Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business (Ultimate Series) - Softcover

PIN YOUR WAY TO PROFITS

How would you like to share your brand, service or products with millions of prospects who are eager to learn more, likely buy, and happy to repin (refer) for thousands of others to see? Pinterest offers this and more.

Bestselling author Karen Leland uncovers the opportunities hiding within this social media phenomenon and reveals what you need to know to participate, promote, and ultimately, profit from Pinterest. Using simple steps, and business-specific applications and solutions, learn how to set up an attractive company profile, reach and engage your target market, identify new markets, develop an enthusiastic following, enhance your reputation, and so much more.

Chapter 2: Create a Pinterest Profile That Rocks
In the previous chapter, you learned how to join Pinterest as either an individual or a business/brand. Once connected, your next step is to set up your account profile—and here’s where you have an opportunity to create a killer first impression.

If you’re a serious entrepreneur, hot-shot marketer, or just plain smart, you will take the time to maximize your Pinterest profile to its fullest. The more the people who check out your pins know about you, the stronger your personal and business brand will be.

For individuals, before you begin to enter your autobiographical information, Pinterest will ask you to follow five boards that share your same interests. Not to worry; you can always unfollow them later when you have time to step back and apply some strategic thinking to the types of boards you want to create, including the names you give them. In Chapter 4, you will find step-by-step instructions on setting up, naming, and designing your boards.

For businesses and brands, you will be taken directly into the profile setup as part of joining, without having to choose starting boards. While the process for creating a profile is similar for businesses and individuals, there are some slight variations. But since there are some overlaps, read through the information for creating each for the useful tips that apply to both.

CREATING AN INDIVIDUAL PROFILE
Once you have chosen a few starter boards, you will need to locate the settings file, under your name, and complete the profile process. Profile elements include:
Email
Not to worry; this isn’t shown on your public profile.
Email Preferences
By default, Pinterest is set up to notify you right, left, and center about all the great new happenings in the world of all things pin, such as news updates and a summary of weekly activity. Pinterest will also email you when:
One of your pins gets liked
One of your pins receives a comment
One of your pins is repinned
One of your group pinboards receives a new pin
A new user decides to follow you

If all this sounds like just too much of an inbox influx of pinning information, your notifications are the place in your profile to set limits. By going through each of the various options, you can change your email settings to decide when you do and do not want Pinterest to let you know when one of the above actions is taken.

First and Last Name
This is a different field than your username on Pinterest and should reflect your real name, or the name of your business, if your account is being set up for your business.

Username
As discussed earlier, if you created your Pinterest account via Facebook, your username was automatically generated for you. If you signed up via Twitter, you provided a username. In either case, your username is critical because it becomes the URL upon which your Pinterest account is based.

Gender
Now, if this one seems obvious, Pinterest, in all their political correctness, has provided the option of “unspecified” as a gender choice. So if you just don’t feel like being pinned down (no pun intended), you’re free to stay uncommitted.

About
Pinterest only gives you a brief 200 words to describe yourself or your business in this section, so make them count. They are text-only and can’t be changed into bold or italics, just plain old letters. Since these are the details that someone sees when they visit your profile page, aim for information that lets the viewer get an at-a-glance look at who you are, what you offer, and why they should care. You may want to consider including your basic elevator speech about what you do; your book, business, or product name; what you are passionate about pinning; and your website address. By the way, it won’t be a live link.

Keep in mind that to strengthen your brand, you should maintain a consistent message across all your social media platforms. This means that a similar description should show up on Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other places on the internet where you publicly declare your brand.

Location
One advantage to adding your location to your profile is that potential customers looking for a local resource will be able to see that you are geographically desirable. If for some reason you would rather remain a gypsy, just leave this section blank.

Website
Pinterest only allows you to list one website URL, so if you have several websites, think carefully about which one you place here. In general, I recommend to my clients that they use their main website. You can always go back later and easily change this by editing your profile. By the way, unlike in your “About” section, this website URL is a live link represented by the world symbol under your profile pic, which visitors can click through to your site.

Profile Photo
If you are one of those people who think that forgoing a profile photo is an OK option—it’s not. By some accounts, social media profiles with photographs are seven times more likely to be viewed than those without. When you first sign up for Pinterest, it will pull a profile image from whichever social network (Facebook or Twitter) you connected with at startup. However, you can change that image at any time via three methods:

Upload an Image
This allows you to instantly browse your computer and find the image file you want to upload as your profile picture. The exact size of your Pinterest profile picture is 160 by 160 pixels. Stretching or shrinking to fit will automatically resize square images that are larger or smaller than 160 by 160 pixels. Rectangular images are centered, resized, and cropped, possibly leaving you with a profile picture that is less than optimal. For this reason, the ideal image is a square photo around 200 by 200 pixels in size.

Refresh from Facebook
If you have chosen to integrate your Facebook with your Pinterest account, you can instantly update your profile photo to match the image being used on your Facebook account. Just click “update,” and your profile is automatically changed. Remember to hit the “Save Profile” button at the end before exiting.

Refresh from Twitter
Opting to also connect your Twitter account to Pinterest works in the same way as the Facebook button. You can change your current profile image to match the one you are using on Twitter with one click. Again, save before exiting to have the change take hold.

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FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ACCOUNTS
Even though Pinterest no longer requires you to sign up by linking to your Facebook or Twitter account, once you are in, you can adjust your profile to link as you like. However, before taking this step, consider a few things:

By turning on the “Publish Activity To Facebook Timeline” button in the settings, you are creating another form of engagement with your tribe. If you’re worried about bombarding your friends with nonstop images, don’t be. Pinterest publishes your pins as a group, not one at a time.

If you want to Tweet your pins, switching the “Login with Twitter” setting to “On” allows you to automatically send any new pin you create to your tweet stream by simply checking the Twitter box that appears when you create a new pin.
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To Hide or Not to Hide?
Most people want their Pinterest boards to be as public and accessible as possible for marketing and branding purposes. But if you want to hide your Pinterest account from the search engines, you can do so in your profile settings, via an on/off button at the bottom part of the profile page, just above the “Delete Account” button. When you start your account, the default setting is “off,” which I...