Pinterest Best Practices For Search Marketers

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Pinterest supports more than 10 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, but how can search engine marketers tap into the growth? Digital search marketing agency Greenlight published a paper on Best Practices that search marketers will find valuable.

Learning the personal interests of consumers becomes the benefit for brands. Charlie Elliott, content and creative strategist at Greenlight, and co-author of the guide, tells us that the content found in Pinterest is typically the sort of insight and intelligence a brand needs, but would need to go to great lengths to attain before tailoring its product offering to the tastes of its target audiences.

Categories in the platform include Pinners you follow, Everything, Videos, Popular, and Gifts. These categories will eventually provide fodder for ad targeting. Today, it's a way to categorize pinnings, adding a pin from a URL or computer, or adding a new board, along with a user panel Settings, and Boards & Pins.

Along the left rail, users can see how others have interacted with your pins, individual images that people post, and boards -- themed areas where users collate a selection of similar Pins, followed by the most recent pins from people you follow.

Think of the boards as bulletin boards displaying pictures of events taking place in your life or products you like. Repinning is when users copy a Pin they see to their own board, and Like represents something users may not want to repin, but show their appreciation, explains Greenlight Search's Pinterest Best Practice Guide.

Think of the social data related to interest or intent from Pinterest users that could one day contribute to ad targeting. Then think of the relationships with search engines Pinterest will likely build to serve up some of that content in query results. Type in the keywords "Bose portable speakers" in a search query box on Google or Bing, and a paid-search ad for Logitech serves up at the top of the page or down the right rail, along with boards, pins, pictures and comments related to the audio equipment from people you know.

Pinterest already allows users to share the Pin on blogs and Web sites. Users can email an image URL or share the content as a Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet, just by clicking on a Pin. The guide tells us that Pinterest has just been introduced as one of the 60 new apps available on Facebook's Open Graph.

Greenlight explains that Pinterest allows users to share images by copying and pasting the code on blogs and Web sites. The sourcelink generated is crawlable. It can pass authority to the original source where the image was originally found.

The paper outlining best practices reminds marketers that Pinterest is not a broadcast tool similar to Twitter and Facebook. It doesn't encourage what Greenlight calls "product pushing," meaning that brands must look to create Boards that are related to culture and lifestyle based on trends, behind-the-scenes stuff and preliminary product sketches.

The platform provides a place for brands to listen to followers by watching the Pins and boards that users create about personal interests. Greenlight suggests creating a crowdsourcing opportunity by asking people to Pin pictures of themselves with products on themed Boards. Use open boards to initiate competitions, such as pinning an outfit to a Board or ask users to share their own ideas.

Pinterest is also testing affiliate links using skimlinks, a service that automatically replaces links to a product when associated with a program. Greenlight warns that Pinterest could change links for their products if an affiliate program exists.

Do you use Pinterest -- and if so, how do you use it and how does that match up with Greenlight's best practices?

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2 comments on "Pinterest Best Practices For Search Marketers".

1. PM Digital from PM Digital
   

   commented on: February 22, 2012 at 10:40 a.m.
   Great article! We are using Pinterest and recently wrote a blog post full of best practices. Click here to check it out: http://blog.pmdigital.com/2012/02/pinterest-information-and-best-practices-for-brand-marketers
2. Roberto Ty from TYDESIGN
   

   commented on: February 22, 2012 at 4:43 p.m.
   Updated: Pinterest has stopped using skimlinks for now.

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