Brett Relander     socialmediatoday

Ready to ramp up your efforts on Pinterest? Here are the no-fail guidelines to become a real “pinner.”

You can generate lots of traffic from Pinterest in a short amount of time. You can make your path even quicker if you let these 9 rules guide you to success:

Rule 1: Keep your boards in order. A common mistake is to dump all your content onto one board. Instead, use different boards to break down content in a way that makes sense. This is a way to broaden your reach by reaching out to multiple segments of your audience. Doing this also shows your followers that you respect their time enough to have your content organized.

Rule 2: Image quality matters. For Pinterest, which is all about images, this seems like something that shouldn’t have to be said. Yet many images uploaded are actually blurry or too small. Or, just as bad, have an obvious watermark.

Of course, this guideline should be about much more than just avoiding the bad. Not every image has to be something that qualifies to hang in a museum, but the more effort you put into making your images as professional as possible pays real dividends.

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BrandLove, LLC     brandlovellc.wordpress.com

If your brand still isn’t using Pinterest, then it’s time to step in and take advantage of its enormous popularity – by now, it’s certain that Pinterest isn’t a fad, so don’t wait anymore. Since Pinterest has been made primarily for the B2C market, running contests in one of the most effective strategies on Pinterest: it is easy, can be inexpensive and it will help you engage with your audience in the ways that will increase referral traffic to your website and generate buzz about your brand. Really, any business that relies on driving a high-volume of website traffic to increase sales, should consider joining Pinterest. Research indicates that Pinterest is more effective at driving traffic to websites than any other social platform, even Facebook.

Here is why you should run a contest on Pinterest:

• Pinterest is the third most popular social network in the U.S. in terms of traffic.
• Pinterest has accumulated 14.9 million users as of July 2012.
• Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3 times more efficiently than Twitter was at a similar time in its history.
• Over 80% of pins are repins, demonstrating the tremendous “virality” at work in the Pinterest community.
• Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic as of January 2012.
• Shoppers referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to make a purchase than visitors who arrive from other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

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Kaila Strong     Search Engine Watch

Navigating the choppy waters of a new social networking site can be challenging as a marketer. The latest social media site to have marketers buzzing these days is Pinterest. Experian Hitwise finds Pinterest is the new No. 3 social site on the web (total visitors), just slightly ahead of LinkedIn. Massive growth and popularity prove Pinterest is a wise avenue for your next marketing dollars. But how can you use it?

Pinterest Guide for Marketers – Introductory,  one of the first things you need to understand about Pinterest is what the heck it is. The site is “A content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pin board.” Pinterest allows users to create customized themed boards to pin their images, video and other objects to. The board and theme are as creative as the individual and for marketers this can be ripe ground for our talent.

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Louise Julig     SocialMedia Examiner

Callan Green, senior social media specialist at Sony Electronics, never thought she would want a pair of leather pants. “But I saw enough pins on Pinterest that I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to own them,’ and I went out and bought some.” It was the fall of 2011 and she was discovering firsthand the power of Pinterest to drive sales. The image-based, pinboard-sharing social media site launched in March 2010 is now the third-largest social network, behind Facebook and Twitter. In March 2012, it tallied 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day. “We were all using [Pinterest] personally,” said Green of the social media team at Sony Electronics, “and realized the power of the platform to drive people’s interest in purchasing.”

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