I have been reading everything I can in order to be able to use the newest social media craze to hit the web for my business and of course, for my clients.

Two of the most important things to do are:

1. Use your time with Pinterest wisely otherwise you can spend hours pinning recipes or planning your dream home (I’m a sucker for that). Why are you using pinterest? To direct traffic back to your site? To boost sales? You can do both quite easily with pinterest. So plan, strategize, act and stick to your plan!

2. Use tools to track and measure the effectiveness of each of your Pinterest campaigns. Without them, how do you know that your efforts are a success?

With Pinterest being relatively new some of these tools are still in their beta versions. So here are a few of my favorites that I like to use when it comes to using Pinterest for my business.

Pin Puff
It’s like Klout for Pinterest. It measures your influence, popularity, virality (so how viral your pins are) and your overall reach. You also receive a stats profile and an influence number. It also gives a monetary value for the pins you create. This will be great in the future when it comes to creating pins that go viral for brands.

Repinly
Find out what’s hot and trending in Pinterest with this nifty website. It has a list of the most popular pins, boards, pinners, categories, as well as your own pinfluence number and profile.

Spin Picks
Beware! This can get incredibly addictive! This tool is designed to pull random visually interesting images from places like instagram, twitter, flickr, google, and it gives you the ability to share them straight onto your social media platforms. You can pin them directly to your boards or share them over facebook and twitter. It’s a lot of fun, a great concept and great if you’re looking for new content to add to your boards.

Want pictures that go Viral? Quotes are a good start. Highlight a quote from your favorite mentor or even yourself! My favorite tool to use is Quozio. It creates a beautiful picture out of your quote that you can then pin straight to your board. Head over to my ‘All Things Business’ board on my Pinterest page to see some quotes that I have turned into pins.

There’s also someecards dot com – you know the ones – pastel background with the stock image and quote you see all around facebook? Make one for yourself here!

Hot Tip! Statistics say that ‘light’ coloured quotes go viral quicker.

Quick Pinterest Tips:

• Create interesting images along with your blog posts and pin them to your pinterest board. Check out my ‘Pimp your blog post’ article for tips on creating great looking pinnable pictures (for free)
• Use the 80% 20% rule. The latter being the amount of your content you pin that’s yours. Like other social media platforms, it’s not just about you, so spread the good biz karma and check out pin and appreciate all of the great pins there are to share.
• Interact! Repin, like and comment on other peoples pins. The more you interact the more people see you and interact and follow you.
• Make it easy to follow you and repin your pins to Pinterest. Use a pin it button, and tweet/facebook your pins or boards every now and then.
• Follow the greats. Mashable and even Aweber have great and interesting Pinterest boards. Follow them and follow what they do. Sent traffic from your social media accounts and your own website to your Pinterest boards. And don’t forget your email marketing campaigns and signature. You can use Wisestamp to add a link to your Pinterest account.
• Use your keywords, hashtags, and links to your site / blog posts

Have fun with it! It’s still new so there is so much to learn from using Pinterest.:happydance: