6 Ways to Promote Your Business With Pinterest Places

How Place Pins Work

Businesses now have two ways to associate their pins with a geographic location. In addition to rich pins, Pinterest introduced Pinterest place pins in November 2013.

Place pins use Foursquare‘s location API combined with Mapbox’s map technology. Plus, if a location you want to pin doesn’t show up, you can simply add it.

Brands can create a board to focus on places in a single city or country, or a board that focuses on similar places across the globe.

This board from Outside Magazine shares places across the United States.

This tool is a dream come true for companies in the travel industry. Just check out Hotels.com‘s Hit the Slopes board of best places to ski, New York City: The Official Guide’s Free (and Almost Free) in NYC board and all of the #VXTraveler City Guides on Virgin America’s Pinterest page. Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts has a variety of place boards, showcasing everything from concierge suggestions to honeymoon destinations.

However, just about any company can think outside the box and come up with a creative way to use Pinterest place pins.

Outside Magazine created a board to share places across the United States that offer lots of outside recreation opportunities to their residents.

Use place pins not only for your locations, but to share other places that would be of interest to your followers.

How to Create a Pinterest Places Board

To get started, select Place Boards in the menu from the upper left-hand corner of your Pinterest profile.

The Place Boards option has been added to the main Pinterest menu.

From there, click on Create Board. As you fill in the fields, make sure you select the Add a Map option.

Be sure the Add a Map option has Yes next to it.

On the next page, start adding pins by clicking on Add a Place.

Place pin boards display with a map behind them.

This is where you assign a city location to your pin. Once you choose a city, your searches will return results for venues in that location. For example, Bonefish Grill has several locations across the nation, but only the Boise location showed up in my search.

Manage the location of your place pin by changing the city.

As you add place pins, you can change the city location at any time, which makes it easy to share multiple locations for the same vendor on one map.

Now that you know how to create a board for your place pins, let’s see how you can use them in everyday promotion efforts.

#1: Map Your Brick-and-Mortar Locations

How great would it be if people who found you on Pinterest knew exactly where your nearest location is?

Whether you have one location or a dozen, Pinterest place pins let you provide your customers with a visual guide to where they can find you.

Starbucks Coffee did a nice twist on this concept. They created a Store Design board and pinned the locations of their uniquely designed stores.

Starbucks’ Store Design board has pins for uniquely designed stores throughout the world.

Create a Locations board to highlight your locations in one country or around the world. Whether you want to add a unique slant, as Starbucks did, is up to you.

#2: Pin Your Clients

Part of positioning your brand or business is pointing toward the clients you choose to work with.

When you display your current clients on a map with Pinterest place pins, it’s easy to see how far your geographic influence reaches. You can also provide a link back to their sites so potential clients can see the companies you work with and what they do.

Create a Client board to showcase both the quantity and quality of your current clients to anyone who’s thinking of working with you in the future.

#3: Pin Ideas for Your Clients/Customers

Another option is to create a board with tips for your clients based on where they’re located.

Simple Skincare created a places board called Winter Skincare Around the U.S. The board has skincare tips for different climates, and illustrates the best ways for the people in those regions to use their products.

Simple Skincare has a places board with skincare tips for customers who live in different parts of the United States.

If you can add tips for customers based on the place they live, that can raise your expertise level and the value of your brand.

#4: Introduce the Team

Every business is made up of employees who come together and work as a team. They provide the product or service that makes your business successful.

Pinterest place pins can help your customers to get to know your team as people.

Using place pins, map the hometowns of all of your employees, alongside their favorite restaurants or shops. Better yet, create a group board with all employees and let them pin their favorite places and spaces on their own. These insights give customers a glimpse of your team members’ personalities.

People like buying from people they trust. A board featuring employees helps customers get to know your team and build that relationship.

#5: Share Your Inspiration and Process

Every brand or business is inspired by something. Learning about that inspiration helps people identify with you.

Tundra Restaurant Supply in Boulder, Colorado created a places board to showcase their favorite places in their state, so the restaurants they work with could get to know them better.

Tundra Restaurant Supply created a places board so they could share how much they love their state with their customers.

Customers love transparency, and using Pinterest place pins to show them all of the ins and outs of your business makes them more likely to trust you.

Use Pinterest place pins to share the locations around the world that inspire your products or services. If you own a cafe, show customers where you get your coffee beans. If you run a Chinese restaurant, tell them where your dishes originate. If other businesses work with you to create your final product, pin them too.

You can also share your whole process from start to finish. This will encourage loyalty from current customers and attract new customers.

#6: Demonstrate Your Customer Reach With a Competition

No matter where you’re based, chances are that your products and services are used across the country or even around the world. Let your customers tell that story!

Encourage your customers to pin pictures of your products or services from wherever they are and offer a prize to the pinner who lives farthest from your location.

A competition gives your customers a reason to share the product they bought from you. Not only will people see how popular your products are, each new pin increases your visibility.

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3 Unique Ways to Use Pinterest for Business

#1: Increase Your Brand Authority

Do you want to establish authority in your field? This is a common goal for many businesses on Pinterest.

Middle Sister Wines positions itself on Pinterest as an authority in the wine industry by creating several Pinterest boards that provide useful and educational informationto their followers while promoting their products in fun ways.

Middle Sister Wines.

You don’t have to create all the content that you pin on Pinterest. To help position yourself as an authority in your field, share from a carefully vetted combination of sources to ensure your boards contain the most accurate and useful information available.

Middle Sister’s Wine Tips and Tricks board contains videos from their YouTube account, alongside resources from other industry experts. The board addresses topics such as how to pair wine with food and what type of glass should be used to serve different kinds of wine.

Follow Middle Sister Wines’ lead and pin relevant and helpful resources. Your followers will come to think of your account as the go-to place for reliable information about your subject. And as you increase your authority, you’ll continue to build trust, which could lead to increased customer loyalty and referrals from brand advocates.

#2: Expand Your Reach

Do you want to expand your reach and grow the size of your audience? Consider leveraging the community on Pinterest.

Use Group Boards and collaborate with popular pinners who have a large following to expose your brand and content to more people.

While Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) has a strong standing in traditional media, the average BHG Pinterest board had fewer than 200,000 followers.

One of BHG’s latest Pinners of the Month is Jennifer Chong. Jennifer pins content from BHG’s website to the Pinterest-owned board which exposes all of Jennifer’s 2 million followers to BHG’s content and to the BHG Pinterest account. As Jennifer’s audience follows the board, BHG’s follower numbers grow.

Better Homes and Gardens strategically collaborates with popular pinners to boost following.

Using group boards, BHG has grown its overall follower numbers to over 379,000.

Better Homes and Gardens has developed group board strategies to grow their Pinterest following.

Use This Approach Thoughtfully

Your followers will see what your contributors pin, and what they pin will reflect on your business, so trust between parties is important.

The collaborative partnership should benefit both parties. In the example above, Jennifer received recognition and exposure from a renowned magazine and Better Homes and Gardens increased exposure and following of their Pinterest account.

A poorly conceived partnership built around content that isn’t relevant to your existing audience could lead to a loss of followers. Collaborate with someone outside of your niche and your followers will be confused. The collaboration must make sense.

With careful thought this is a great way to get in front of a wider audience.

#3: Drive Traffic to Your Site

Are you interested in getting more traffic to your site? Then consider using Pinterest. Beth Hayden, author of Pinfluence, revealed that Pinterest drives more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube combined.

In order to take advantage of this, Pinterest users first have to be attracted to your pins and repin them to their boards.

The most successful pins on Pinterest have some traits in common. They combine great images with content to solve a problem, inspire, offer something desirable or appeal to interest in a hobby or activity.

This doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. For example, take this image from Gwen Wilson at Simply Healthy Family sharing a quick and easy way to shred chicken.

Pins don't necessarily have to be taken by a professional photographer to be popular.

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5 Creative Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Posts

Does this sound familiar? You write an amazing piece of content. You made sure to craft an attention-grabbing headline. You share the link on Twitter, Facebook, even Google+.

Then you wait in breathless anticipation for your share count to skyrocket. Except it doesn’t.

Never fear, in this article you’ll find fresh ideas to generate buzz and get your posts noticed.

Use a two-pronged approach with a variety of platforms and different types of media to get your post shared. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Promote Your Article Across a “Wider” Variety of Platforms

Everyone is using Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn to promote their content. It’s tempting to focus only on these four networks because they have popularity and community numbers on their side.

However, you get a competitive advantage when you share your content on smaller or less well-known networks. These sites often have active, focused audiences and offer less competition for attention, so your content will stand out.

Here are some examples of smaller networks:

• Quora.com—A question/answer-based website founded by two former Facebook employees. What makes Quora unique is that all content is created, edited and organized by its user community. The user base tends to be more business- and academic-oriented.
• Tumblr—A microblogging site that recently made headlines when Yahoo! acquired it. Its user base tends to be younger and more “hip,” making it the perfect platform to share edgier, niche-based content.
• Empire Avenue—Part social network, part social media marketing tool, Empire Avenue uses gamification to enable users to broadcast content across all of the other social networks. The primary members of EAv are small businesses, social media professionals and bloggers.
  

  Intel on Empire Avenue.

Grab Viewer Interest With Different Types of Media

Sharing a link to your post isn’t enough to guarantee that it gets read. You need togive users a compelling reason to click your link.

Use one or more of these outside-the-box, creative methods to promote your posts with images, audio and video.

#1: Use Dubbler to Give a Short Audio Introduction

Available for iPhone and Android devices, Dubbler offers a simple way to record up to 60 seconds of audio on your phone, and then share it with other Dubbler community members.

Dubbler brings the simplicity and fun of audio to the social world. Record your voice, add a filter or photo and share with your friends.

The app includes voice filters and lets you add a cover image.

Spark interest in your blog post and record an audio message that communicates your excitement and passion about the content in a way that text or static images can’t.

Add an image, enter your blog post URL in the description and you’ve got a ready-made sound bite that can be shared with the Dubbler community, as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Add a link to your blog post. Record your teaser audio and share.

#2: Create a 6-Second Preview of Your Post with Vine

Vine is an iPhone app that lets you create 6-second looping video shorts. A Vine video is a great way to give viewers a 6-second teaser about the blog post contents.

For example, this bicycle blog created a short Vine of one of their bikes and tweeted it with a link to their blog post about its features and availability.

Here is an example with the blog post URL in the video description:

Vine has an active and growing community to share with. Additionally, you can alsoshare to Twitter and Facebook.

Since Vine is owned by Twitter, your video will display automatically when you tweet it, as well as provide a link to the blog post and specific hashtags.

There’s another benefit of using Vine. Tweets with Vine videos are four times more likely to be shared than standard video, according to research by Unruly.

#3: Create a SlideShare Overview of Your Post

SlideShare is more than a just a content-sharing platform.

With 51.6 million monthly visitors, SlideShare is a thriving community with five times as much traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

A presentation by Pam Moore, the Marketing Nut, demonstrates the cross-promotional opportunities between SlideShare and her blog. In this example, Pam created an overview of her blog post with the slides and then included a link back to her post in one of the presentation slides.

At the end of her post, she embedded the presentation, which links back to SlideShare and more of her content.

Pam put her links at the end of her presentation on her closing slide.

Your finished presentation will be visible and searchable from within SlideShare and you can extend its reach and share it to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

#4: Pin Your Post to a Pinterest Group Board

Pinterest allows you to pin on individual boards and collaborate by pinning to contributor boards. The benefit of pinning to a contributor board is increased exposure. When you pin to a contributor board, your fellow contributors see the pin and so do their followers. The more members and followers a group board has, the more people will see your pin.

Here are some tips for pinning your post to Pinterest:

• Choose an interesting image from your blog post to pin
• Make sure the title of your blog post is visible on the image you choose
• Add keywords to the description
• Use hashtags, if they’re relevant
• If you mention someone in your blog post, you can @ mention them on Pinterest, too
• Pinterest will add the URL to your blog post
  

  A great way to increase exposure for your blog post.

#5: Instagram an Image From Your Post

Instagram has a constantly updating feed of images that is viewed by over 100 million monthly users. Sharing your main blog image, overlaid with the post title, is a great way to drive organic traffic to your blog. You can leverage the sheer volume of Instagram traffic by using the same blog post image that you shared to Pinterest. Instagram is also very hashtag-friendly! Here’s an easy way to post your picture to the Instagram community and beyond:

• Save your blog image to Dropbox
• Access Dropbox from your mobile device
• Upload the image to Instagram
• Add any relevant hashtags and the URL of your blog post to the caption, usingBitly to shorten and track click-throughs
• Be sure to @ mention anyone you referred to in your post
• Remember to share your Instagram image to Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare

Pro Tip: Twitter no longer displays the actual Instagram. Instead, it links to the image. You can use IFTTT to circumvent this issue. Here’s the recipe and here’s what the tweet will look like using IFTTT.

Get Creative When Promoting Your Blog Posts

There are many other creative ways to promote your blog post. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

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