Pinterest might seem like a simple online pin board service to you. The endless recipes, scenic photos, and words of wisdom pinned on Pinterest make the sight seem pretty one dimensional upon your first glance. But if you look a little closer, you’ll see thatit’s actually a complex and effective marketing tool, perfectly built for web-savvy businesses.
Not buying it? I don’t blame you, but I’d like for you to hear me out. Pinterest is growing presence on the web, and the sooner you buy into it the better chance you have at growing your business. Maybe a more comprehensive explanation of Pinterest’s effect on businesses will help you to see it’s advantages.
An ideal market for selling quality products
Pinterest’s pin board setup creates an ideal setting for businesses to feature their services or products. A company needs only to start their own Pinterest account and get to work pinning on relevant boards to get the ball rolling. In no time your business can create a vibrant image collage that showcases the best things about your products: anything from books to tech gadgets to household appliances will look photogenic on Pinterest. Paired with some contact information about your business and where people can buy the photographed products, this service could be a real win for you.
Of course many businesses don’t provide concrete services that can be captured in a single picture. An HR services company or a web design firm can’t sell their business with a few alluring pins. These businesses have to get more creative with their pins; they can pin popular images and trending infographics across a wide spectrum of interests in order to drum up interest and traffic. Businesses can also utilize older social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to redirect followers to their Pinterest profiles.
Riding the Pinterest wave
Pinterest is one of the most popular community-based online services since Facebook, adding countless new users every day. Since exploding in popularity earlier this year, it seems as though Pinterest’s growth has known no bounds. And recently PCMag reported that Pinterest had surpassed the popular microblogging service Tumblr in reader popularity and interest. Apparently more people want to pin their pictures and products than they want to tumble them.
Tumblr reported over 1.5 billion unique page views a month starting in January 2012. If Pinterest has indeed surpassed Tumblr in overall user interest, then businesses would do well to jump on the pinning train immediately. That kind of potential customer base doesn’t come around every day. Imagine if your business could tap into a fraction of that burgeoning online market; all you need to do is find out an effective marketing to execute on this easy to use social media tool.
The new blogging and Pinterest
Pinterest’s popularity marks a new era in online communication. Fewer and fewer readers are turning to blogs for all their information; the masses are instead going to microblogging platforms like Tumblr, Percolate, and (you guessed it) Pinterest for their daily dose of web knowledge. I can’t entirely blame people for turning from the majority of blogs out there—many of them simply repeat or blatantly copy the content of related blogs, or merely serve as an aggregate for the daily headlines.
Pinterest caters to a younger (and hugely present) online demographic that perpetuallywants more information in less timeand in a smaller space. You see how well Pinterest answers that demand in it’s layout: the striking panel of images with space to comment below, the endless scroll, the tasteful curation of such disparate interests and products. College students, young entrepreneurs, heck, young consumers use services like Pintesest with vigor, if just for its insatiable catalog of posts. It’s a veritable goldmine for web marketers who understand that there are more ways to expand an online business than through blogging.
Do you pin on Pinterest?
If this post hasn’t convinced you to pin for your business, I don’t know what will. Pinterest may not be the Facebook of tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a viable marketing tool. Its widespread popularity in recent months makes it more than fertile ground for a successful marketing push.
What are you waiting for? Start pinning on Pinterest towards a more successful business!
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