Pinterest: Marketing Your Business

Pinterest is a social media platform which allows users to “pin” their photos to their profile. Essentially, it’s like an online pinboard with several million users. It’s been named by Experian to be the third largest social media site on the Internet, though it has far less registered users than Facebook and Twitter.

The attraction of Pinterest is its ease-of-use and the mere fact it takes advantage of one of the biggest features of the Internet–it’s image based. In other words, it quintessentially personifies the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Even businesses that aren’t visually based can use this growing social phenom to their advantage.

About Pinterest

Founded in March of 2010, Pinterest launched in a closed-beta phase. It later switched to an open-beta phase, but limited new users to invitation-only applications. Within just nine months of its initial launch, the network had 10,000 registered users. By the beginning of 2012, the site had nearly 12 million registered users.

The bugaboo about the social network is it has–since its inception–been seen as a personal social community, not as a business marketing tool. However, some businesses have actually been “born” on the social site, setting up small kitchen-table entrepreneurs for success.

However, despite popular belief, your business doesn’t need to be product-based in order take advantage of the benefits that Pinterest offers. –Forbes.com

The reason Pinterest has been seen by the public as a personal storyboard is in-part, because of its users. But small, medium and large businesses have leveraged the power of the site to promote their products and services. The trick is in knowing how to use the medium to build a larger audience and increase revenues.

Using Pinterest for Business

For some time, businesses have preferred using networks like Facebook and Twitter. Businesses have also harnessed the power found in YouTube marketing to promote their presence on the web. From this, a cottage industry has been born comprised of social media marketing firms. Trouble is, it can be expensive and difficult to tell the difference between the real deal and social media phonies.

Now there’s another site to deal with and it seems overwhelming to learn and maintain yet another online profile for your business. But here are some tips that will help you to use Pinterest to effectively market your business:

• Use only original photos on your boards. The profiles which are most viewed, shared, liked and photos that are most often repinned are original works. Some users get thousands of visits a day on their website through Pinterest referrals.
• Share other users’ pins. Like all social media, this site works best when users are, well, social. Sharing other users’ pins and boards widens your audience and encourages others to share yours.
• Pin catalogs to your boards. This is a great way to promote your business and get more traffic to your site. Catalogs do well on this network and companies like Nordstrom are using this strategy.
• Post offers and promotions on your boards. A good deal for other users is stumbling onto a good deal. If you offer discounts or other incentives, let the Pinterest community know about them.
• Show your business cares. Set up a board dedicated to the charities and organizations your company supports. This lets other users know your business is involved in its local community and helps to create awareness for the causes your business supports.

If you’d like to know more about social media marketing and how to use these platforms to grow your business and increase your ranking in search, then contact us. We can show you how to effectively use social media to reach more customers and leverage more sales.

business, community, facebook, Pinterest, seo