In an effort to target casual users on Pinterest, the social network has created a new hub called “Teachers on Pinterest” to help teachers by providing educational content in an easy-to-use hub. Pinterest has teamed up with several elementary school teachers and educational bloggers to provide lesson plans, crafts, activities, classroom decorating ideas, tips and tricks for teachers.
Pinterest’s Popularity With Teachers
They’ve collaborated with Edutopia to bring in some of the content, but the site is already a mecca for teachers. In their blog post announcing the launch of the Teachers hub, Pinterest reported that more than 500,000 education-related pins are uploaded or pinned each day. The site is so popular with teachers, in fact, that Edutopia reports Pinterest is among the top five professional development sites for teachers.
Currently, the content only focuses on elementary teachers, but the network may expand to more grades in the near future. Current Pinterest users can follow the hub and start pinning from the boards right away. They can also comment and tag their colleagues on pins. Casual users can use the hub as a starting point, and Pinterest hopes they’ll be converted to regular users to create boards of their own.
How Businesses Can Learn From the Teachers Hub
An important lesson for businesses to take away from the Teachers on Pinterest hub is that of targeting important demographics with their own pin boards. If you sell a product that could be useful in therapy, create a pin board for therapists and psychologists. If your service caters to mom bloggers, create a pin board that is the go-to resource when it comes to popular mom blogs, how to start blogs, best plugins and more. The idea is to create and pin content that becomes an invaluable resource to the primary demographics you cater to.
Pinterest as Part of Your SEO Strategy
If you think Pinterest is a waste of your time, think again. It’s popular with the social media scene, but it’s also popular in the search engines, too. Pinterest boards provide the perfect opportunity to rank for long tail keywords. If you have a hard time ranking for the terms on your site, you can piggyback off Pinterest’s popularity and authority while promoting your own site within the pin boards. In addition to getting pins to your own site, your pin boards will give your business more visibility in the search engine. In turn, traffic will be driven to your SEO site.
Pinterest’s foray into catering to specific demographics is expected to pave the way for the creation of hubs that cater to other professions and interests. This will provide more targeted content for current users and allow casual users to utilize the site without the hassle of signing up. Businesses can use this strategy with their own pin boards to not only target their primary demographics to provide valuable resources, but also to rank higher in the search engines.