So you’ve had a Pinterest account for ages, you use it to pin recipes you like, hairstyles you want and places you’d like to visit in your far off dreams. But now you keep hearing about the power of using Pinterest for your business and you want a piece of it. You’ve got quite a few followers on your personal account that include people you know through your business and they’re followers you don’t want to waste.

You don’t want to start again from zero and link a new pinterest account to your business with zero followers that’ll make you look like a lonely unpopular saddo and be a big fat social proof FAIL. You don’t want to keep using your personal account because it’s got all your own personal stuff on it. Whilst you think your customers might be interested in some of the stuff they probably won’t be too excited over your plans to redecorate your spare room in teal and gold or make a egg cosey out of hamma beads.

So what do you do?

It’s really common for people to have started out on pinterest with a personal account. For one reason it might’ve been before business accounts were introduced and two it’s where you grew a following personal or otherwise. You invested the time, you pinned from your heart and people liked it, so now you don’t want to chuck it all away.

You weigh up swapping over and you keep putting it off because it’s just easier to ignore it. But by not having a business Pinterest account you are missing out on a whole heap of powerful benefits and tools to propel your business.

This article will show you how to swap your personal account to a business Pinterest Account so you can keep those followers and then go create another personal account where you can pin your holiday plans and goal boards in relative privacy!

Why do it ?

The benefits of having a Pinterest Business account are:

Pinterest analytics – you’ll be able to access stats to see how your boards and pins are doing so you know where to put your energy in terms of promoting your business and products.
Name your account properly – you get to actually name your business properly instead of having to use the first and last name format so no more Mr Pin Right instead you can be PinRight.
Rich Pins – this is still a massively underused but extremely powerful tool that enables you to pin from your website to gain more traffic and authority. Rich pins contain headings in bold, more information can be seen and most importantly they have big lovely calls to action like “read more on PinRight here”. These pins have a far higher click through rate and are FREE to use but you can only get access to them with a business account.

If you don’t have a personal pinterest account that you want to convert you can start from scratch with a business account at https://business.pinterest.com

How to do it?

Go to your profile page and to the right of the main search bar there is a little icon showing 3 lines like the pic below

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This will give you a dropdown menu and at the bottom click the third option along titled Business like the ringed option on the screenshot.

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The you will get the screen below and click “already have an account convert now”.

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Next you will see the following screen:

convert to business account set up

Enter your business name in the box (no having to put first name and last names here!)choose pinterest business category

Choose your business category from the dropdown menu (this is really important to complete in terms of search optimisation – so choose wisely)

Next add your website address (make sure you remember to put http:// in front of it).

Finally, you’ll get a confirmation screen the same as this.

pinterest business account set up

You can follow the three steps listed to fully set up your business account straight away by installing the pin-it button on your website. We’ve got an article on this if you need help.

Then get the “follow me” button installed on your site so your website visitors can easily click through to your Pinterest account. We’ve got an article on this if you need help.

Finally, verify your website so that you can view your analytics data and have the verified website tick sign on your profile. That means your followers know the account is definitely yours – you’d be surprised how many people will set up fake accounts to move traffic to their own website even copying pins from the original account. We’ve got an article on how to verify your website if you need help.

If you want to convert your account but don’t have time to do these three steps there and then you can always come back to your business account and do them at a later time. Just click on gear next to the Edit Profile button where there will be a drop down menu and choose Tips for your Business which will then bring you back to the three options again.

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So there it is how to swap your trusty, follower packed personal account over to a Pinterest Business Account and get all the benefits that brings to help catapult your business to Pinterest stardom.

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