How to Use Pintrest for Business
By Joel Black on 07/25/2012
Pinterest, although having over 10 million users as of January 2012, is still largely unknown to a lot of business owners. Even if they have heard about it, they might have a lot of confusion as to how “pinning” works or how it could help their business at all. With a little more information and a little creative thinking, Pinterest can be leveraged to be a big part of any social media strategy.
Pinterest in simplest terms, is a social media site where users create virtual “boards” that they can “pin” photos too from sites all over. They can share these boards with other users who can comment on and repin these photos on their own boards. It is also searchable for users to find new boards and images that are interesting to them.
The user demographics show that users are about 80% female & 20% male. The highest age percentage is 25-34 with 34-44 close behind. Because of these stats, its easy to see why most of the content you will see on Pinterest is closely related to content that would be interesting to these groups. Having said that, there are still a variety of users. Pinterest is still fairly young and has a lot of room to grow to encompass a variety of users and content.
Some of the largest big brand users are Better Homes and Gardens (25k followers), Whole Foods (19k followers), Michael’s (7k followers), Birchbox (4k) and Scholastic (1.8k). All these brands have very visually appealing brands and have found a lot of success on Pinterest by pinning, or allowing others to pin photos from their website. These pins can also be shared via Twitter and Facebook allowing users to share their favorite products and creating buzz around these brands.
Pintrest Whole Foods
Even if you don’t consider your business as a strong visual brand, with some creative thinking, you can find a place here. Instead of just pinning pictures of your products, think of lifestyle photos of people using your products or services. Try pinning photos of things that you find inspiring and relate to your business. You could even pin photos of inspiring quotes that relate to you, written in well designed fonts. There are plenty of creative ways to do this with these just being a few. Each industry can have a creative way to create interest in their brand and provide users with images to pin and share.
