One of the big problems with Pinterest is that there is lots of well-meaning but often inaccurate information out there. There are also common mistakes that people advise beginners to make.  Here are five mistakes marketers make with Pinterest that you can easily avoid.

1 – Treating Pinterest like a social media site

This is the easiest mistake to make since Pinterest features social media elements and Google Analytics even lists it under the social tab.

As a marketer, forget social media and view Pinterest as a visual search engine, a search and discovery platform. View it as more like Google search than Facebook. With this in mind, it is important to keep elements like keywords being front and centre of what you do.

2 – Focusing on monthly views

The monthly views figure is prominently featured on your profile when you look at the saved or created tabs so it seems logical to view it as an important metric that you should track.  Lots of people get excited by reaching a million or other milestones with this figure.

However, the reality is that your views tell you little about how well your account is actually doing. A view is like an impression, which means the pin has simply appeared on someone’s screen.  This doesn’t mean they took any notice of it, clicked it for a close-up or clicked the pin.  As we are focused on clicks on the website, the monthly views figure doesn’t say anything useful.

3 – Stressing about Follower numbers

This is another carryover from social media marketing; being stressed about the follower number and focusing on growing it without any context.  After all, more followers are good, right?

Wrong! Followers who are interested in your content will repin your pins and click your links.  People who save your pins to their boards are also brilliant.  Random followers who inflate a number but never interact with your content aren’t helping at all. Don’t stress about increasing followers, focus on improving your SEO and getting more clicks.

4 – Not doing keyword research

This one applies to both Pinterest and organic traffic.  If you don’t do your keyword research, you run the risk of using the wrong words, meaning people can’t find your stuff.  While there are no dedicated tools to do keyword research on Pinterest, like there are for Google search, you can look at terms in the search bar and see what long-term and associated keywords appear.

Plus, if you are researching keywords for SEO, there’s a good chance these will work on Pinterest just the same.  Remember, Pinterest is a visual search engine!

5 – Expecting quick results

With SEO, we are taught that it takes 12-18 months at least for Google to trust sites and start to send consistent traffic. People often expect Pinterest to be quicker.  While it can be, it still takes a good amount of time to get that consistent traffic.

Most experts will say that you need at least 3-6 months of consistent pinning with quality pins and content to start to see good results. Sometimes it can be even longer if you are in a very saturated niche, and many people get disheartened when they’ve been pinning for a few weeks and nothing happens.  

Don’t fall into that trap – start with the knowledge that it takes time.

Avoid these common mistakes!

Mistakes are a natural and useful way of learning. If you avoid these common mistakes with Pinterest marketing, you can benefit from the lessons of others who made them and get ahead with your efforts.