How to Optimize Pinterest for Your Startup: 5 Entrepreneurs Share Their Secrets

Guest Author Jul 9, 2012 Tweet

The following answers are provided by The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

1. Authority Provides Great SEO Opportunities

“One thing that never gets mentioned with Pinterest is the search engine optimization opportunities that the social giant provides. Because of its high authority. Pinterest ranks and/or is starting to rank well within Google and other search engines.

“When you create your boards on Pinterest, you are choosing a name for that board, which now becomes an actual page (URL) within the Pinterest website. For example, ‘www.pinterest.com/user/blue-navy-socks.html‘ will become the URL if you are creating a board on blue navy socks. Now, you create a whole page about blue navy socks and there is a possibility – depending on the competition for that keyword and because of Pinterest high authority value – your page you created might rank for blue navy socks!”

- Pablo Palatnik, CEO at ShadesDaddy

2. Create Category-Specific Pinboards

“Pinterest’s Popular section is a great resource for seeing what’s hot right now. Unfortunately, Pinterest does not provide category-specific Popular pages. So if you’re interested in seeing the best Humor content on Pinterest, you can try to find relevant accounts to follow or take your chances on the Humor category page, which isn’t curated – it shows the most recently uploaded Humor content.

“We’re creating a series of Pinboards that repin the best content in specific categories as a resource for those who only want to see the most entertaining content in a category. This is a customer acquisition strategy – as we accumulate thousands of followers, we’re able to begin using these accounts as marketing channels to promote our content and generate awareness of our other products.”

- Emerson Spartz, Founder and CEO at Spartz Media

3. Pins Build Community Quickly

“Since launching my book, Pinterest has been a way to show the audience where the book has ‘traveled.’ Anyone who has a product can use Pinterest to build a community around the product. Pinning everything from what inspired the product to customers taking photos with the products are a couple of ways we have built our community.

“Additionally, when we are ready to launch a new back-end product, Pinterest helps us ‘test’ out the market. We pin to generate awareness and valuable opinions.”

- Nancy T. Nguyen, Founder at Sweet T

4. Creative Quotes Go Places

“People love to laugh, learn something and connect emotionally with things on social media. Sometimes it can’t be all about business – we created ‘Bodisms’ which are sayings that Robert says all the time on our show. We created visual quotes of Bodisms that people connect with through business and life.

“It’s a great way to show another side of our business but also to reach audiences across the boards. We didn’t focus on making them ‘customers,’ we focused on building a fan base through it. If you can figure out a way to get your company’s message across in a fun way, then you will double your return.”

- Ashley Bodi, Co-Founder at Business Beware

5. Where the Fans Gather Together

“We use Pinterest as a hub for community activity. Modify is a very visual brand, and our fans are prolific photographers, showing ‘How I Wore It’ in an assortment of photos. We have tried to take that one step further, by taking imagery of fans that have been submitted through all of our channels – email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – and then tagging audience using Pinterest. Our customers then are able to chat among themselves about styles, interesting photos, etc.

“Cultivating community on Pinterest has helped us in a few ways. First of all, we are able to extend our reach, because a customer’s engagement automatically shares their passion for Modify with friends. Second, we have seen an increase in conversion rates from Pinterest since we started making fans the heroes.”

- Aaron Schwartz, Director of Player Personnel at Modify Watches