The thing about social media is that one platform will work for your small business and another won’t! There are no hard or fast rules to say your small business will fail if you don’t have a Facebook page or that you can’t run a successful etsy shop if you aren’t pinning on Pinterest! Social Media should be an integral part of your marketing plan but not the only part! I love Facebook and I love Twitter and I love Blogging – these work for me, but small businesses in other genre’s may not find these platforms as beneficial. If you are really creative with your images then Instagram and Pinterest will be more your bag!

When Pinterest announced they were setting up small business accounts I jumped in and grabbed “Charlie Moo’s” URL in fear of someone else nabbing it and I have pinned a few bits and bobs but it’s not my thing. I don’t promote it as somewhere I hang out I barely pin anything ekkk! But it’s something a few people have asked me about so here are some fabby tips from Simmi at Grace’s Favours .

How can you build up a following?

It takes time to build up a following. You need to pinning a good mixture of your products and other things, so that people will find you through being interested in different things. Unlike with Twitter and to a certain degree, Facebook, with Pinterest, if someone follows me, I don’t automatically follow them back. So your following won’t necessarily grow by racing round and following people like a demon! I have joined a couple of group boards ( Like this on – “Craft Life board, run by Hillary Pullen of Craft Blog UK“) which allows me to pin things that are relevant to a group of people and I mix up the pins I choose to add, so some of my products and some tips/tutorial type pins, and all of them get a good number of re-pins, which is especially satisfying when they’re my product pics.

Bunny_Rabbit_Kids_Dressing_Up_Easter_Mask_Grace's_Favours[1]

Bunny Dress Up
Grace’s Favours

What are your top pins?

I have found the most heavily pinned things from my blog are my tutorials, which makes sense and is great, because it’s sharing the blogsite with potentially thousands of people I wouldn’t be able to reach alone. Labeling of your pins is important, although the boards, are labelled much more for my own personal use, but they are searchable too, so as many descriptive words in the titles will help. If I search “Campervan” you have to scroll through absolutely masses of pins to find any of my products, even though they all have the word ‘Campervan’ in the title of the pin. But if you search “Campervan Toy” out of the top row of 5 pins, 4 of mine are up there. So you have to think about how people would search for you, in the same way as when you’re listing products on a website, or labeling a blog post.

Previously Viv from Poppy Sparkles mentioned finding one of her pieces of work pinned to a board entitled ‘craft projects’ and not being happy about the idea that someone else was going to try and replicate her work for themselves. Does this bother you?

In my opinion, those people are not likely to buy from you if they feel they can make it for themselves. It’s really irritating, but I think it comes with the territory. In the old days, people like that would go into shops, look at something and then try and replicate it at home, they never had any intention of buying it. Now it’s just made easier in that they can keep the image and refer back to it. What worries me more about people pinning my products to boards entitled ‘craft ideas’ or ‘things to try’ is that they will copy something and then try and sell it as their own design. Thankfully it’s not happened to me, but I’ve seen so many occurrences of it with other designers, that it’s something I’m very conscious of. I think the practice of annotating pictures, so that when they are pinned and re-pinned and eventually lose the source, is a great one, it’s much harder to get rid of the annotations and most people won’t bother to try, which at least protects the source of the material. (thank you so much for your piece on that the other day “maximise your images share potential” … it made me get off my bum and do it for my tutorial pics as they’re the most heavily pinned photos I have)

www.livingwellspendingless.com

How do you drive traffic to Pinterest and other sites?
In terms of driving traffic, with blog posts, I think if you get the right key words into your pin and a tantalising picture it will encourage people to click through to the blog… especially titles like ‘5 ways to design like a professional’ or ‘5 mistakes businesses make on Facebook’, etc. If you sell on Etsy then you can see in your stats how many of the page views have come from different sources. For me Pinterest is the 5th highest traffic source for my Etsy shop.

Love to hear your opinions on Pinterest. If you have a success story to share please do leave me a comment! Thanks for reading … now get pinning!

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