• February 27, 2012
• Blog, How To
• CJ Bruce
• 2 Comments »

Three Ways to Use Pinterest For Social Video Marketing

Pinterest? For video marketing? The answer is yes.

While most people are using Pinterest strictly for sharing photos, it can also be used to share video content.  One of the biggest benefits of Pinterest is that it’s the only social platform that really gets content discovered outside of a given users network. Your friends see it, but so do other Pinterest users giving your content a great opportunity to be seen by a new audience.

Right now Pinterest users are mostly female and the most popular topics are in the fashion and food categories. If your business touches either of these spaces, you must be on Pinterest. If not, get on Pinterest and start creating collections around your industry so you can have an established channel as the audience expands.

Here are a few tips to get the most out of Pinterest for your social video marketing efforts.

Get More YouTube Views

Thumbnails are always critical. This is doubly true on Pinterest as the site will pull the thumbnail of the video to be the primary image on Pinterest. For a general YouTube channel, you get three pre-selected choices so the best way is to plan for that in your production and try and get a great looking shot right in the middle of the video.

If you are a YouTube partner, you can upload your own thumbnail. I would recommend cruising around on Pinterest so you can see what kind of imagery is doing well and get a strong photo that represents the content and would also be attractive to Pinterest users.

One thing to note for thumbnails when optimizing for Pinterest is that they put a big play button in the middle of the thumbnail. Make sure that this doesn’t obscure whatever your primary visual is. For example if you put your face in the middle of the screen, it will be blocked out by this button.

As of right now, I’ve only seen the video sharing where the embed an actual player work with YouTube. Pinterest doesn’t seem to recognize other video thumbnails embedded, which leads me to my next tip.

Drive Traffic To Your Video Pages

Whether or not you use YouTube for your videos on your site, you can still put an attractive image on your video page and Pinterest will pull it. If your goal is to drive traffic back to your site rather than drive views on a YouTube video, this is the best way to do it.

Everywhere that this image is shared on Pinterest will become a link back to your website page with the video on it leading to more views.

Encourage Your Audience to Pin

Pinterest is growing fast, but it’s still relatively young and people aren’t used to interacting with it on a regular basis like they are with Facebook and Twitter. This is especially true when looking at videos on Pinterest. How do you resolve this? Educate.

Write a post explaining to your audience what Pinterest is and how to use it to share and organize content from your site that they like. Then include the Pin This button on your individual pages so that users can easily share it with their audience.

The other technique is to share everything you put on Pinterest on Facebook and Twitter where your audience is already used to daily interactions.

Have you found an interesting way to use Pinterest for video marketing? Let us know in the comments!