Good Morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.
I’ve been hearing lots of interesting things about a website called Pinterest, basically it is an online pin board. Pinterest started in March 2010, as a way for people to share images that they like in visual categories. Below is a pin board that I created of my favourite business books.
How Pinterest works is that you can either load up images, eg photos you have taken, or you can add a button to your bookmark tool bar on your browser and then when you find a cool image on a web page you can “pin it”. You can create your own boards and comment on others boards, and also invite people to contribute to yours.
This is rather like the “old school” creating fashion boards or vision boards etc from magazines, but it’s all online and they put the link back to each image you find so that there is no stealing going on!
How I think Pinterest could work for businesses….
- Creating vision boards for goals
- Creating ideas for new designs, I used to do this each time we created a new range of Mocks designs, it all started from ripping pages from magazines
- Creating a resources type board, like I have with books
- Create a board of your new range, rather like a a magazine article, eg a pink scarf 10 ways
- Have images of produces in use showing people that it’s not just for x
- Images of creative ideas for new ranges and products
You need to remember that these boards are public in the Pinterest community, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make them private. But you could create a board and get the community to give feedback via comments and suggestions, or even just monitor how many LIKES your board gets, or the each item on your board.
Use Pinterest to Market Your Business
On Pinterest you can follow people’s accounts and boards, you can see here that Paula Deen has over 12,000 people following her (she is an American cook). This is great way to promote her business visually and obviously she is very popular – even Pinterest promote her on their Facebook page!
I found an article from The Social Robot which gave these 5 tips for using Pinterest for business marketing:
- Be sure to have creative board names. Example: “Children’s Creations” versus “Wood Toys”
- For retail, post how your products are used. For service-based, post before and after shots or examples of how your business helped a customer.
- Remember that Pinterest is visually driven. This doesn’t mean a board with photos of your office staff. This means creative uses of the products you sell or your industry.
- Embrace Pinterest by giving your website users a way to share your products on Pinterest. If a user puts a price in their description (with a dollar sign, such as $45.99), the price automatically shows on the top left-hand corner of the photo, making it easy for users to “shop” and create boards of products they want.
- HAVE FUN. Be positive and creative. Customers like that, even from hardware stores and their local beauty salon
Add Pinterest to Your Facebook page
Pinterest has an app that you can add to your Facebook page, so if you create a board you can share with it your page visitors – I love this concept, because it is so much more exciting that having just photo’s of your product you could show people the journey that you took to get to the product, or different uses, just get creative.
Pinterest is Social
When you use Pinterest you have the option to link it up to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and share things you find with friends. Someone has even created a Facebook page called I love Pinterest which has tips and ideas of how you can get the most from your pins, both personally and for business.
If you have a visual product or service type business Pinterest could work really well for you, plus your pins can be found by search engines – just remember to write descriptions (using keywords) for each image as well as your board.
Obviously Pinterest also has a lot of personal usage, eg planning a wedding (which I saw quite a few boards on), recipes, craft items to be made, home ideas and lots lots more. But, be warned it can be pretty addictive, before you know it it’s been hours…..
Are you using Pinterest to promote your business, tell me how in the comments?
Hi I have tried using that app button that you talk about but it does not work. I can’t get it to click onto anything. Do you have an example of it working? I’d love to see it. At first I thought that it was because I already had free apps on my pages and they would not allow me anymore so I deleted some apps but it still did not work. I’d love to find a way to get that going. Nice site.
E
Hi Elizabeth
I haven’t actually added it onto one of my pages, but I have seen it working on other pages. It sounds like it has a glitch, have you contacted the app people on their page?
Good Luck,
SR