The healthcare content marketing cycle includes creating great content, distributing it, and repurposing it. Pinterest is an excellent way to distribute and repurpose your great content.
Not familiar with Pinterest? Here’s some background:
Is Pinterest for you?
Pinterest is terrific if you have good visual content. Beautiful photos, clever infographics, and inspiring quotes are always popular at Pinterest. Does your practice, organization, or business have great images? Then Pinterest could be a terrific way to reach out to your target audience.
Pinterest is also an excellent way to reach women. 71% of Pinterest users are female. If your prospective patients and customers are young women, you can provide valuable content for them at Pinterest.
Do you have great content at your website? Just posting pictures can get you followers, but building the relationship requires strong landing pages at your website.
Making Pinterest work
- Create valuable content.
Suppose you’re planning a campaign for Arthritis Awareness Month. You’ll need at least six excellent images for a Pinterest board on the subject. You can repin other people’s high quality content, curating useful information for your visitors. But you also want to bring visitors back to your website, where you can control the message and drive conversions. So your first step is to create those six awesome images and at least a few great landing pages.
Pinning the same image on multiple boards can share your excellent content with people making different searches. For example, a strong post on whole grains and health can show up on a board about nutrition, one about colon health, and one about nutrition for kids. But having awesome graphics on one board and linking them all to a single landing page — that’s not a good experience for your followers.
Ideally, you’ll have your web team create six graphics linking to six important landing pages. Here are some possibilities:
- an eye-catching illustration from a blog post on arthritis information
- an infographic on arthritis in your state that links back to your arthritis treatment information page
- a photo of each of the doctors in your practice who work with arthritis, linking to their profile pages at your website
- an inspiring quote linking to your Arthritis Awareness Month campaign page
- a graphic sharing a startling statistic, linking to your page on lifestyle changes that can reduce arthritis pain
- a luscious food photo linking to recipes you recommend for your arthritis patients
Creating the content is the most important step. In some cases, it’s the step that keeps the campaign from happening. If you need help with producing great content, we’re happy to help.
- Create your Pinterest board.
We like to create a board first as a private board. This allows compliance checks or review before the pins become public. If you’re building a board with six pins, go ahead and make it public all at once. If you’re going to add 32 pins — either by repinning a curated collection of great pins already on Pinterest or by linking to lots of related content already on your own website — start with those six pins and then add the others gradually over a period of a few days. Some of your followers may be irritated if you flood their streams.
- Create your pins.
Make sure your web team provides good text for each image. Your goal is to encourage your visitors to click through and learn more. The text does this job best. Many people will repin a nice picture without clicking through. Use both your Pinterest and Google analytics to get a sense of what appeals most to your audience. Use that information to build pins that increase engagement.
Follow up
Pinterest is one of the social media platforms that can be used in a campaign style without negative consequences. If you only tweet when you want to promote something, your Twitter account will be lame. Your Pinterest account, however, will look legit as long as your boards are full, even if you don’t maintain regular activity. Avoid the gray areas shown in the screenshot below by posting full boards only.
However, Pinterest will tattle on you if you don’t post regularly, because they show when a board was last updated. People are more likely to follow an active account. They’re more likely to follow a board that is updated frequently.
You can’t be active on every possible social media platform. If Pinterest is a good choice for you, commit to it and keep up.
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