How to Set Up a Pinterest Business Account and Start Your First Board

Pinterest is becoming an increasingly attractive option for businesses when interacting with customers online. Especially if you offer products or services that are visually powerful, Pinterest can be a great tool. But if you're not sure how to get started with Pinterest, the process might seem daunting.

If you're a bit overwhelmed, fear not! Signing up for a Pinterest business account and setting up your first board is easier than you might think. Here's a simple beginner's guide to Pinterest.

Sign Up for a Pinterest Business Account

To sign up for a Pinterest business account, you need to first visit Pinterest's business page and enter some basic information. The site will ask for your email, password, business name, type of business and your website. If you already have a personal Pinterest account that you want to use as your business's account, you can also choose to convert it from that same page.

Add Your Details

Under your basic settings, you can edit your profile including your business name, picture, URL, description and location. It's a good idea to add some keywords to your business name and description so that people who search on Pinterest or Google can easily find and follow you.

Confirm Your Website

Within that same section, there's also a button that says “Confirm website.” This allows you to track the content that people pin from your site. So you just need to enter your website in that field and then click confirm. That will give you a code that you can enter on your own website. Once you've done that, click the “finish” button back on Pinterest and your business website should be confirmed. That gives you access to analytics about the content that is shared on Pinterest from your website.

Connect Other Social Networks

The site also gives you the option of connecting your other social media accounts to your Pinterest business account. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and email. By doing so, you can have the option of posting some content from Pinterest right to your other pages, which allows for some easy cross promoting. But you can also use those different accounts to actually sign into Pinterest if that makes it easier for you.

Find Other Users to Follow

Following other users on Pinterest isn't mandatory. But doing so gives you some networking opportunities. And it also makes it easier for you to repin content right from your Pinterest home page if you follow other users in your field. So you can search the other social media platforms you've linked to for connections that might also be on Pinterest, or just search for other people in your field on Pinterest and then follow them or their specific boards.

Get the Browser Button

You can also choose to get the “pin it” button for your browser. What this does is allow you to pin any content from any website you visit even if they don't provide share buttons for sites like Pinterest. The “pin it” feature shows up as a small button on your browser's toolbar. But it's not required in order to use Pinterest, so you can choose to skip it if you like.

Create a Board

On Pinterest, boards are the areas where you can save and share the content you “pin.” You can have one board or several. Most users set up multiple boards that specify different interests or subjects. So if you're a fashion retailer, you might set up a board for general fashion images, one for your own products, one for inspiration and more for anything else that strikes your fancy. To set up your first one, go to your profile and you'll see a link to create a board. From there, you'll need to choose a name for your board. And you can also add a description and put your board into a category. Choosing a relevant category and adding a description with a few relevant keywords, along with a title that contains relevant keywords, can really help your board get found by other interested pinners.

Start Pinning

Once you've created your first board, it's time to add some pins to it. There are a few different ways to add pins on Pinterest. First, if you've added the browser button, you can go to any website and click that button to bring up a selection of pinnable photos from that site. From there, you can select the photo you want to pin, add a description and then pin it to your board. Some websites also offer share buttons you can use to pin images to your board - but these don't require you to download anything onto your browser. And finally, you can actually upload photos or enter URLs right on the Pinterest website. And as a bonus, if you follow others on Pinterest you can actually repin the content that shows up on their boards just by clicking the “Pin it” button that shows up when you hover over an image.

Set Up Buyable Pins

Pinerest now offers the ability for online retailers on certain platforms to set up buyable pins. Buyable pins allow people browsing on Pinterest to purchase the products they see without having to leave and visit a separate website. Currently, you can set up buyable pins if you use Shopify, Magento, IBM Commerce, Demandware or BigCommerce. Pinterest also recently added buyable pins to the web version of its site. Each platform has a different process for signing up, so visit your eCommerce dashboard or contact your customer service representative to sign up. And if you're not on one of those platforms but would like to use buyable pins, you can sign up for the wait list to be notified when the feature becomes more widely available.

Pinterest Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "How to Set Up a Pinterest Business Account and Start Your First Board" was first published on Small Business Trends