Dad of Divas' Reviews: Book Review - Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business

Friday, May 3, 2013

Book Review - Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business

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About the Book
Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that allows users to create a visual, online pinboard with images they love organized around topics of their choice by category. It’s the fastest growing social media site in history, the third-largest network after Facebook and Twitter and has over 25 million members and 10 million unique visitors a month.

The most recent studies indicate that nearly 20 percent of women using the Internet are on Pinterest, 72 percent of Pinterest users are female, and 66 percent of those are age 35 or older, and the average amount of time visitors spend surfing the Pinterest site is an hour.

Karen Leland, author of the new book “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” has created a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to hitting the road running and quickly making Pinterest into a valuable source of prospects, promotion and profits.

“Great business brands are about telling compelling, congruent stories, and Pinterest is at its core about storytelling in pictures,” says Leland. “Pinterest has tapped into this visceral lover of visuals, and no small business, entrepreneur or corporation can afford to miss the boat on bringing what they offer beyond words and into images.”

Taken from her new book “The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” Leland offers these top tactics for achieving maximum performance in business on Pinterest.
  1. Strategize First and Pin Second: Consider your objectives before you pin. Are you trying to: drive traffic to your website, boost your brand awareness, promote new products or services, educate your customer base, enhance customer understanding and enthusiasm, increase prospects and sales or improve customer service? Depending on your strategy, you will want to pick the images that best support your objective.
  2. Manage and Balance Your Percentages: Create inviting boards by making 40 percent of your pins motivational and inspiring, 40 percent instructional and educational, and only 20 percent about your brand — including products, services, sales items, profiles, specials and contests.
  3. Make Your Website Pin Friendly: Install the Pin It Button on your website and give every page and blog post a featured image that can be pinned automatically. In addition, put a social media “Follow me on Pinterest” button on your home page.
  4. Share With, Engage and Promote Others: Build your brand by engaging with others through re-pinning, commenting on and liking other pins. You can also tag @ another pinner you are following in one of your pin descriptions. Engaging with others in these ways generates flow back to your Pinterest.
  5. Establish Your Expertise: Craft keyword-rich pin and board titles and descriptions to boost your Google ranking and be found for your expertise. Use hashtags # to highlight key words and phrases your customers search for. In addition, emphasize pins with a focus on problems and solutions you specialize in.
  6. Integrate Pinterest With Your Other Social Media: Connect with your other social media by creating a Pinterest tab on Facebook, tweeting your pins, and embedding pins in your blog posts.
  7. Organize Your Pinboard: Research shows that pins placed front and center receive the highest percentage of viewers and capture the most attention. So place your most important pins near the middle of the top or second row of the board.
  8. Give Away Value-Added Information: According to Pinerly, pins that have a call to action see an 80 percent increase in engagement. Post pins that focus on free reports, e-books, videos and podcasts you offer. Be sure to add a live link to each of those pins’ descriptions.
  9. Leverage the Power of Multimedia: Make your Pinboards more interactive by sharing videos, webinars, teleclasses, screencasts and podcasts. Good multimedia pins include: presentations, expert tutorials, product demos, behind-the-scenes tours and excerpts from live recorded interviews, courses and trainings.


About the Author
Karen Leland is the best-selling author of nine business books and the President of Sterling Marketing Group, where she works with entrepreneurs, small businesses and Fortune 500 companies around the globe on building stronger personal and business brands. Her clients have included AT&T, American Express, Marriott Hotels, Apple Computer and Johnson & Johnson, among others.

She is a regular speaker for business groups and has spoken for the Young Presidents' Organization, American Management Association and Direct Marketing Association, among others. Karen is a frequent guest of the media and has been interviewed on "The Today Show," CNN, CNBC and "Oprah."

She writes a regular branding and marketing column for Entrepreneur.com and has been published in Woman's Day, Self, The Los Angeles Times and others. Her latest book is "Entrepreneur Magazine's Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business."

My Take on the Book
This was a well written book that has some great tips for businesses on how to best utilize Pinterest within their marketing. With this being such a growing social media channel, I for one was definitely looking to learn more (as I have yet to master the site myself). Thus, personally and professionally this book gives you a ton of tips that will open your eyes to ways in which you can better coordinate your social media efforts on this platform. On top of this, the author does a great job at helping you better understand how to allow Pinterest work for you. I loved the way in which the book was set up and you are able to easily find whatever you are looking for while easily learning new concepts that will aid you in becoming an expert on Pinterest.

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1 comment:

Alexander Zwilling said...

Pinterest has quickly jumped onto the radar of brands and businesses over the past few months and it’s gaining a lot of momentum. There’s a lot of talk about this picture-centric social network, and rightfully so.