Pinterest quickly climbed the social media platform ranks, earning a top spot when it hit 10 million unique users a month faster than any other independent site. Pinterest social icons and Pin It buttons have cropped up on websites and blogs everywhere. And no longer is it good enough to simply include a photo in your articles; now it’s all about a proper “pinnable image”.
So with all the excitement and notoriety surrounding Pinterest, it’s a social media “must” for your business, right?
Maybe.
But maybe not.
5 Reasons Why Pinterest Might be Good for your Business
- There are a lot of businesses like yours with a presence This is a good indication that Pinterest may be worth your while. Conduct searches through Pinterest for your competitors along with relevant keyword and hashtag searches to see if there is a lot of Pinterest activity pertaining to your industry.
- You use a lot of images in your business Since Pinterest is extremely visual in nature, your website or business blog needs to have high quality photos in order to pin any of your own content to your boards.
- You have an online store We already know that images are a must for Pinterest. And because 80% of pins are repins, product pages on your website stand a chance at “going viral” through massive repinning. Pinterest has already established itself as a traffic driver, coming in higher than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube.
- Your customer reach extends beyond your local area The average pinner glances at an image, perhaps reads the description if there is one, and then decides in a split second whether or not to repin that image. Unless a pinner clicks on a specific user’s profile, the location of that user is not evident. It’s because of this that it’s much more challenging to localize your efforts. With other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it’s much easier to focus your account follows and interactions with users in the same geographic region. So while you may see a spike in pageviews on your site while using Pinterest, short of having an online store or multiple locations throughout a large region or several states, the majority of pageviews you receive will not be from people who can be converted into a sale.
- You have time By “time”, I mean time in your day to fit this platform in with your other social media activities. And time to test and see if Pinterest will pay off.
No social media platforms provide immediate results. And no one social media platform or strategy is going to be a “guarantee” for your business. Whether it’s Pinterest or another social media platform, it’s best to give it time, assess your progress every month or so, and don’t expect results over night. And worst case? You can always let Pinterest go and put that time into something that works for your business.
Thanks for writing this, Liz! I think WAY too many people are jumping on the Pinterest wagon for the WRONG reasons. If it’s not right for you, you’re taking time away from another platform that is. I’m experimenting with Pinterest for work, and I think we might be a good fit for it. Ours is a little different….we are trying to build a brand that doesn’t necessarily have immediate ROI. So, that means I’m using Pinterest to position our health org as a content curator and reliable resource for health information, so that when the time comes, you’ll think of US for health care needs. It works because there is SO MUCH health information on Pinterest — recipes, infographics, fitness — that it makes sense. Great points you’ve made here.