If you want to see what the future of the Web will look like, just follow the money. Venture capitalists have plowed another $200 million into Pinterest, ReadWrite reports, following a $225 million infusion of cash in October 2013. According to ReadWrite, Pinterest is looking to move beyond its roots as an image sharing social network and perhaps challenge text-based Google itself and become an image-based search engine and e-commerce channel.
Communicators are facing their own related professional challenge—to shift from text-based to visual communications and keep pace with technological advancements. Kevin Dando, senior director, digital marketing & communications for PBS, and a speaker at PR News' June 3 Social Media Summit in New York, offers eight tips here to help you make the shift to using Pinterest effectively for your visual communications.
1. Focus on metrics. What are you tracking and why on Pinterest? You can track repins, traffic sources, most popular pins. Consider using a monitoring service like Curalate to track Pinterest-related metrics.
2. Use other social media, like Twitter, to promote not only your Pinterest account but also specific pins.
3. Schedule daily stand-up and weekly social media strategy meetings to see what visual resources and ideas are available and to coordinate promotion. These meetings will go a long way toward answering communicators' common question of where they're supposed to find a source of visuals.
4. Be careful about the source of repins. Ensure the provenance of pins is accurate before repinning content.
5. Be a good community member. Resist the urge to only pin brand-related content. Show off content that is complementary to yours.
6. Carefully consider the naming of your Pinterest boards. Be clever and enigmatic in the naming of your boards. A board called "Stars in the Galaxy" could refer to actual stars in the sky or movie stars. Make people wonder what's in the board.
7. Pursue collaboration boards with other organizations with similar/complementary content. Make sure all collaborators cross-promote the board.
8. If someone has chosen to follow your brand on Pinterest, show them why that was a good decision with content you think they'll appreciate.
Learn more from social media experts like Kevin Dando at PR News' June 3 Social Media Summit in New York.
Follow Kevin Dando: @kdando
Follow Steve Goldstein: @SGoldsteinAI