Getting Started on Pinterest? Important Things You Need to Do

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A Proper Pinterest Profile Is the Key

Whether you are just starting a business or expanding your market, Pinterest is a great social media platform for your online marketing. Pinterest reported over 478 million users every month. With these numbers, your brand is sure to find the perfect audience in your niche.

To get started, you will need to get people to visit your profile. So, it is quite essential to dress it up as best as you can, similar to having a physical store that you design and decorate to draw customers in. With the proper profile setup, you will attract a lot of users and potentially drive traffic to your main website or eCommerce store. More traffic means more possible conversions.

Don’t be deterred if you are not tech-savvy. Pinterest is a very user-friendly site. Plus, this guide is made to help you every little step of the way. You will be able to navigate the site and use their tools in no time.

For starters, here’s a short description of what Pinterest is, what to expect on the platform, and the components that you have to be familiar with.

Pinterest: Boards and Pins

Pinterest is what everyone’s calling a “visual search engine” since what people see on the site is always a post with some form of graphic. Whether they’re searching for a recipe, a DIY tutorial, or news about the latest trends, it would most certainly be accompanied by visually appealing photos or graphics.

On the platform though, instead of just having posts on your home feed, you see what they call pins which you can pin on your board using the save button– similar in concept to a real-life bulletin board on which you can pin posters.

Pins are, what the site describes as, ideas that people want to save and/or share with the world. Any content, may it be original works of yours or virtually anything from the internet, can be pinned on Pinterest boards.

Pinning on boards is a great way for you to organize your pins per topic, theme, and so forth. You can create any number of boards on your profile to suit your needs. Well-organized boards can make your profile popular.

Now that you are familiar with the main components of the platform, let’s dive into the next steps to getting started on Pinterest.

| Read: How to Share a Board on Pinterest? Complete guide

Set up a Proper Pinterest Profile

Pinterest offers a wide array of opportunities to grow your brand. The first and most crucial step is setting up your profile. This will help your brand grow exponentially.

To help you in this important stage, we’ve compiled some very detailed and useful tips. Follow this advice to ensure that your profile is optimized to its full potential.

1. Create a business account

Since you want to be on Pinterest to sell your products or services, you will need to apply for a business account. With this kind of account, you can maximize all the benefits you can get on the site. The good news is it only takes a few seconds to do, and it won’t cost you anything! Here’s how you do it:

If you already own a personal Pinterest account, you can simply convert it into a business account.

Log in to your account on Pinterest.
Click on the drop-down menu in the upper right corner and select Convert to business.
On the next page, click Convert account, and it’s done!

If you don’t have an account yet, it’s easy to create a business account.

On a browser, just go to the Business sign-up page on Pinterest.
Type in your business email, age, and then set up your account password.
Click on Create account and it’s done!

You can now continue setting up your business profile. With a business account, you have access to a wide host of tools to help you start on the road to Pinterest growth.

2. Set up your profile

We’ve mentioned before how important it is to have a great Pinterest profile. When people visit your page, this is the first thing they see. So, your profile needs to make a good impression. You have to gain their interest and trust in less than a few minutes.

Here are some valuable tips to guide you on creating a noteworthy profile.

Choose a memorable username and display name for your business. Your username will be used as the URL of your page. The display name will be the one that pops up in searches on Pinterest.

Use keywords that are most likely to be used when people do searches.

Upload a high-resolution profile picture that features your face. Even if you’re working under a brand name, people are more likely to trust a brand that has a face. They will feel more connection and familiarity when they see a person. Plus, they’ll know your company is not just a scam.

Dimensions to follow: 165 x 165 pixels.

Claim your domain. Link your main website or eCommerce store to your profile. This will make it easier for people to visit it with just one click. This will also put a Pin it button on your website that enables people to pin content from your website directly onto their boards.
Create an interesting profile description. Talk about your company and what you do, what your products or services are, and what your audience can benefit from following your profile.

To give you a concrete example of how a great profile should look like, here’s a Pinterest user, Sarah Boland, who is selling her services on Pinterest:

On this profile, she used a smiling picture of herself. She looks friendly and trustworthy.
Her cover video, which automatically plays above her profile picture, shows the work that she does. It’s very creative and eye-catching. It makes the viewer want to know more about her and how she does it.
On the display name section, notice how she wrote her name in capital letters to make it stand out. This makes the viewer instantly aware that she works independently as herself and not under any company name.
Then she used a divider “|” between her name and the description of herself. It provides a clean and organized look plus she maximized the limited areas provided on the site to put more information about herself.
In her display name, she used common keywords like entrepreneur and video marketing to have her profile pop up in searches related to those words.
Under her display name, we can see the link lifelapseapp.com which is the website where you can download the app that she uses. The link is clickable so the viewer can check it out just by clicking on it.
Beside it is her Pinterest username @sarahvideocreator. It tells us that she is a video creator. Plus, it’s also easy to remember and search again.

It’s also a great idea to use the same username for your other social media accounts so that people can easily follow you on the other platforms.

Then in her profile description, she wrote a clear and concise explanation of what she has to offer. She has explicitly identified that her target market is brands. She also provided a specific type of visual presentation, loopable videos, which she teaches how to create by just using a mobile phone.
So, if you own a brand and want to learn how to create promotional materials using this new technique, you should try her services.
She also inserted another URL at the end of her description. Another demonstration of how she maximized the space provided. This other link, however, is not clickable. It needs to be copied and pasted on a browser to be visited.
Her profile also displays the number of monthly views that she gets, which is 4.8 million. This is a big number for an individual page to get. This huge amount of traffic proves that her profile has been successfully optimized.

3. Set up your boards before going live

After your name and description, the next thing that people will look for on your profile is your pins and boards. So, before promoting your page, create a board and fill it up first with pins that will catch people’s attention.

| Read: How to Change Pinterest Board Cover?

Don’t forget to optimize your pins and boards using keywords in the title and description. This will make them more visible in searches.

To get you started, here are some ideas for your first boards:

Your products or services – Pin some of your main products on this board. You don’t want it to look like a catalog, though. So, insert some creativity into your product presentations. Convert normal pins into rich pins that users can click to directly purchase your products.
Tips, hacks, and how-to tutorials – A lot of Pinterest users go on the site to get some new ideas and instructions on how to do things. Get in the loop by providing your own collection of how-tos that is related to your niche.
Creative and fun stuff – Put some good vibes out there by making a collection of funny and cool pins that will interest people.
Group boards – You can create a public board that any user can pin to. Just set a topic or theme for the group boards to keep them organized. This will help you build a community of like-minded people in your niche.

To Wrap Things Up

The 3 items we discussed are the important things you need to do to optimize your Pinterest presence. Optimizing is a simple yet effective Pinterest marketing strategy that helps in attracting more users to visit your profile and website. And, they don’t cost a thing!

So, why not start your own Pinterest business account and make your brand grow!

If you need additional help in getting more pinterest followers and traffic to your profile, you can try using a Pinterest user growth service.