Pinterest is a social media and a visual search engine often overlooked but can be an excellent tool for businesses.
With over 400 million active monthly users, the platform has become one of the primary sources of inspiration for fashion, food, relationships, weddings, and much more.
Unfortunately, many businesses have not yet discovered how to use it for their brand’s marketing purposes. If you are not yet using Pinterest for your business, you are missing out.
Pinterest is an excellent place to grow your business and engage with your target audience. But, there are still some costly mistakes that can hurt your brand image unknowingly, making you lose potential leads.
Are you making any of these mistakes?
15 Disastrous Mistakes To Avoid on Pinterest
1. Disregarding Pinterest Guidelines
Every platform has a set of rules to help the users have the best experience, and Pinterest is not an exception.
Pinterest guidelines do not allow creating content that is about
- Adult content
- Exploitation
- Hateful activities
- Misinformation
- Harrasement & Criticism
- Private Information
- Seld-injury and harmful behavior
- Graphical violence & threats
- Violent actors
- Dangerous goods & activities
- Harmful or deceptive products & practices
- Impersonification
You can read the details of each point here. So, go through the guidelines to see which of them you’re doing unknowingly.
2. You Don’t Have A Business Account
There are two account types on Pinterest; Personal and business accounts. Even though they are both free to use, a business account has many merits over a personal account.
For example, if you want to expand your business growth on Pinterest, a business account is a must-have.
The advantage is that you can access more features such as rich pins, promoted pins, Pinterest ads, analytics, claim your website, and more.
3. Not Linking Your Website With Pinterest
Pinterest is an excellent tool for driving traffic to your website and increasing your conversion rates.
So it’s essential to link your website with your Pinterest account.
But how?
First, you need to show Pinterest that you’re the site owner by claiming your website.
After then, Pinterest will display your website URL in front of your profile, helping you drive massive traffic to your blog.
Pinterest will give you access to analytics, promoted pins, Pinterest ads, rich pins, and add your profile picture to all your pins.
4. Not Optimizing For Search
Many people see Pinterest as a social media platform forgetting that it’s a search engine.
Users on the platform search for creative ideas with keywords, and if your board doesn’t have keywords in the description and title, it may not appear in the search results.
So, pick a niche for your business and create boards with different categories of your interests.
Then, optimize your titles and descriptions, targeting long-tail keywords to increase your chance of being found.
5. Slow Website
When people look at your pin images and the description on Pinterest, they become eager to check out the information on your website.
Only for them to stay forever before your website loads. The truth is they may leave your site for another without returning.
Hence, optimizing your website speed is essential, especially on mobile. In addition, Google prioritizes the mobile view of the website for indexing.
So, ensure you check your website speed regularly and follow the recommendations to fix any issue.
6. Incomplete Profile
People interested in your content will find it difficult to locate you when you don’t have a complete profile title and description.
So fill in your complete profile and optimize for search; a summary of who you are and what you wish to offer to users on Pinterest.
7. Poor Pin Design
Pinning generic images without captions or descriptions will not attract the impression you want. Likewise, a poor pin design can ruin the intended message of the pin.
When creating your images, keep in mind that Pinterest recommends vertical pins of ratio 2:3, for example, 1000 x 1500 pixels. It’s not that the superlong, square, or horizontal image sizes are not good, but they may be cut off or look out of place, especially on mobile devices.
If you want to generate massive traffic and increase engagement for your pins, create high-quality images of the correct size.
8. Low-Quality Content
While it’s essential to market your products on Pinterest, you should not pin products to sell only; include useful information.
By doing that, you are helping your audience with valuable and helpful information to help your audience solve their problems.
9. Not Pinning Frequently
Many people give up on Pinterest easily because they don’t see immediate results forgetting that it takes time.
Also, if you don’t post pins regularly, your followers may forget who you are and stop following your board which will cause low engagement with your pins.
So, create pins regularly and then schedule them to your boards bit by bit. You can use tools like Tailwind to save and share content to Pinterest.
10. Spamming Your Boards
Pinterest may view your content as spammy if you pin the same pin without changing the text or image.
So, when next you want to repin your post, try to change the images, text, and colors to look different from the previous one.
11. Putting All Effort on Followers
While it’s not enough to just pin pictures, you want to interact with the community and see what’s trending, too! You’ll be able to create better pins and get more followers this way.
But you will be making a big mistake if your focus is only on followers instead of what you want to accomplish with your business.
Engage with users and follow other businesses within your niche but don’t make it your ultimate goal.
12. Using Other People’s Image
Pinterest is a social media site that allows you to share your ideas and interests through visuals.
However, many users often post their photos, which can be a mistake if you copy them without the right license. You could be sued for copyright infringement.
So, choose your images carefully from the right source, for example, with a free license to use. But, even with that, don’t upload the image directly, add some text, change the colors, etc.
13. Not Tracking Your Metrics
Monitoring your analytics can help you learn more about your audience’s needs and get you more engagement.
In addition, it gives you a good insight into your overall engagement, impressions, total audience, and engaged audience. With this information, you know what’s working and where you need to improve.
The good news is it’s free to access for all business accounts.
14. Using Link Shortner
Pinterest does not support using a link shortener to shorten your links because they want people to be taken to exactly where the URL says.
The reason is to prevent spam and all related issues.
15. Not Creating Your Board
It’s a big mistake to focus on pinning other users’ images without creating your own boards.
Creating your board allows you to manage and save your photos, images, and videos of the same category in one place.
So, create up to 15 boards and optimize the board name for the search.
Conclusion
Pinterest is a great social media channel to expand your business growth, and if you can avoid these mistakes, there’s every possibility that you stay on the good side of Pinterest.
And if you want to engage with more people on Pinterest, focus on creating high-quality content and publish your pins regularly.
Over to you
Do you have more tips to add to the list? Please leave them in the comment.
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