You’ve probably already heard about Pinterest from your friends or seen people sharing their “pins” on Facebook. We’re also seeing a lot of brands starting to use Pinterest as a way to visually describe who they are. So if you’re not already on the bandwagon, here’s your beginner’s guide to Facebook.
Pinterest is a visual-based social bookmarking platform. Users can organize and share anything found on the web, encouraging people to browse through various pinboards to plan for events, find recipes, or discover new inspirations. Pinterest’s goal is to connect everyone in the world through the “things” they find interesting.
How do you use Pinterest?
Pinterest is currently by invitation only, but don’t worry as the wait time is short. Once you get on the platform, you can create different boards based on different subjects. Many users create boards based around DIY projects, recipes, home decoration, wedding planning, and beauty inspirations.
Next, you need to search the web or different boards for images to pin. You can make this easier by installing the “Pin It” button onto your bookmark bar. You can also upload your own images onto your boards to share with others. Pinterest recently began expanding the functionality of video pins, but currently only videos from YouTube can be pinned.
The Pinterest mobile app is currently available only for iPhone and functions similarly to the website. Users can see who they are following, explore by category, view their profile, and pin images from their phone’s photo library.
What are brands doing in this space?
Brands are beginning to see the opportunities within the relatively new social network. There are approximately 35 million active users and daily users have increased more than 145% since the start of 2012. In addition, Pinterest has raised $37.5 million in funding since October 2011.
It is being used by over 100 brands in categories including food/cooking, home improvement, retail, television, news, media, beauty, sports, travel, and non-profit.
Whole Foods, known for its combination of indulgent food products and environmental consciousness, currently has over 25,000 followers. Their Pinterest page reflects their image by pinning images for different recipes and DIY projects that reuse things like milk cartons, old CDs, and ketchup bottles.
Case Mate creates fashion-forward cases and mobile accessories. As a brand focused on selling products, some may assume they simply post pictures of their products; however, Case Mate has found success on Pinterest by posting boards centered on creative inspiration, style guides, celebrity spottings, and a mix of product shots.
How to use Pinterest for brands
If you’re looking to start a page for your brand, keep in mind some of these best practices:
– Build Brand Personality: Use the platform in a way to highlight the essence of the brand through engaging images that let users visualize how the brand fits into their lives. Pinterest can be used to humanize the brand through behind-the-scenes exclusives or pictures of the company culture.
– Engagement with Users: Brands can use Pinterest as a crowdsourcing tool by asking fans to tag your brand in pictures of themselves with your products. These pins could be turned into a VIP-style board to recognize your fans and how they use your products
– Contests: Contests are a great way to raise interaction with users while exposing the brand. As users pin images from the brand’s website, these pins have the potential to be re-pinned by users. This is a free way to increase brand awareness, increase source traffic, and improve a website’s SEO.
– Do Not Only Self-Promote: It is important to not use Pinterest purely for self-promotion. Brands need to engage with the users by pinning a variety of interesting and relevant images, not just product images.
What’s the future outlook?
Pinterest is one of many social discovery platforms currently on the market. Apps like Foodspotting, Tiny Review, and Stamped all focus on reviewing and liking specific items as opposed to reviewing a venue as a whole. This trend of focusing on specific items will continue as the digital world links all things together.
Facebook Timeline and Open Graph platform automatically shares all your pins to your Facebook. The integration with Facebook’s Open Graph will increase Pinterest’s popularity as users will now share pins on both of the social networks.
Pinerly was launched as a Pinterest account management dashboard. The platform allows users to follow others with similar interests while also providing tracking statistics for your pins. Since Pinterest is driving a lot of traffic on the web, the Pinerly tool may help generate traffic to brand sites and blogs by as much as 30%.
Pinterest recently updated the website’s homepage to highlight a Gifts section. Gifts can be browsed based on price ranges from $1-20 to $500+. This new section utilized the Price Display Feature, which allows pins to be listed with the item title and price when using the Pin It button on websites like Etsy. Pinterest does not currently work with brands, but the gifts and price features demonstrate the company’s start to look at more commerce opportunity.
