Picture having a corkboard or bulletin board at home that displays a collection of your favorite snapshots, recipes, inspirational proverbs, funny quotes, newspaper articles and more.
Next, imagine that you have a new item you’d like to pin on your board. Even though your board is full, you don’t have to remove an old item to make room for your new one. Instead, your board magically gets just a little bigger. Every time you find something new to pin, there’s space provided. Now imagine that all of your friends have the same magical board. You can see their boards, and they can see yours. Let’s say one of your friends has a great magazine article on how to de-clutter your kitchen pantry. With a snap of a finger, you can make a copy of that article and pin it on your board. If your friends like the Abraham Lincoln quote on your board, they can just as easily add it to theirs. And the best part of these magical boards? You can view and pin to them whenever you want, wherever you want. That’s Pinterest—a relative newcomer to the social media universe. Where Twitter is primarily a galaxy of words, Pinterest is a galaxy of images. Many refer to its function as “social scrapbooking.” Perhaps that’s why the overwhelming majority (30 million out of 34.9 million total users at the end of 2013) of Pinterest users are women—the traditional scrapbookers. We’re sure the folks at Pinterest are very interested in and focused on getting more men to use their platform. That’s an interesting topic, so we’ll definitely want to revisit it at a later time. To us, Pinterest and the social individual are a perfect match. It makes sense for a housewife to share a photo of her favorite cheesecake and a link to the recipe. She’s not doing it for the money; she just wants everyone else to know about her go-to dessert. But what about businesses? Every company wants to grow in its respective market. So how does Pinterest help a company market its products, services, or overall mission to its existing and prospective customers? The best way to answer that question is to ask Pinterest itself. The Pinterest home page has multiple success stories of businesses that have made headway with their Pinterest boards. For example, Sony has a board featuring videos and photos taken with Sony products. It’s an ingenious way to utilize the visual nature of Pinterest by involving pinners who also happen to be Sony customers. Sony is an established Pinterest giant with 35 different boards, thousands of pins, and tens of thousands of followers. But some businesses are just undertaking their Pinterest campaigns. Take, for instance, the health and wellness company Melaleuca on Pinterest. Their mission is displayed on their Pinterest board: Enhancing the lives of those we touch by helping people reach their goals. While their Pinterest presence is small by comparison, with time, they could create a massive, popular board or several boards unique to their mission and products. How? By pinning and re-pinning content that shouts wellness, whether it’s specific to them or not. That’s just a start, but we’ll look at Pinterest and business in more posts to come. Sources: www.pinterest.com www.howstuffworks.com www.forbes.com
1 Comment
Swizzertuns
11/5/2014 07:50:23 am
Pinterest for businesses, eh? My company has a Facebook account but that's about it. I am trying to learn more about Pinterest to see how it can be used, that's why I stumbled across this blog. Some interesting tidbits for sue. Thx. Leave a Reply. |