Noelle Marketing ConsultingHow to Create a Pinterest Business Account

How to Create a Pinterest Business Account

September 10, 2013

Why Pinterest? 70 million users, of which 80% are women – that’s why. With 2.5 billion pageviews per month, you need to incorporate Pinterest into your social media plan. Find out more on how in our tutorial below.

If you have something to sell that lends itself to beautiful imagery – say, products, or design, or photography – I can’t stress this enough: use Pinterest.

Coming soon: we’ll be adding a new addition to our Annotated Graphic Series on Pinterest.

1. Set Up Your Account

First, you’ll want to set up your business account on Pinterest, here. Make sure you upload a square logo of at least 250×250 pixels. After you’ve filled out all required fields, and clicked on “Create Account,” Pinterest will ask you to follow 5 boards to get started. They want you to tell them what your interests are, so you can choose boards to follow by category. Choose a category and follow a few boards. To help move this tutorial along, I’m setting up my very own new Pinterest account, which you can check out to see how this whole thing works.

Once you’ve chosen 5 boards, click “Next.” Now you’re shown your business’s home page. It should looks something like this:

My empty home page, just waiting to be filled.

2. Verify Your Account

Pinterest will first send you an email to the address you used to create the account. Make sure you verify that email address – it’ll make things easier later on. Also, remember your URL – for example, ours is https://www.pinterest.com/noellemarketing/.

Next, verify your account. To do this, look in the upper right corner of your screen. You should see your company name and logo with a drop-down menu. Select “Get Started.” On the next page, you’ll see a red button, “Verify Website.” There are two ways to do this: either download the HTML file they offer, then upload it to your web server; or, add a meta tag they provide to the <head> of your index.html file. Verification is important – it lets all Pinterest users see your entire URL in your profile. There are some handy instructions here for commonly used web platforms.

Once your account is verified, you’ll see your full URL in your profile header:

That little red checkmark means we’re verified.

3. Create Your Boards

For purposes of illustration, I decided to add a board called “Smart Quotes,” so I can feature quotes along with images of the people who said them. It can be particularly challenging to determine what to pin, particularly when your business is somewhat virtual (as is mine). But I’m going to figure it out, and so should you.

4. Start Pinning

Once you’ve created your boards, you can start pinning to them. Look for the little “Add +” button in the top navigation bar of the site, and enter in the URL that contains the content (image) that you want to pin. For example, I took a quote I particularly liked from my earlier post Jeff Bezos and Customer Focus: “20 Smartest Quotes“, and used the image from that article and a quote that I liked. Note that, because I used the link to my blog to generate the pin, the link is embedded in that pin. In other words, if I click on that image of Jeff Bezos, I go straight to my blog. That’s good news.

This is what my new Pinterest board, “Smart Quotes,” looks like with its first pin.

5. Add More Boards and More Pins

Keep building your Pinterest presence. The pins don’t have to be generated solely by you – they can also be re-pins of other pins that you liked. Do a search on Pinterest around key search terms for your business, and see what pops up!

Note that, as you add new pins to your boards, the oldest pins will move down the page – but your first pin will be the board’s main image, unless you stipulate otherwise by editing the board.