Pinterest for a Business That Sells Renovations

The board on the client's phone

At the first meeting about a kitchen, the homeowner opens a phone and scrolls through forty photographs: white cabinets, a range with tile behind it, open shelves, a window over the sink.

That collection is a Pinterest board, built over months of evenings, long before anyone phoned a contractor.

Most of the photographs come from magazines, manufacturers and other contractors' websites, often in other countries. Each one links back to wherever it was saved from.

The question for a renovation business is whether any of its own work is in collections like that one, and where the links lead.

How Pinterest differs

Pinterest is filed under social media, but people use it less like a conversation and more like a scrapbook with a search box.

• People search for ideas, typing what they want rather than scrolling news.
• They save, collecting pins onto boards for a project they are planning.
• Pins last, turning up in searches months or years after they were added.
• Every pin links to the page it was saved from.
• Boards get shared with partners, designers and, eventually, the contractor.

The third is what sets it apart from almost everything else a small business posts. A Facebook post is mostly seen within a day or two; a good pin can still be sending visitors the following spring.

Which businesses it suits

It suits work that is visual, chosen rather than urgent, and planned well ahead: kitchens and bathrooms, decks and patios, gardens, millwork, flooring, interiors.

It suits the emergency trades poorly. Nobody pins a burst pipe or a failed furnace.

And it rewards good photographs. Pinterest is a visual search engine first, and ordinary pictures disappear among millions of better ones.

Pin from your own website

The most common mistake is uploading photographs straight to Pinterest. They look the same, but they link nowhere useful, so a homeowner who loves the porch has no route to the business that built it.

Instead, publish each project on your website first, on its own page with a description, then pin the photographs from that page. Every pin then leads to the project, and from there to everything else you do.

A Pinterest business account is free. It lets you verify your website, so pins saved from it carry your name, and you can see which images people save.

A save button on your project photographs lets visitors pin straight from your site, with the link already attached.

Descriptions people search for

Pinterest finds pins largely through their words. A description reading another happy client tells it nothing.

Write what the photograph shows in the terms a homeowner types: the room or element, the style or era, the materials, the colour, the work done.

"Craftsman porch rebuilt with fir columns and the original brackets restored" can be found. "Great job" cannot.

Mention the city or neighbourhood where it helps, since many people search for ideas that suit the houses around them.

Boards that show your range

Organise boards the way clients plan: by room, by element and by style. Porches, windows, kitchens, exterior colour, each as its own board.

Boards can be divided into sections, which suits a business with several kinds of work: a kitchens board with sections for small kitchens, older houses and open plans.

Resist filling boards with other people's photographs to look busy. Each one is a link to somebody else's business.

Photographs that suit the format

Pinterest shows pins in narrow columns, so tall photographs take up more of the screen. A shape about two units wide for every three high suits it well.

Wide photographs still work, but they appear small. When a project is photographed, take some upright shots on purpose, including details: a hinge, a joint, a moulding, a tile edge.

Before and after pairs suit Pinterest well, provided both are taken from the same spot in similar light.

A worked example

A heritage restoration contractor works on houses built before the First World War: porches, wooden sash windows, millwork and exterior colour schemes.

Homeowners kept arriving at first meetings with Pinterest boards. Almost none of the photographs were local, and several showed work that would not suit a house of that age.

The contractor's own website had a gallery of good photographs as small thumbnails, without a word of description. Nothing on it could be found in Pinterest's search, and none of it had ever been pinned.

Over a month, the office wrote a short page for each of twenty finished projects: the house's age and style, what was restored, what was rebuilt, and the materials used.

Photographs were pinned from those pages onto boards for porches, windows, interiors and colour, each described the way a homeowner would search.

Whether the pins find their way onto clients' boards will show over the autumn and winter, when next year's projects are planned.

A slow clock

Pinterest works on the timescale of the projects it serves. A pin added in July may do most of its work in February.

A few pins a week, every week, does better than fifty in an afternoon and nothing after. Pinterest's own advice favours pinning regularly, and a steady flow keeps the account in front of followers.

Analytics shows visits arriving from Pinterest, and Pinterest's own figures show saves. Ask new clients where they first saw your work, too, since a pin saved in winter may lead to a phone call months later.

The counter-case

Pinterest is not for every business. Emergency trades and businesses with nothing visual to show will find little there.

A contractor whose work comes entirely by referral, with a full calendar, may reasonably put project pages on its own site first. Those pages help in search as well, and they are what any later pins would link to.

For a business selling visible, planned work, though: pin your own projects from your own site, with descriptions and boards that show your range.

Getting started

1. Open a free business account in the company's name.
2. Verify your website in the account settings.
3. Give each project its own page first.
4. Pin from those pages, never by upload alone.
5. Describe each pin the way homeowners search.
6. Build boards by room, element and style.
7. Add a save button to project photographs.

Step four is the one that turns pins into visits. A photograph uploaded on its own can be admired endlessly and still send nobody to the business that did the work.

Choosing the format that suits the platform is the same question raised in long video on Instagram.

Frequently asked questions

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