Have you heard the saying a picture paints a thousand words? Well your business can do just that on Pinterest.
Pinterest is a new social media site where you can create online bulletin boards and ‘pin’ your favourite images to it.
You can create a variety of bulletin boards in any category imaginable. Your followers can then view your images, like them, add a comment and re-pin them to their own boards. Each image represents a link to its original website, which makes sharing images and websites easy.
It isn’t a broadcast mechanism and doesn’t encourage product pushing, so you need to be creative and take a different approach to Twitter and Facebook.
The images on Pinterest can quickly convey their messages to the audience with just a glance, instead of users reading through long lists of text on Twitter and Facebook.
There are also a number of sharing options. Each image can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, you can embed it so the pin can be shared on blogs and external sites (which is great for link building) and the URL can be shared via email.
How Pinterest can benefit your business:
- Engage with your target customers: You can share a behind the scenes look into your company by pinning images of employees or office activities. This will help to humanise your business and create personal relationships with your customers.
- Learn from your customers: Brands can learn from the followers as they are offering a lot of personal information about the personal interests.
- Engage with employees: Post inspirational photos to inspire your employees or ask them to post photos and engage the whole company in a fun activity.
- Run competitions: You can ask Pinterest users to pin images to your bulletin board to receive benefits or prizes as part of a competition or special offer. This will help to raise awareness of your business and gain new customers.
- Crowd sourcing: Ask people to pin pictures of themselves with your product and repin them on a themed board.
- Reach target customers: You can reach your target customers by creating bulletin boards in categories appropriate to your target customers. Currently the majority of users on Pinterest are female, which will benefit businesses whose target customers are women.
- Drive traffic to your website: You can pin images with a link back to your website to help increase your website traffic.
- Promote your products: You can post images of your businesses products and services with a link to your website where they can purchase them. This can help to increase your sales and customers.
- Promote your success: Post images of media coverage, success stories or client case studies to promote the achievement of your business.
- Pin videos: Another great way to communicate to your target customers is to pin videos to your businesses bulletin board. You can then link your bulletin board to your businesses YouTube channel and post video messages from company employees or the CEO.
- Tell your story with images: If you have a message for your target customers it may be easier to tell it through images rather than text. Visually compelling stories may have a greater impact then written articles.
Pinterest is a great new way to promote your business and engage with your target customers.
However, Pinterest shouldn’t be used purely for advertising purposes because your followers may view your content as spam and disconnect from you. Your business should become actively involved in the Pinterest community by posting useful content and re-pinning or commenting on other user’s images.
So start pinning today!
