Pinterest: if you’ve heard of the site, you probably think of it as a place for virtual window shopping, DIY crafts and planning weddings to grooms who may or may not exist. But don’t write this new social media site off as a pleasant diversion. Pinterest is a growing force, and it is showing its potential to be a strong tool for business owners.
Pinterest is a social bookmarking site where users create virtual pinboards of products, ideas and inspirations they find online. You can also browse your friends’ pinboards and repin images you like to your own collections. Right now, the audience skews to the female side, but there’s no reason to think that the numbers won’t balance out as more users discover the site.
But how can all this pinning and repinning benefit your business? First, Pinterest drives traffic. Major traffic. According to this Mashable study, Pinterest already is responsible for more referral traffic than YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace combined. People are pinning products and services and enticing their friends and followers to make a visit to the business’s site.
As a business, you can also get active on Pinterest rather than waiting for the traffic to come to you. This article from Entrepreneur has some great tips on how to use Pinterest to draw buyers to your sites and promote products and services. Among them: repin other people’s content and post some non-promotional content so you don’t come off as self-interested.
Are you on Pinterest? Want some help brainstorming the kind of content that could be used to promote your business? We’re here to help.
