Is Pinterest right for your business?

In Week 6 of the SMS module, we covered a timeline of development of various other social media platforms.

One of the most popular ones today and a rapidly growing one as well is Pinterest. 

It is setup like a web bulletin board but instead of textual content, it has visual content with some accompanying text.

When I first checked out Pinterest, it seemed to have a focus mostly on food recipes, women's fashion and landscapes. The images were engaging and enticing to hang around for a while on there. Over time of course, the content grew in to more subject areas. 

Now Pinterest is often cited as being one of the fastest growing social platforms in existence, even faster than Facebook or Twitter. It is the new darling of the social media world. The question that arises is whether to incorporate Pinterest in to business marketing just because of that. The answer to that depends a lot on the type of business in question and the level of marginal resources available to dedicate to Pinterest marketing. Here are some common tips on when to use Pinterest for business marketing:

1. If your business is visual content dependent, like clothing retailer, then Pinterest would be a great platform to showcase the product line in an innovative way. 
2. Visual content by itself is not enough. This is a common mistake many novice users make. The fact of the matter is that "Pins" are not just randomly discovered most of the times although this does happen quite a bit. Typically, a user will search for an area of interest and the results will be displayed accordingly. That means that all Pins must be accompanied by relevant text in order to be found on the search.
3. Use it to get feedback. Many companies just focus on "Pinning" away and then forgetting about it. That is a big mistake, because there may be valuable user feedback that could help in developing or improving the product line. There is a Pin history button located on the top right corner of the platform window and by clicking that one can review what pins were "repinned" and commented on. By seeing which pins are being share more than others and listening to commentary on the pins will really help gauge user interest on the product. If a Pin is being positively commented or repinned extensively, it is likely that users are likely going to be interested in purchasing that product as well if it meets all other requirements that one may have.
4. Encourage sharing of your content by providing a "Pin It" button on the website. Many small businesses still think that sharing content on Facebook and perhaps Twitter is good enough.  That would be a big mistake as there is a lot of engagement on Pinterest (according to this article), particularly from the female demographic, who could be potential customers of your company or purchasers of your product. 

-Abi