Why do I use Pinterest?
I use Pinterest for products I want or am interested in. Much like Instagram, but mainly for inspiration. It keeps things organised, whilst looking creative and fun. Your ‘boards’ can look beautiful when you have a good amount of varying content for others to be inspired by.
It’s easy and fun to share around pins you like and build up your life or future in photos and ideas. Other social networks seem more corporate in comparison to Pinterest but don’t let that make you think it’s not suitable for a business.
Why would it benefit businesses?
It’s not a social network to just showcase your products. It’s to show what inspires you or your company and to create boards for the ideas, places, moods and people behind your brand. It especially benefits businesses that can produce a lot of imagery from their company e.g. photos of products, inspirations etc. It’s a lot like Instagram, in that it’s completely image based
It’s also a great for brand awareness as more and more business have started using to reach their consumers, of which, was the primary userbase for Pinterest when it started. So you will gain a wider audience as well as potential customers. It’s also easy to find your inspirations and what your audience is liking through the search bar, by typing in as many words as you want. You can search anything you want. Here’s an example for a business in the Wedding industry searching for potential products their audience may be interested in, as well as competitor products. This is a great start for market research as well as the first step into building relationships.
These are the results with ‘wedding’ as the search term:
The results show will bring up other relevant search terms that you can add to your search query, to widen the net when it comes to searching more content.
To search for people or companies within the Wedding industry you need to either click on the ‘Pinners’ or ‘Boards’ when you’re searching. ‘All Pins’ is too broad and will bring up everything wedding related, which is fine if you’re looking for some inspiring photos to re-pin to one of your boards. Other than that, I’d stick to pinners and boards to make your search more specific to finding your audience.
This is what it looks like when searching ‘wedding’ in the ‘Pinners’ section. It displays people and companies that are pinning products, inspirations or ideas in the wedding industry.
Here’s what Pinterest displasy when searching ‘wedding’ on the ‘Boards’ sector. Whatever you search in boards, it will show every board that is related to what you searched. In this case: wedding boards.
A lot of people use Pinterest for personal use. It helps find inspiration and also to search for products they’d like to buy at some point. Using the wedding industry as an example, you could create a boards such as ‘wedding dress inspiration’, just your own products and any other wedding inspirations as it shows that you’re interested and passionate about the industry you’re in, which is one of the most important thing’s an audience wants to see.
What’s the point in building an audience on Pinterest?
Like Instagram, Pinterest is growing for businesses, who are using it to reach a wider audience and gain more customers. Depending on the industry your business is in, it’s worth using photo based social networks to build up more of an audience and gaining brand awareness as more people are interested in seeing images than content linking elsewhere. It’s also completely free.
Do I always have to post original content?
On boards that promote your own products, you obviously need to pin your own content. Maintain credit and ownership of your own content by adding watermarks to your images. This is also a good way to gain exposure to your brand, for when other users pin your content for their followers.
How do I build relationships with my customers through photos?
Make sure that your re-pinning photos from your audience’s boards
Post photos that are going to be helpful or inspiring
Comment on photos to interact with your audience
Create boards with short but engaging titles
Pinterest may not be for every brand and it certainly takes a couple of days to get the hang of. But it’s certainly gaining in popularity and can be seen as the whacky, creative little sister to Instagram. It’s lovable and fun and could be a masterstroke in making your brand stand out from the competition.
The post Is It Time to Get Your Business on Pinterest? appeared first on Wonderlabs Blog and was written by Alex
