Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks. It’s a visual bookmarking site, allowing people to categorize bookmarks and share them with their networks. Most understand that Pinterest is eye candy and fun to spend hours browsing through, but don’t understand how it can be useful for business.
A few facts about Pinterest
1) Pinterest is an incredible driver of traffic to websites - more than Google+. Youtube and LinkedIn combined.
2) ~40% of people who click through to a site from Pinterest purchase the product they clicked on.
If Pinterest is driving that much traffic to sites, figuring out how your business can be a part of it is definitely worthwhile!
How should you start?
- Create boards that are related to what you do.
- Share information of value to your customers; not all this information should be yours.
- Write enough information in the pin description for people to understand what they will be clicking through to, but not so much that they don’t need to click through.
Who is doing Pinterest well?
Oprah: Oprah could never run out of things to share on Pinterest. A few notables include pins from her bookclub, about food, and quotes she loves.
Keurig: Coffee sayings, coffee flavours and fun coffee mugs. I proved Pinterest works when I stopped writing this post to purchase a new flavour of K-cup I’d never heard of before :)
US Army: sharing everything from celebrating veterans to army inspired food, the US Army Pinterest board is a feel good/community building space for the army.
Four Peaks Brewery: bringing together lovers of beer they have boards on kinds of beer, cooking with beer, beer gifts and of course, just fun pins about beer.
Petplan Pet Insurance: Pet owners love animals. Petplan shares tips on keeping your pet healthy, shares pet blogs with their community and lets people take a look inside their organization.
This is just a few examples of businesses using Pinterest in ways that create value for their followers, build community - and for some, even lead to sales.
What other notable Pinterest accounts do you follow?