The Pinterest Phenomenon

With all of the buzz around Facebook and Twitter, it seems as though Pinterest is often overlooked for its amazing marketing potential. If you’re not familiar with what Pinterest is, it’s a place where you can create your own page of things that inspire you.  When I say things, I mean pretty much anything!  Food, photos, hair, clothes, DIY, home decor and the list goes on. So how does it work you ask? Let me give you the basics:

Pin - A pin starts with an image or video you add to Pinterest. You can add a pin from a website using the Pin It bookmarklet or upload an image right from your computer. Any pin on Pinterest can be repinned, and all pins link back to their source.

Board - A board is where you organize your pins by topic. You could pin ideas for remodeling your bathroom to your House Projects board, for example. Boards can be secret or public, and you can invite other people to pin with you on any of your boards.

Pin It Bookmarklet - The Pin It bookmarklet lets you easily pin things you see on websites and blogs. To get the bookmarklet or learn more, check out our Goodies page.

Follow - When you follow someone, their pins show up in your Pinterest home feed. You can follow all of someone's boards or just the ones you like best. To manage who you're following, go to your profile and click Following.

Home Feed - Your home feed is a collection of pins from pinners and boards you follow. It's updated every time someone you follow adds a pin.

In short, the pins create a chain reaction and all things popular show up on an endless number of Pinterest boards. From a business perspective, this is the ideal marketplace to market your product or service. Since the users of Pinterest are shared by common interests and tastes, they can great a network of interest for you pin by pin. Analytic support is also available to enable businesses to track which products or services get the most repins, who pins them and what the competition may be. Businesses can also add the “Pin It” button to their website or mobile app to enable users to promote the company and/or product or service. According to the Pinterest site, “Businesses who use the Pin It button often see big lifts in referral traffic. Just 3 months after Allrecipes.com added the Pin It button, people pinned more than 50,000 recipes from their website. This lead to 139 million Pinterest impressions.”  

With nearly 70 million users to-date, businesses should look to this social media phenomenon they call Pinterest.