Regardless of the platform, in order to be successful on social media, you need to be creative and strategic.
Throughout the past three weeks, I have been showcasing specific success stories featuring brands that use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram successfully.
You’ve seen through these success stories that in order to crush it on social media, you need to engage with your fans, provide high-quality content and be unique.
You can’t just do what everyone else is doing. In fact, that’s exactly why I wrote this blog series – to help inspire ideas that you can apply to your business to see success on social media.
This blog, the final part in this 4-part blog series, is dedicated to Pinterest.
Similar to Instagram, Pinterest is all about the aesthetics. It’s a visual social media marketing platform that allows you to organize imagery through boards.
Using a style guide on Pinterest is as, if not more, important as utilizing one for Instagram.
The best brands on Pinterest are finding unique and creative ways to organize their visual content into clearly-defined boards.
When it comes to crushing it on Pinterest, there are three brands to look to for insight and inspiration.
Neiman Marcus
Neiman Marcus does a great job and creating a consistent look and feel for their Pinterest boards, as all of them are named as “The Art of,” something.
For instance, they have boards such as: The Art of Winter, The Art of Eyes, The Art of Gifting, and The Art of Cocktails, to name a few.
What’s great about Neiman Marcus’s Pinterest profile is that they have a wide variety of pins on each board. It’s clear to see that they’ve taken the time to invest in their Pinterest strategy, because their boards feature pins from a wide variety of Pinterest users, from other brands to customers.
Takeaway tip: find clever, creative ways to name your boards to differentiate yourself from other pinners on Pinterest. Using all caps, asterisks or lead-lines such as “The Art of…” is a great way to do this.
Birchbox
Beauty brand Birchbox does a fantastic job using Pinterest to showcase a variety of different styles, looks and even ideas un-related to their brand.
Through boards dedicated to different areas such as lips, eyes and nails, Birchbox organizes their pins by body part and/or beauty area.
They make use of the board description to pair a cute and clever caption with each board.
In addition to beauty boards, Birchbox also has boards to represent different seasons; this is a great way for the brand to provide value to their audience, as these boards showcase products, DIY-projects and colors that are stylish in/for that season.
Just like Neiman Marcus, Birchbox clearly curates a ton of pins from other pinners to create diverse boards with a wide variety of graphics. This makes the brand more trustworthy on Pinterest, as you don’t feel like you’re constantly being sold to.
Takeaway tip: don’t just pin photos that link back to your website or blog. Pin a wide variety of photos from different Pinterest users to create boards that are dynamic and diverse in value.
Ikea
Ikea does a great job at creating boards that are extremely clean and beautiful.
Every board has a beautiful cover photo that perfectly fits the board’s name and description.
Even better is they have a board dedicated to fan favorites; this board is a mix between pins from Ikea and curated pins from customers. What’s great about this board is that every pin is paired with a descriptive caption that details how you’d use the product in your own home.
By providing real use-cases for their products, Ikea does a great job at inspiring individuals looking to redesign their homes or just add a little extra functionality to a room in their house.
Takeaway tip: include descriptions for every pin. Especially when featuring products, be sure to detail how a customer could use this product in their everyday life.
These brands are showing that Pinterest is a platform perfectly suited for product-centric brands. By re-pinning regularly and creating descriptions for each pin, you’ll be on the way towards growing your audience and analytics on Pinterest.
Do you have brands that you think are using Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and/or Facebook really well?
Comment below! I would love to do another roundup featuring your favorites.
