Pinterest for B2B marketing: Velocity dives in

At Velocity, we never let a bandwagon rattle past without at least making a token effort towards hopping on board. So when Pinterest started to pick up steam, we registered without a moment’s hesitation. Our excuse? We need to learn about this stuff even if it’s not exactly suited to our business.

As soon as we joined, we saw that Econsultancy, the digital marketing community (and Velocity clients and friends) are doing quite a good job at Pinterest — here’s the Econsultancy Pinterest board (or collection of boards or whatever). They’ve got boards for infographics, events, reports, posts about Pinterest, SEO, mobile marketing… all the kinds of things you’d hope to see from them. And it looks like they’re getting lots of re-pins.

Emboldened, we dove in. I give you The VelocityB2B Content Marketing Pinterest page.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far
In a few months playing around, we’ve learned these things about the social juggernaut-du-jour:

• Pinterest is a visual medium – great pictures get shared. Bad ones don’t.

• But that doesn’t mean text isn’t important – the descriptions play an important part in findability and shareability

• Yes, it’s great for fashion – and other pretty-centric industries

• But that doesn’t mean it’s not good for B2B – turns out, it kind of is

• Boards make it easy to set up sub-blogs – so each topic you want to pin about gets its own board

• It’s an SEO booster – The links in Pinterest aren’t no-follow links like Twitter ones

• It’s fun! – kind of like the scrap books we had as kids

What do we think Pinterest may be good for?
Well, it’s another channel to be discovered in — but like all social channels, it does take time, energy and attention (three scarce commodities).

We’ve heard reports of Pinterest generating more web traffic than other social channels, so we’ll watch with interest to see if that;’s true.

And we’ll see if there’s any impact on our search rankings — though that may be tricky to determine.

What would we do if we were you?

• We’d start playing in Pinterest. Give it a couple hours.
• Get the ‘Pin It’ button for your browser – makes it way easier
• And the app for your iPhone – de rigeur
• And create a few relevant boards – like we did
• And follow other people’s boards – like we will
• And track your progress – looking at 3 metrics:  re-pins, likes and web traffic
• And put a P icon on your site – so people can follow you (we’ll do this on our new website

The Velocity Pinterest boards

So far, we’ve got a board on B2B Content Marketing:

And one on our B2B Content Marketing eBooks:

And a board on our B2B Videos:

And a board on recent Velocity Websites that we’ve produced:

And one on B2B Infographics that we’ve produced (we’ll do a board on ones we like that we didn’t produce, too):

And B2B Marketing Books we like:

And here’s one on some Velocity Clients and their smiling faces:

And finally (for now), one on the other social media channels where you can find Velocity — including LinkedIn links for Stan, Neil, Ryan, Martha and I:

So that’s where we’ve started out on Pinterest.

What happens next?

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea. We’ll keep playing around with it and monitoring the re-pins and web traffic.  And we’ll let you know how it goes.

Some  Pinterest links

There’s a cool Pinterest infographic here, from Maximyser.

And an A-Z of brands doing interesting things on Pinterest, from Econsultancy.