Pinning This Down

I get more referral traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook even though I’ve put a fair amount of effort into the latter and scarcely even looked at the former. I created a Pinterest page a few years ago when marketing mavens insisted that everybody should. Whenever I subsequently logged into Pinterest I saw a motley collection of my products that other people had “pinned” to their pages. I couldn’t find my own still-blank pages and had no clue what to do when I finally did stumble across them. 

Last week I finally made good on my recurring threats to rectify that. Aimless flailing eventually turned up a button that would convert my page to a business page – which I thought I already had done, but the button’s presence implied otherwise. The Pinterest interface started to make some rough sense after the conversion. I pinned a few St Patricks Day products and beat a retreat.

Lo and behold, Pinterest started sending daily “Getting Started” emails. I don’t grok social media in general because I’m not social, but step-by-step instructions are my speed. Unfortunately they started with the assumption that you know why you’re there in the first place, they didn’t go into very much detail, and they ended too soon. I was still mostly on my own.

I figured out how to edit and populate a board. A long-ago marketing story recommended creating tightly topical boards, so I made one specifically for St Patrick’s Day and another for Easter. Pinterest recommends adding at least one new pin every day to give people a reason to follow your page. I don’t know what to add apart from my own products…maybe that’s the key to this whole thing. I could try pinning some whiskey drink recipes and beer recommendations, for example, although it’s already too late for St Patrick’s Day sales. 

Easter’s harder because I’m not a Christian. As a businessman I want to appear strictly neutral toward religion if I have to acknowledge it at all, and it's very hard to stay secular about Easter without offending believers. I usually sell quite a few dove and create-a-bird kites to churches for use in their Easter pageants, so I posted those and left it at that. 

“Rich pins” apparently turn one’s pins into full-blown ads with price, quantity on hand, brand, and a whole bunch of other fields. Implementing that is way over my head.

AFAIK nobody has pinned anything from my new pages yet. I accidentally deleted the link to the page that showed all of the products that other people had pinned, and I can’t find it again. That’s a step backwards. Pinterest is confusing, I’ll give them that.