As a soon-to-be new mom, you can find me scrolling through Pinterest in my spare time looking for nursery ideas or freezer meals for when baby comes. For the 300 million monthly Pinterest users, the platform serves as a place to search for new ideas and store content for future use.

Food is a hot topic on Pinterest, with trends like mushroom recipes, grazing tables and foil pack dinners all growing in popularity in 2019. Pinners are actively looking for information and inspiration, and they don’t mind getting it from brands. In fact, 78 percent of pinners say content from brands is useful.

The most popular pin at Produce for Kids is a Build Your Own Smoothie Bowl infographic.Since Pinterest isn’t a traditional social network, there’s less competition for your updates to be seen over life moments from friends and family. The platform is driven by search and creating content that is useful and relevant to your target audience is key.

Pinterest also gives your content longevity. The average tweet has a lifespan of a few minutes, the average Facebook post a few hours and the average pin a few months to a few years. Our most popular pin at Produce for Kids is a Build Your Own Smoothie Bowl infographic, which was created in 2016. With more than 200,000 repins, it continues to drive traffic to our website every day.

Whether your brand is getting started on Pinterest, looking to grow or working with influencers and content creators to expand your message, there’s much that can be done to increase your brand awareness and educate shoppers on your products.

Pinterest basics

To set up an account, make sure to use your company name and logo, claim your website and create an engaging bio using keywords. When setting up boards, focus on keywords, like Healthy Salad Recipes, rather that cute titles like Salad Sensation, to help users find your content. You may also want to set up Rich Pins to pull in key content like recipe ingredients and help your content appear higher in the search feed.

When pinning, it’s important to pin both your content and content from others, and to look for vertical images, rather than square or horizontal. If you’re a greenhouse vegetable grower, set up boards for each of your commodities to pin your recipes to, then seek out recipes from popular blogs and websites to pin alongside yours. There are scheduling platforms, like Tailwind or Buffer, that can help streamline your pinning, keeping it consistent and delivering content regularly to pinners.

Eat with your eyes & focus on keywords

When it comes to recipes and food on Pinterest, we definitely eat with our eyes first. Having good photography backed up by a strong, keyword-rich description is a must. Pinterest users to the platform much like they do Google, to search for things like “easy weeknight meals” and find ideas that can inspire dinner tonight or three months from now.

Hashtags are relatively new on the platform, but offer another way to add searchable keywords to descriptions. Unlike Instagram, where hashtags are sometimes a play on words or one long sentence, hashtags on Pinterest are all about key search terms.

Create motion in the feed with video

Recently, Pinterest launched a new video uploader, a dedicated tab for video content and video ad capabilities for brands. Videos in the feed play automatically, usually catching the eye of the pinner and stopping them in the feed. They offer a great way to showcase a recipe in action or a how-to on selecting or prepping your commodity.

While videos are still fairly new and there aren’t a lot of stats out there on the success, early adopters like Tastemade have been able to drive more than one billion video views on the platform. Not too bad if you ask me.

Go targeted with ads

Pinterest also has a robust ads platform to help get your content out to a wider audience. Rather than targeting demographics of the user like other platforms, Pinterest ads are geared more toward targeting search intent.

Once you run an ad, the ads platform also gives you in-depth insights into which keywords perform best, helping guide your content strategy and inspire new captions for your pins.

When it comes to Pinterest, and your larger digital strategy, remember to serve your target audience first. Knowing what content they are looking for and crafting your strategy around that will help drive success on Pinterest and in the digital space.