What’s your Pintellegence? Are you leveraging the power of Pinterest to launch your t-shirt brand into the direct line of vision of thousands of people looking for exactly what you have to share? Well you should be and here’s how to get started.
The photo, micro-blog, social media network pinterest has blown up in recent months. Generating more inbound links than twitter in less than 25 months and reaching 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day as of March 2012, according to Mashable.
Pinterest is proving to be a powerhouse of traffic generation and brand promotion in an age of short attention spans and click-happy photo-lovers, pinterest feeds that need to feel creative and productive without leaving the couch.
So how do independent t-shirt designers cash in on the power of Pinterest? Here are five tips for bringing your branding into the Pinterest spotlight.
1. Create Pin-able content.
People love people. If you’re putting up pictures of your shirts just laid out flat, you’ll get some pins, add a model and you’ll get way more. Create mock-ups of your t-shirts featuring a model and the flat t-shirt. Make it really easy to pin your photos and be sure to have a “pin it” button on your pages.
2. Optimize your images for Pinterest.
When you write a blog post and post all your beautifully mocked up t-shirts on models, make sure your photo captions describe the image, including the word t-shirt. Fill in the description with something informative, with accurate keywords, but not too long. This infographic has lots of great tips regarding image optimization for Pinterest. Sevenly does a great job of pinning beautiful photos with accurate and informative descriptions.
Sevenly on Pinterest
3. Be Social.
Pinterest isn’t just for dumping your products, respond to people who pin and repin your stuff, give them coupons, comment and repin on other people’s pins. Pinterest is a great way to engage your fans, all you have to do is reach out.
Don’t forget to embrace t-shirt bloggers, like Shirtoid, and comment on their pins. Bloggers are very likely to pick up one of your designs if you engage them.
4. Use Pinterest like any other user.
Don’t just pin your t-shirts, have a few t-shirt boards and pin things that reflect your brand values. That being said, don’t clutter up your followers feeds with too many off-the-wall pins, make sure there’s some brand consistency. Threadless has all their boards set up to reflect what the company loves and supports, this helps followers feel like they know and can relate to the company. Cafepress focuses on their quest to customize everything and really leverages their niche marketing with boards dedicated to bacon, coffee and pi.
5. Follow other t-shirt brands.
Follow, like and pin movers and shakers in the t-shirt industry. See what Threadless and is doing and engage them socially. By pinning the coolest t-shirts on the web, both your designs and others, you’re building the value of your boards to your followers. This will naturally increase your pinfulence.
Tee Fury
Snorg Tees
Zazzle
Sevenly
Fibers.com
Next Steps
Follow these basic steps and you’ll be on your way to a healthy and vibrant Pinterest promotional plan for your t-shirt designs. But you can take your Pinterest activity to the next level and further engage fans by running a contest. Lot’s of the big names in the t-shirt world like Threadless, Cafepress and Zazzle have dipped their toes into the Pinterest contest water (Zazzle Birthday Pinterest Challenge, Cafepress St. Patrick's Day Pinterest Challenge, Threadless V-Day Pinterest Contest) There are a proven contest tactics:
Pin it to Win It: have followers create a board and name it after your company or the contest name. Contestants pin t-shirts to the board and the best board wins! Often there will be a theme, but depending on how much pinnable content you have it might just be your brand.
Repin contest: have fans pin t-shirts and contestant with the most repins and likes wins.
Luck of the Draw: encourage people to pin as much as they can and then draw a lucky winner at random.
Because a Pinterest contest requires a little work on the part of the contestant it works best if there’s a prize of $100 or more.
Once you get the ball rolling Pinterest is a fun/addictive way to continually engage your fans, promote your t-shirts and glean inspiration. So get to pinning! Got a tip? Example of a t-shirt brand using Pinterest in an interesting way? Let us know!
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