one of the most important things is to get your pin repinned as many times as possible. And Pinterest team threads are excellent to force this sort of traffic.

On the other hand, there have been reports of people being frozen on Pinterest for a certain period of time for saving the same pin over and over again, even to different boards. I cannot personally confirm or deny this, but it’s something to bear in mind.

So probably the best approach is to rotate your pins on the various threads you take part, coming back to any particular item you want to push every few days.

When you participate in Pinterest threads you are bound to come across the same listing several times and you are always required to save it, so you will have to have several boards available to you where you can do so.

Group boards are a good option to do it.

The general belief has been that big boards with tens of thousands of pins and thousands of followers were the best but Smart Feed changed this. What you need are boards with a high rate of repinning instead.

Here’s a good site to try and determine which group boards to apply to: http://pingroupie.com/

Sort the information on the OrderBy tab by number of repins and hey, presto! Right in front of you all you need to know to check the boards out and decide whether to apply or not.

Group boards that are specific to your type of product are also excellent for your own promotion. In our example, you could choose:
- In Categories, women’s fashion, design, etc.
- You know what to do in OrderBy and Sort
- In Title, maybe jewellery or handmade jewellery
- In Description, narrow your title if you wish to, for instance, beaded jewellery

One important thing to bear in mind to try and obtain more repinnings for your pins is that attracting a wider group of people is crucial. If you participate in the same Pinterest threads with the same group of people and they are the only ones saving your pins it doesn’t do as much for them as being saved by pinners outside these groups. So, check the people who are saving your pins without being prompted by an Etsy team thread! Try and follow as many of them as you can, they might follow you back or even just check you out themselves and end up saving more of your stuff.



6. HELPFUL TIPS

Make your Pinterest account as interesting as possible but do not lose sight of your actual goal: driving traffic from your account into your shop! Do not get distracted by everything you like and clog your business account with it. Have a separate account for those things!

Going back to our example, the fact that you sell jewellery and love Mexican food does not necessarily make for a good fit, unless you only sell Mexican looking pieces. Your business account must be as coherent as possible.

Pin regularly and consistently to keep your account relevant.

Try and achieve a corporate look. That made me laugh too: a corporation of me and my split personalities, I suppose. But it makes sense. Your account will look considerably more professional if, for instance, you make sure that your board covers either match the colours/design that identify your shop or at least are consistent with your shop’s image. Remember, Pinterest is a visual tool so make sure your account and your boards are visually pleasing.

Experts reckon that a well curated Pinterest business account can convert an average of 2% of the traffic into your shop into sales. And wouldn’t we all love that!

Hope this helps and enjoy! Above anything else, Pinterest is fun, fun, fun!

[CruzEsquivel]

Great posts Graciela! ;)

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Thanks, Javier! Glad you found it useful.

[DelanesBitsandPieces]

When an item sells, should we remove it from our boards?

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I wouldn't. If someone clicks to follow it into Etsy they will at the very least be shown your latest 4 items at the top and, hopefully, some others in the 'You might like these' section just below the statement of the item being sold out.

Hope this helps!

[DelanesBitsandPieces]

I just noticed that my url for Pinterest is ukPinterest. what's up with that? I live in Canada. I just went online to sign up for a business account yesterday and started to work it and noticed that... does that mean pins are only seen in uk? unless I pin them on a team? so confusing.

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The location of the URL is irrelevant. I have seen this happening a lot with Australia, for instance, pinners from there showing as if they were uk based and then many Eastern European appearing to be posting from Australia. It has no bearing on the visibility of your pins, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to see my pins for instance, unless you did live in the UK.

Don't worry yourself about this one, it tends to sort itself out eventually. And if even it didn't, no harm done.

[JoHulsteinFinePrints]

Yes, very helpful Graciela, Thanks!

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@Jo. Happy it goes some way to help you guys!

[DelanesBitsandPieces]

thank you! Awhile ago I opened a business account, but I see it says ukpinterest....why would this be? Does this affect who sees my pins?

[DelanesBitsandPieces]

oh, I just saw your answer to the first time I asked....it didn't show up til now. Thank you so much f or all your work!!! I hope you are feeling yourself again.