Thanks to AJ Kumar | May 14, 2012

You signed up for Pinterest, the popular online bulletin board, thinking it’ll be the next great social networking platform for your business. You’ve already pinned a few pictures that relate to your company. But now what?

To take advantage of the exploding interest and growing community on Pinterest, you’ll most likely need to motivate people to share your content. That should, in turn, drive traffic to your website.

Here are a few guidelines to follow to help promote sharing:

Build content people naturally want to share.

Because Pinterest is a visually oriented social network, you should focus on images and graphics that people will naturally want to share by re-pinning them to their personal pin boards.

Spend some time clicking through random Pinterest boards to see what’s re-pinned most often. Generally, you’ll see image-heavy posts, infographics and lists. You won’t see many plain text articles being shared — they simply aren’t as aesthetically pleasing on Pinterest boards.

Embed sharing options in your content.

In addition to creating viral-worthy content, you’ll want to build social sharing options into the Pinterest-ready posts on your site. If you run a WordPress site, the ShareThis and Digg plugins offer automated solutions that will add “Pin It” buttons to every post on your site.

If you run a static HTML site or prefer not to use one of those plugins, check out the Pinterest “Goodies” page for details on how to manually install Pinterest sharing buttons on your site and within your content.

Encourage readers to share your content on Pinterest.

Don’t assume that users will automatically share your content. Many need extra prompting to go above and beyond simply reading it.

For this reason, consider asking users to share your content on Pinterest. After you’ve created a pin-worthy article, for instance, add a line such as this at the end of the text: “Like this article? Please take a second to share it on Pinterest.”

Continue reading “How to Get Your Content Shared More on Pinterest”.