Pinterest: An Introduction for Business Owners and Marketers
Just in case you were beggining to think that, between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn, that the Social Space was just about covered...
WRONG!
Along comes Pinterest, a Digital Pinboard.
In less than a year, Pinterest has accumulated more than 10 million registered users and earns itself around 12 million unique monthly visitors.
What may interest you as a business owner, though, is that Pinterest is apparently driving more referral traffic to websites than Google+, YouTube, and Linkedin combined.
Although Pinterest still isn’t in the same league as Facebook, its incredible continuing growth in users and content sharing is undeniable.
In effect, Pinterest is like a digital pinboard where users pin content they find interesting onto their or other's pinboards. Other users can comment, like or repin that pin. Finally, a person’s page can have multiple pinboards that cover different categories (e.g. “funny photo” and “cool bands”).
For Business Owners and Marketers
The key is to provide content that inspires sharing and interest but doesn’t constantly promote your brand - like most social platforms, Pinterest discourages this. So, if you you’re a sporting goods store, you may want to have pinboards for Tennis, Football and Fishing, rather than pinboards focused on your products.
To inspire you, we have found a few brands that we believe are using their pinboards well and have gathered relevent and interesting images for their fans.
Scholastic
That's right, the books you loved as a child are at the forefront of digital marketing with their own, well established Pinterest Page. Scholastic is tugging at our nostaligic heartstrings by including pinboards such as 'Vintage Scholastic' and they are generating effective interest with other pinboard categories like 'Beautiful Bookshops' and 'Bling for Bookworms'
Blockbuster
Regardless of your oppinion on the future of the on-premise movie rental business, Blockbuster are ploughing ahead with their social presence and have built up an impressive Pinterest Pinboard Collection.
Their Categories include;
I have a feeling this will be a great resource for the indecisive movie selecter!
When I started researching this article I was sceptic, although the more examples I saw, the more I realised that this is potentially something that I could use regularly for recommendations on anything from Popular Culture, to Holiday desitinations.
Pinterest is defintely one to watch, and the time to start thinking about your Pinboard Categories is now!
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