I admit it...I was probably way too excited to try my first Promoted Pin, but then again when you're a social media dork, these things happen. Pinterest recently rolled out Promoted Pins, a similar product to Facebook's boosted posts or Twitter's promoted tweet. The premise is to extend the reach of your pinned content to relevant users on Pinterest.To set up the promoted pin go to https://ads.pinterest.com/ and log into your company's Pinterest account. You must tie a credit card to that account, so be sure to have an AMEX handy.
Once inside, Pinterest populates recent pins and you can select which one you want to promote. It didn't populate all my pins which was a tad annoying, but after scrolling through I found one that would work for my test. Pinterest does want you to promote original content that you own, which makes sense anyhow if the end goal is to get people to click back from the pin to your website.
Once you have a pin selected you can choose interests, geography (medium to large cities), device type and gender. At this time you can't select age.
You then set your maximum CPC, how long you want the campaign to run and your daily campaign budget. Since this was a test I ran it for two days with a maxiumum $5 daily budget and $1.50 CPC. I was out $10 at the very worst. Keep in mind, you only get charged when someone clicks on your pin to go to your website, so it is totally possible to run a campaign and not spend anything.
Since the spend was minimal I didn't see outrageous results, but I did see a definite spike in reach for the particular pin I promoted. I also found it interesting to see what keywords / interests drove the most views. Using that information you can create more pins and boards around keywords that did well.
Overall, setting up a Promoted Pin was just as easy as a Promoted Post on Facebook. Pinterest doesn't have the robust analytics that Facebook has but it is making strides. And at the end of the day, Promoted Pins are another indicator that all social will need to have paid "media" in the mix when you want to expand your reach.
Go on. Test it out. The platform is fairly intuitive and you can set up an ad buy for minimal cost. Let me know what you think.