3 ways Pinterest can help market your business!

February 17, 2012 By Digital Operative,

Pinterest is the social network darling of the moment, and your business should be making money from it. You may not have heard of Pinterest, but your consumers have. Pinterest is large (3.3 million users) and it captures users attention (average site time 72 minutes). I will briefly describe what Pinterest is, what makes it unique, and how you can use it to drive traffic to your website. What is Pinterest? Pinterest is basically a virtual bulletin board. It is a way to share interesting images online. A user will have many different boards, each themed around a different subject. When a user finds a picture that they like from a webpage they “pin” that picture onto their bulletin board. Like the other social networks users can follow other users and receive updates that the original user posts to their board. What makes Pinterest unique?

Most importantly Pinterest is a visual social network. Though conversations do occur, the whole premise is to receive messages visually rather than textually.
When a user clicks on someone else’s pinned photo, Pinterest will take the user back to the original webpage where they found that photo. Visitors that are intrigued by a photo simply click it to find more information on the original webpage.
Pinterest allows the user to see who the person re-pinned the photo from. If Sally re-pinned a photo from Joe and a user likes the photo, then maybe the user also wants to follow Joe.

How can I translate this into revenue? To translate a Pinterest account into revenue ,the key is driving traffic.

Get your brand on Pinterest – creating a board (like Digital Operative’s - http://pinterest.com/digitaloperativ/) allows consumers to learn about your brand visually. This is a different experience than many webpages and allows you to tap into the emotional calls to a consumer. Pinterest is like a free, highly visual PPC ad without the paying for clicks.
Use re-pinning the same way you use re-tweeting – Pinterest is a visual social network that allows for easy sharing. Pinterest allows others to re-pin your content easily and a user that clicks on the re-pinned photo still goes back to the original source (your webpage). If you are part of an Internet company you probably already have excellent images, put them on the site and watch as people come to your site feeling inspired
Reach people who are not actively searching – Pinterest allows the marketer to post pictures in places where users are browsing anyway. As users browse through the various pictures they are not necessarily doing so by brand, but rather are doing so by image. This allows smaller brands to put their more visually stunning images up and compete with the bigger brands. Additionally, these users are just looking at pictures and are not shopping. If they come across a photo and like it so much that they go to your page, that is a highly qualified visitor who is likely to convert.