I frequently hear Pinterest users asking if they need to sign up for a Pinterest Business Account, or if they can just carry on using their personal account to promote their blog.
My answer to that is: If you’re using Pinterest for business, you need a Business Account.
Pinterest stipulates this in their terms and conditions:
“If you want to use Pinterest for commercial purposes, you must create a business account and agree to our Business Terms of Service.”
You may wonder what “commercial purposes” are, and I personally would define that as: If you’re making money in any way from your pins or the blog/website that they link to, then it is commercial.
Don’t worry though – having a Pinterest Business Account is not a bad thing – there are lots of advantages over a personal account.
Here are the great features that come with a Pinterest business account:
Full Business Name
Pinterest Analytics
Rich Pins
If you have a Business Account, all of the pins that are saved from your website will be Rich Pins.
Pinterest Ads
Audience Tracking
You’ll see their page visits, category views, signups, video views, searches, shopping cart activity, checkouts and more.
Should I convert my personal Pinterest account to a business one?
Once you’ve decided that you need a Business account, if you already have a personal account you may want to convert it to a business one instead of creating a brand new business account from scratch.
Here are the things to consider when deciding whether to convert your personal account to a business one:
- Would your business account have the same name as your personal account?
- Does your personal account cover the same subjects?
- Do you have many followers on your personal account?
- Are these followers going to be interested in your business?
- What are you planning for the future – will your personal followers be interested in your future business plans?
When I say “Are these followers going to be interested in your business?”, I don’t just mean would they be bored by your blog, I mean “how likely are they to engage with your pins?”.
Pinterest notices if your followers are not engaged – you only want followers who are going to save your pins, so there’s no point in keeping a lot of followers who are not interested in your pins.
If you have lots of engaged followers on your personal account, and the business account will be closely linked to your personal activities, I would say go for it and convert it to a Business Account.
If you have hardly any personal followers, or your business boards will be different to your personal boards, it would probably be best to start from scratch with a sparkly new business account.
When I first started to use Pinterest I had a personal account and used it save interesting things I discovered on the web, and places I wanted to visit. I had boards like “People I Admire”, “Places to Visit Animals”, “Fairytale Castles” and “Cuddly Kittens”.
I didn’t have many followers (mostly friends and relations), none of whom were connected with my new business.
However, my new Business Account was going to have the same name as the Personal one (ClareIvatt), so I decided to convert the personal account rather than starting afresh.
Once converted, I had good clear out of the non-relevant boards (cute kittens etc), and my small number of pre-existing followers were soon outnumbered by the new followers I gained who wanted to learn about blogging and running their own business.
Here’s how to set up your Pinterest business account (including converting a personal account):
https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/get-a-business-account
If you enjoyed this article, please save it on Pinterest:
