Pinterest For Business. What You Need To Know.

Since its launch in 2010, Pinterest's popularity has grown at an incredible rate. It's estimated to have over 70 million active users and is worth about $5 billion. Plus, unlike Facebook, the whole setup of Pinterest is designed to promote and sell products. This week's blog has been written by Manage My Website's 'Go To Girl', Kirsteen. She loves to travel, and has a real passion for social media, writing blogs and iPhoneography. She's also recently discovered the joys of Pinterest.

My name is Kirsteen and I’m a self-confessed Pinterest addict. Ok maybe I’m not an addict, but I’m ever so slightly obsessed with it. I feel like I arrived at the Pinterest party a little late as I missed the frenzy circa 2011 and I’ve only recently become a ‘Pinaholic’. Better late than never I guess, and the party is still going strong with more and more users (including businesses) signing up every day.

What is Pinterest?

Back in 2012 Allie posted two blogs about Pinterest but if you missed them and have no idea what this social media platform is or how it works, here’s a quick summary:

It’s a free photo sharing website and mobile app where users can upload, save and sort images (known as pins) through collections known as pinboards. For example, if you find a delicious recipe online and want to keep it for future reference you can simply ‘pin’ it to your ‘Meal Ideas’ pinboard or if you’re looking for inspiration for your next holiday you can pin images of snowboarding resorts or top dive sites onto your ‘Travel Ideas’ board. Whatever you’re interested in (sport, motorbikes, music, politics, computer games, Buddhism, fashion, food, yoga, travel, interior design or dogs riding skateboards) you can find hundreds of images (with web links) which you can save to one of your personal pinboards for future reference.

But isn't it just for women?

Absolutely not - that wouldn't be good business. Pinterest is becoming increasingly popular with e-commerce retailers. The average order spend by Pinterest users is reputedly $123.50 - far more than the average $54.64 order spend of Facebook users.

To widen its revenue potential, Pinterest had to start making it more interesting for men to use too as in the past it was seen as a women's hobby site. They've now launched guided search, which displays results based on the gender of the user. They say that their male user base has increased by 73 percent.

Why do I love it?

It's a beautifully designed, practical and easy to use site which is genuinely helpful. If I’m looking for information about the benefits of essential oils or travel tips to Reykjavik, I will automatically search on Pinterest rather than Google.

How can Pinterest help your business?

As well as being a fantastic tool for getting inspiration, Pinterest is also a great way for businesses and brands to increase their online presence, and ultimately their sales.

This is an important social media platform for businesses as there is huge potential to promote your products/services. We encourage most of our clients to be active on Pinterest.

According to Forbes, Pinterest users tend to be some of the most engaged and loyal users of social media. And this engagement doesn’t stop at pinning and browsing images; the majority of Pinterest users rely heavily on the platform to help inform their purchase decisions. Recent research released by Millward Brown, suggests that a whopping 87% of users have purchased a product because of Pinterest. They also found that 93% have used the website or mobile app to plan for future purchases. Wow!

We’re particularly excited about the news that Pinterest has recently partnered with Shopify which means that customers can buy products direct from the Pinterest App on mobile devices. If you have a Shopify website all products pinned from your online store will automatically become 'Buyable Pins' and your customers can make a purchase without having to leave the app. Unfortunately Buyable Pins aren’t possible for UK businesses yet as the currency has to be in US Dollars but we anticipate that they will roll this out to other currencies in the near future. We’ll keep you updated as we’re sure our clients who have Shopify e-commerce websites would love to be able to sell their products on Pinterest. This really is exciting news and demonstrates the future of Pinterest as an e-commerce site rather than just a visual social sharing site.

Over the past few months I’ve been creating various boards on the Manage My Website Pinterest account. These include screen shots of our new website launches and advice about social media and email marketing for small businesses, plus I’ve been re-pinning interesting infographics which other users have uploaded. We think that it is an easy and effective way to promote our agency.

How to create a Pinterest account for your business

• You can create an account by clicking here.
• Choose your company name as your username and complete your profile information, including a company description, logo, and a link to your website.
• Add the ‘pin it’ button which makes it easy to collect all the inspiring things that people find online. After you’ve installed it, just click the little ‘P’ whenever you see something you want to add to Pinterest.

Once you get started you can create pinboards before you start trying to build your Pinterest following. One idea is to ‘pin’ photos from your website which gives people a clear idea about your company and your products/services.

You can then promote your presence on Pinterest through your other social networks by encouraging your followers/fans on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to follow your pins. You can also start following users you’d like to follow you back.

As with other social media platforms you should showcase your business' personality by adding photos of the team and some of the fun activities that your employees engage in (company outings, parties, awards celebrations, volunteer days etc.).

Need some help with Pinterest?

Manage My Website offers an online marketing and Social Media consultancy service where we will set up the account for you and train you to manage your account professionally and effectively.  

For further information about this or any of our other online marketing services please get in touch.