If your business is closely aligned with the kinds of items your clients will pin, consider putting a form on your website or a sign-up sheet at the front desk:
May We Follow You? Sign up sheet for a brick-and-mortar business
For some businesses, this is a non-starter. If you sell children’s music lessons, you may see more crafts and recipes than you can stand.
However, for a business selling home decor items from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s an instant winner. The owner can keep an eye on what her customers are wanting, pinning, and sometimes buying. Because “following” is often reciprocal, individual users she follows will generally follow her store account back.
Notice that you must include a note about what you are using the email address for and that you will not (or do, if you do) share the email address. Use text that works for your business about why they may not want to be subscribed to your list.
“Following” Etiquette
If most of the people you will follow this way have personal accounts, consider following them at the account level (follow all), and then unfollowing any individual boards that are outside your business interest. This way, Pinterest will tell your customers that you followed their account, and they won’t know you unfollowed individual boards.
If you only follow the boards that fall under your business category, Pinterest will tell those clients that you “followed their ‘living rooms!’ board,” and some of them may feel a bit hurt that you didn’t like their “brunch recipes” collection. Better they don’t find out…
Website “Follow You on Pinterest” Experiment
I’m testing this on my Rugs site now using one of the Fast Secure Contact forms.
DIY “Follow You on Pinterest” sign up form for a website.
If my programming skills were better, I’d create a button that performed the same function. It would look better.
I may have to go back and add a captcha. Will post here when I have results.
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