What is Pinterest and how does it work in B to B?

Pinterest: What is it and How Does it Benefit Businesses?

What is Pinterest For?

Pinterest is a social network created by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, and Ben Silbermann in 2010. Pinterest's unique feature is that it only allows publishing of infographics, photos, and now videos. Very little text appears on it, making it a highly visual social network.

Posts on Pinterest are different from what we're used to seeing on other social networks - they don't have a self-promotional purpose.

Users of this social network genuinely share their interests, passions, and best practices. Pinterest counts nearly 400 million active users each month, with over 200 billion pins saved.

People visit Pinterest to find inspiration and new ideas. You'll frequently find posts about: DIY, fashion, decoration, cooking recipes... Popular themes that give it the reputation of being primarily a female social network. It's used by 70% women, although about 40% of new users are men.

Today, this social network increasingly interests professionals in their content marketing strategy for several reasons:

• It can significantly improve your organic search rankings

• Posts have a lifespan of up to 4 months versus barely a few minutes on Twitter, for example

• Advertisers now have the ability to sponsor their posts

How Does Pinterest Work?

Pinterest operates on a principle of pins and boards.

All posts you see on the homepage can be saved to your profile. You also have the ability to create boards and sub-boards within your main boards to organize the content you've saved.

Another feature that distinguishes Pinterest from other social networks is that you can only interact with a post through comments. Only videos have the ability to receive "like" interactions.

On this social network, simply saving a post constitutes an interaction. Basically, the more your post is saved, the more relevant it is in Pinterest's eyes.

Pinterest also gives you the ability to follow users you appreciate to have their content in your feed and/or be notified if there's something new on their profile.

In Pinterest jargon, you'll frequently encounter or hear the following terms:

• Boards: the boards/collections

• Follow: subscribing to a user

• Pins: a post or the act of saving a post

• Pin it button: allows you to add pins to your boards. You'll more often hear "I pinned it to my profile" rather than "Pin it"

Infographics at the Heart of Pinterest

In its early days, users mainly published infographics. Over time, it has seen some evolution allowing users to publish photos and videos. Nevertheless, the must-have on Pinterest remains infographics.

But what exactly is an infographic?

An infographic is a content format widely used on the web to visually illustrate reading material. It's generally used in blog articles as a "summary" of a section or entire article to highlight key information and/or figures.

Video - Emerging Content on Pinterest

For some time now, videos have been present on Pinterest and, like elsewhere, they're gaining momentum across all social networks.

Easily "consumable" and interactive, video marketing is increasingly used by businesses as it allows for a 27% increase in click-through rates and a 34% increase in web conversion rates.

The ability to add native videos to Pinterest is fairly recent. Previously, it was possible to share video content, but it was only visible as an image. For example, if you wanted to share a YouTube video, you had to put the video link directly and not the video itself. Result: you'd see an image appear on Pinterest, not the video...

Adding this new functionality offers more opportunities for businesses since it allows differentiation and catching the eye in the flow of infographics and photos. However, it should be used sparingly to maximize its effectiveness.

Pinterest and SEO

In addition to keeping pins for up to 4 months, this social network has another advantage that's little known and underestimated by businesses: backlinks.

Quick SEO minute: What's a backlink?

A backlink is literally a "return link" or "incoming link." It refers to a hyperlink within content pointing to another site. For example, in this article, links directing to third-party sites are present - this creates a backlink for those sites.

However, there are two types of backlinks: no-follow and do-follow.

Backlinks marked as no-follow tell search engine robots not to follow and not to consider the link in their SEO calculations. Conversely, do-follow backlinks tell them to follow this link and therefore transmit the "popularity" of the visited content to the link target in their calculations.

Note: Until March 1, 2020, a "no-follow" marking systematically blocked tracking by Google robots. Since then, Google considers them as an "indication" but reserves the right not to take them into account.

Creating backlinks presents a double benefit:

1. It increases your traffic

2. It improves your site's ranking in search engine results

The question at this point is: Okay, but how does Pinterest factor into this?

Pinterest offers the ability within its posts to introduce a link pointing to your website. Unlike a post via a Facebook or LinkedIn account, this won't decrease your post's visibility, so you won't need to resort to hacks to "counter the algorithm." The links on pins will constitute do-follow backlinks. They'll point to your site telling search engine robots "go check out this site, it's legitimate."

The cherry on top? Pinterest is considered a site with very high authority.

Result: your SEO will be (greatly) improved.

Organic search is a VERY vast subject, so if you're interested, you can check out [this article].

Complementing Your Content Strategy

Beyond SEO, all the efforts you put into producing content for your Pinterest account won't be in vain. Content can be used in different ways:

Blog Articles

As we saw earlier, an infographic is content often used in blog articles because they qualitatively illustrate articles. It also has other advantages:

• For readers, having an infographic in an article makes reading more enjoyable and helps them better retain information

• For Google, introducing an infographic into an article brings content diversity and therefore richness. This improves your SEO

Social Networks

On social networks, infographics are actually quite underused.

However, they bring great content diversity, especially on LinkedIn, and have very good virality.

By publishing infographics on other social networks, you can communicate about your articles in a different way. Remember, a blog post performs well if it's optimized, and communication contributes to this. By using infographics from your articles, you'll give less impression of republishing the same content and spamming your audience.

How to Use Pinterest to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Creating a Pinterest Business Account

Now you know the potential Pinterest represents for your business. All that's left is to take action.

Creating a Pinterest Business Account

• ‍Step 1: Go to Pinterest
• ‍Step 2: Click "Sign up" in the top right
• ‍Step 3: Click "Create a business account"
• ‍Step 4: Fill in information (email, password, and age). Then click "Create account"
• ‍Step 5: Configure your profile, fill in all information regarding your company name, website, and language
• ‍Step 6: Choose the category that corresponds to you, then click "Next"
• ‍Step 7: Click "I don't know yet" and "Next" - Otherwise, you'll get spammed with emails to create ads
• ‍Step 8: You have a choice 🙂 You can fill in information if you want to learn more about Pinterest ads. If this doesn't interest you, click "Skip"
• ‍Step 9: Choose "Present your brand" -

Before moving to pin publishing, you need to optimize your profile and set up certain features for backlinks.

Let's look at that in the next section!

Optimizing and Authenticating Your Business Account

Profile optimization is necessary to create traffic and allow users to find you more easily in the search bar. Your account will be seen as more attractive to users and they may potentially subscribe to your content and/or pin your boards. The more they're seen, the more visits you'll have to your website and potentially incoming leads.

In addition to optimizing your profile, you must authenticate your Pinterest account to activate certain features necessary for Google to recognize backlinks.

1. Activate features to make it a pro account

2. Activate the feature for Google (to recognize links)

Step 1: Optimize Your Profile

If you haven't left the previous page, you'll still be in your profile settings.

Otherwise, click the profile icon in the top right, then "Settings."

Once you're on the "Edit your profile" page, fill in:

1. Your business name

2. Username: This will personalize your Pinterest profile URL and allow users to find your profile when searching on search engines

3. Your profile description: In this section, you should present yourself concisely while highlighting what you are. The description should make users want to follow you and engage with your content

Finally, fill in all location-related information below.

Step 2: Click "Claim your content" in the left column

• Once in the category, enter your website and click "Claim"

• If you have an Instagram account and YouTube channel, you can also claim your content

• Simply click "Claim" your content and log into your social networks on the new page that opens

Organizing Your Pinterest Profile

Why Organize Your Pinterest Profile

Once you've created your professional account, you'll be able to pin photos, videos, and infographics on Pinterest. But a small prerequisite is necessary!

Before publishing on Pinterest, you need to organize your profile by creating boards and sub-boards inside based on the topics you cover, for several reasons:

1. The more organized your Pinterest profile is, the more optimized it will be and generate traffic. You should create a minimum of 10 boards on your profile, including one collaborative board (covered later in this article) to make it performant.

2. When you publish, you'll gain efficiency because you won't need to categorize everything later.

3. Your readers will find content more easily if it's organized.

#tip: Create boards based on all the themes you cover on your blog.

Creating Pinterest Boards: Tutorial

• ‍Step 1: Go to your profile and click "Boards" ‍
• Step 2: Create a Pinterest sub-board - Go to the + then click "Add a sub-board," name it and create it.

Publishing a Pin on Pinterest

Creating and Optimizing a Pin

Step 1: Create a Pin

Two options:

1. You just created a sub-board (see step 4 above). Go back to + and click "Create a pin"

2. You left the page and want to publish a pin. Go to your profile then to boards and sub-boards. Then click the board you want to publish in. Click + and "Create a pin"

Step 2: Optimize Your Pin

To publish well on Pinterest, you must optimize your publication:

1. Add an engaging title with keywords

2. Fill in a clear and concise description that makes people want to know more. You must spark interest in the people you're targeting. Don't put more than 3 hashtags in the description, otherwise it affects its visibility potential

3. Add the link to the article and/or page

4. Introduce your content

When to Publish on Pinterest

To generate significant traffic on your Pinterest profile, you need to publish between 15 and 20 pins per day. This requires considerable content production effort.

The minimum publication would be 5, but that's still significant.

You can spread pin publication over the week to one per day.

The best publication times are between 2 PM and 4 PM and 8 PM and 1 AM. The best day to publish is Saturday.

To compensate for lack of publication and create traffic on the Pinterest profile, you can create a collaborative board (the 10th board mentioned above). The collaborative board consists of pinning content you see on Pinterest inside this board to create traffic on your profile. People who use collaborative boards for their profile can also ask for your content and pin yours.

To avoid doing this manually and wasting too much time, you can use the following extensions:

• Pinterest "Save" button: You can install the button on your web browser. This extension lets you pin all content you see on the web or your Pinterest account by clicking save on the image

• Tailwind: It allows you to pre-save all content that interests you on Pinterest and schedule pins in the collaborative board

All that's left is to wish you success in making your mark and visiting our Pinterest account sometime!