What is Pinterest?
Pinterest http://www.pinterest.com is a new social media platform that is growing rapidly. It is a virtual pinboard where users share images and photos that they find interesting on the Web. Users then create different boards based on their interests — e.g. my style, favorite products, travel, even nerd alerts.
Pinterest describes itself as
Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.
The site is currently by invitation only, and you have to request an invite to get in. Nonetheless, Comscore said that Pinterest now has 1.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. Currently, a huge part of its audience is comprised of 18-34 year old upper income women.
Users have two options in sharing the images: they either upload the photos or images, or put the URL where the image resides. Given that Pinterest is all about images, website owners that utilize images on their sites are more likely to benefit from the sharing activity on Pinterest. A blog that showcases craft work or a cooking site that constantly features images of recipes are the types of sites more likely to benefit from Pinterest.
How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business
Business Breakthrough Mentor Alicia M Forest www.AliciaForest.com offers five specific ways you can use Pinterest in your marketing efforts:
1. Less Clicks = More Conversions
The less clicks your visitor has to make to get to the information or product they want, the higher your conversion rates. With Pinterest, there are just two clicks from first seeing something of interest to visiting its site of origin. That translates into more leads and more sales.
For example, let’s say you have a book for sale and you pin the image of the cover from the book’s sales page to your board. When one of your followers sees your pin and clicks on it, it will allow them to share it with others immediately. And if they click it again, it will take them to the site where the image was pinned from, in this case, the sales page for your book.
2. Drive tons more traffic to your site
Because Pinterest has such a large following (10 million unique views at this writing) it’s a great tool for driving more traffic to your site via the links that are attached to the pins you make to your board.
In fact, there are tracking stats that are showing Pinterest is driving more traffic back to websites than Facebook or Google+.
3. Easy for people to share your content
Pinterest makes it super-simple for your followers to share your pins and therefore links back to your site. Because every pin includes a link leading back to the source of the image, this can translate into a lot more inbound links to your website. So the more followers you have, the more those followers share your pins, the more traffic to your site.
4. Gain from user addiction
Some markets have already fallen in love with Pinterest, with more to come as more people become aware of and start utilizing this new social media platform. If your market is a fan of Pinterest, then you need to get onboard and get in front of all that traffic. Just start with one board, pay attention to what your followers are re-pinning (sharing with others) the most, and pin more of that content.
5. Connect it with your other social media sites
Since I’m all about leveraging your time and talent, if you’re going to use Pinterest, then you need to connect it with your other social media platforms to do so. You can connect Pinterest with your Facebook profile (hopefully they will add the ability to connect to your fan page soon). You can also connect your Pinterest account with Twitter so your pins are automatically tweeted. And you can add a “pin it’ button to your website, much like other share buttons, so your visitors can pin for you.
The exciting thing about Pinterest is that it is so visual. Kind of like a book with lots of pictures. It gets your attention and holds your interest. The potential for marketing is huge.
Yuuppyyy I got one more social platform to make friends and share my feelings.
It was a great news for all of the social media marketer and also for all companies who are finding ways to promote this product. I am not familiar with pinterest because it is new in the market but I always heard this always about pinterest,