If you think Pinterest is just a place for women to put up pictures of their crafts or recipes, you’re wrong. It also has wedding dresses. Actually, it has all these items plus thousands of other categories. If you’re unfamiliar with Pinterest, it has been compared to you and all your friends ripping photos out of magazines, putting them in their personal folders, and showing them off. Or maybe everyone sitting around and reading old Christmas catalogs and circling what they want and like.
While Pinterest did start with a big focus on fashion, home décor, cocktails, and cupcakes, today it has something for every interest, male or female, kids or adults.
From a business perspective, it’s where the Internet’s eyes are right now. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were 11 million people connected to Pinterest in January 2012, compared to 4.9 million in November 2011. We’re told the average length of visit is 100 minutes, which is amazing considering that an average length of stay on a news site is around 10 minutes.
As of July 2013, TechCrunch reports that Pinterest had more than 48.7 million people using the site.
For a business interested in spreading the word about their products or services, Pinterest is the perfect vehicle. It’s simple to create a page for your business and upload – or “pin” — all sorts of images. This could be pictures of your staff, pictures of projects, pictures from your peers, and other relevant images you run across online.
But that’s only the beginning for opportunities to get people excited about what you do.
- It goes both ways. Along with creating your own Pinterest page, your company’s web page should have lots of “Pin It” buttons. This lets site visitors put their favorite things about your site onto their Pinterest pages where all of their followers can see them. You can also include a section on your business site to tell people about your Pinterest page. Learn how to use these tools under the Goodies menu or the Business for Pinterest menu.
- Include other social networking. Pinterest makes it easy to connect your business Pinterest page to your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! or Google Plus pages. This way, people who may use some but not all of these networks can see your activity and consider linking to your Pinterest page. Connect these accounts from the Account Settings menu.
- Include business info in your photo captions. Doing so will let people repinning your items see the name of your business or website url. This encourages conversions, which is the process of viewers actively going from your Pinterest page to your business page. If people remove these details, consider adding a watermark or url to each photo that’s difficult to remove.
- Prepare to pay. Pinterest says it’s close to offering promoted posts, where businesses can pay to reach larger audiences or target certain demographic groups. Facebook and Twitter already offer similar reasonably-priced tools, so it was a matter of time until Pinterest went in this direction. You can use an online accounting tool like Quickbooks mobile to organize online finances and track revenue from Pinterest and other social media sites.