Good morning. I’m Mike from New Media Europe and this is day 19 of 100 new media tools to promote the conference, New Media Europe. We live in a visual world, right? Just as your replies on Snapchat prove to me, thank you very much, Simon Springer, Adam Roberts, DJ Vallauri, I should really be looking at Pinterest. I’ve got confession to make. I haven’t played with Pinterest for at least four or five years. Now there are just so many features you can pin by location, you can pin videos, you can even sell things on Pinterest. Here’s my personal profile, avatar not updated, by the way, let’s go into one of my boards and I’ve got posts here that, well, really are about two years old.
Top Social Traffic Referrers
I’ve got a very old profile here for Music Radio Creative with a few boards. When I look at the social analysts for Music Radio Creative on Facebook, our number one traffic referrer, Twitter at number two, Scoop surprising at three, YouTube at four, Pinterest is five, though. New Media Europe is a different story. Twitter number one referrer followed by Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, Google+, even Ning, but Pinterest way down at the very bottom. And that can easily be explained. We don’t even have a Pinterest profile for New Media Europe. My team and I plan to change that today.
Pinterest Website Traffic
Our goal is to take Pinterest into the top five social referrers for New Media Europe. Is it possible even to make Pinterest the number one social referrer? My story of the day 19, I’m going to show you how to set up a Pinterest profile for business for beginners, and then I’m going to get some boards set up and start delegating out some ideas to grow our Pinterest following for New Media Europe, and as a result, drive some traffic.
Get a Pinterest Business Account
First and foremost, don’t make the mistake of signing up for a personal account. You want to go to business.pinterest.com and sign up for a business profile. Very simple, 15-second signup with e-mail, password, business name, type, and your URL. Then you click create account. It’s going to ask you to follow five topics, so I might, for instance, go for blog and then podcast, and so on, until we get some topics that we like. It’s also going to ask you to grab the Pinterest plugin button, which I’ll let my team know about so that they can use that as they’re posting up to New Media Europe’s Pinterest board.
Confirm Your Website with Pinterest
All right. My Pinterest feed is set up, and really cool, you’ve got analytics as a business, as well, that’s why you should sign up as a business so you can see where all that lovely traffic is coming. So I need to fill out my empty profile a bit now. Edit profile, business name there just under the profile picture, the lovely URL is already Pinterest.com/newmediaeurope, stick in the bio, and also location, as well. Finally, to complete Pinterest business setup, just confirm the website by clicking confirm website and then grab in the code, stick it in the head of your index page. If you’re running WordPress, then it should be really easy to do that with a header and footer plugin, add it to the head section of your homepage, paste it in there, and off you go.
Create Boards Geared Towards Your Target Audience
Before I create the first five or so boards to get the team started, I want to go back to the about us page of the conference and remind myself of who exactly we are looking to target. Pinterest has traditionally been very friendly with Google, so it could be you create a board and it starts ranking in Google. You could use something like the Google keyword planner for this to help you create board title. Here’s something I’m going to be using. Pinterest has its very own search and suggest feature, so if I type in blog, immediately blogging for beginners, tips, ideas for money, perfect ideas for boards.
How to Set Up a Pinterest Board
Setting up the first board now, blogging for beginners with a little description, again, containing words like tips and ideas, category technology, don’t want it to be secret, no collaborators. Right. It’s taken about 15 minutes to get those five boards set up, and the whole account how I’d like it to be. Now it’s time for my team and I to start pinning and see how much interact we generate, and also, most importantly, how much traffic heads over to the New Media Europe website as a result.
I will be reporting back in the coming weeks on how exactly we do, and also any tips that I pick up along the way.
