Did you know that, according to Vertical Response, 71% of small businesses never use Pinterest?
And did you know that since May 2012, Pinterest traffic has more than doubled in size?
Ignoring Pinterest is no longer an option. But neither is ignoring Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your blog. How can you add Pinterest to the marketing mix without consuming even more of your time and resources on a daily basis?
How to Automate your Pinterest Strategy
Start by seeding your boards with amazing content. Check out some of the most popular boards for ideas and inspiration. Don’t just focus on your specific niche. Try to find aspects of your niche that apply to the general public. For example, if you are an internet marketing business, you may want to search out and pin marketing infographics or how-to images.
1. Auto Follow
Use a Pinterest Automation Software that automatically follows lots of other users. You can set it and forget it while it automatically finds hundreds of people to follow. As you know, many people will follow you back!
Software like NinjaPinner is a good option. ONLY use the Auto-Follow feature. I do NOT recommend using any of the other features. Once you start on a relevant board, the system will navigate to other relevant boards and automatically follow boards and people. This is entirely acceptable as it doesn’t require any actual interaction.
Other features, like auto-pin or auto-comment could easily show a footprint and make it obvious that you are using an automated system. You do not want the system to be your voice, simply to speed up something that requires no “brain power”.
2. Schedule Pins
Instead of having to spend time every day adding pins, use Pingraphy to schedule your Pins, just like you do with your Tweets and Facebook updates.
Start by creating an album of pins you like. In order to give proper attribution, I recommend copy and pasting the URL’s into a notepad or Evernote so that you can have quick and easy access to the URL’s.
Once you navigate to the page with the image that you’d like to pin, click on the “Pingraphy” bookmarklet in your browser bar. Pingraphy will automatically look for all images on the page.
You can select the images that you’d like to Pin, and then click on “Next”.
Next you select the board where you want your images to go, as well as a description and URL for each of the images. Make sure you use relevant keywords for each of the images!
You can schedule your pins with an interval of 1440 minutes so that the system will add 1 pin per day. Depending on your niche, you may want to pin faster or slower. For example, in dry niches where it’s hard to find images, once a day may be enough. In other niches where photographs are easy to find, you may choose to pin 2 or 3 images per day.
3. Pinterest Image Pinner
Add the Pinterest Image Pinner plugin to your WordPress site so that every single image on your site will have a “Pin it” button.
4. Repinly for inspiration
Spend 30 minutes or so on Repinly to gain inspiration for what others are sharing.
You can search by popular pins, boards, or pinners. Additionally, you can search the dates to get a broader view of popular topics over time.
There are many ways to get inspired on Repinly. Getting an idea for what people actually love and repin will help you determine the best images to add to your own boards.
You can also search Pinterest for ideas, going to their Popular page.
5. Display your Pins on your site
Most people know to add a Pin It button to all of their images so everyone can add blog images to their Pinterest accounts. But what if you pin images directly to Pinterest or from other sources?
Use the Pinterest RSS WordPress Plugin to display your Pinterest Pins on your website to encourage more pins and engagement with your Pinterest account.
A Sample Pinterest Marketing Schedule
Now let’s put all of these tools together into a methodology. As with all social platforms, Pinterest is about engagement. You cannot fully automate Pinterest as you would be completely missing the point – connecting with others. You have to return to the platform often to connect with people and comment on pins.
Here’s a sample schedule that can be implemented once a week for about 1 hour:
- Spend 30 minutes on Repinly to gain ideas of images to pin
- Open an evernote where you post links to all of the pages with images that you want to Pin
- Use Pingraphy to schedule pins for the next 7 days
- Visit Pinterest and find 15 people with great pins and comment on their pins
- Open NinjaPinner and have it auto-follow people
By following these 5 steps, you will be able to grow your Pinterest account a little bit every week. If you do your reserach well and pin interesting images, you’ll grow faster as people repin your images, which exposes you to their audience.
Whenever someone repins or comments on your pin, you will get a notification from Pinterest. Be sure to thank them and comment in order to create a genuine connection.
That’s it! You’re done for the week! The following week, rinse, lather and repeat!
About the Author: Marcela De Vivo writes for Gryffin Media, sharing tips and tricks to create Social SEO campaigns that lead to both traffic and engagement. Her passion is to find new ways to improve internet marketer methods and to help others improve.
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