In my last blog, I discussed whether Pinterest is a good fit for business-to-business (B2B) companies. The short answer is: it depends.

Like any social media strategy, or marketing strategy for that matter, whether or not your company should be on Pinterest depends entirely on your business, your industry, your clients and other important factors. Here are a few indicators that Pinterest may be a good fit for you:

• Your company creates a lot of content, such as ebooks, infographics, blogs, etc.
• You have a visual product or service offering
• One or more of your primary buyer personas is female

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Looking for a guide to kickstart your presence on any social media site? Check out our guide to Social Media. 

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Create a business account.

Something many new Pinterest users aren’t aware of is that Pinterest has business accounts; these are different from typical personal accounts you may be familiar with. If your company is joining Pinterest, you’ll want to create a business account (you can also convert an existing personal account to a business one).

Business accounts are similar to personal, but provide access to important features such as analytics and advertising. In addition, you can create “pins” (Pinterest’s version of a post) with a “Buy” button, or other rich media that isn’t available to personal accounts.

Share visual content.

Remember that people love to share things on Pinterest, so you want to create pins that are engaging and encourage sharing. Infographics and other visual content are great options for this, but ebooks, whitepapers and other written content can also work as long as they include a compelling image.

Always lead people back to your website.

The number one mistake I see on Pinterest is that a company will share an awesome infographic or an image of a product they sell, and it will get re-pinned hundreds of times and shared on Facebook… but there is no way for all those people to learn more or purchase.

Every time you pin something to a board on your Pinterest business page, always include a link back to your website. If it’s an infographic, maybe you’ll link back to a landing page to download a related ebook. If you’re posting an image of a cool product or service you sell, link back to a page where someone can purchase (or contact you)! When posting on Pinterest (especially shareable content that may spread to hundreds or thousands of people), you want to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to convert.

Add new pins on a regular basis.

Another mistake companies make is starting a Pinterest page, creating several boards, adding pins for all their products, content, etc., and then rarely pinning again. Just like any other social platform, you should plan to add new pins on a regular basis, even if you’re just repurposing existing content.

The more often you pin, the more you will end up in front of the people following you (on their home page feed). You will also gain more credibility than a company who hasn’t updated their page in months.

Get creative with your pins.

Beyond sharing content and promoting your products or services, there are tons of other ways you can use Pinterest as a B2B company:

• Show off your company culture with photos of employees, company events or other behind-the-scenes snapshots
• Highlight your community involvement and post pictures of your company volunteering or participating in local community events
• Take advantage of Rich Pins. These add additional information to specific types of pins, such as articles, maps, products and more, to make them more detailed and compelling to viewers. Implementing them takes a bit of technical know-how, so you’ll want to have your IT department help out, but Pinterest gives you all the information you need to get started

There are many more B2B marketing tips I could share for Pinterest, but this blog is a great start for B2B companies jumping into the Pinterest world. What did I miss? Share your B2B Pinterest best practices in the comments section below.