Recently I’ve been getting a lot of these kinds of questions from my clients:
- “What is Pinterest?”
- “Who’s using it?”
- “Should my business be there?”
- And the most frequent one: “Another Social Network to worry about…really?”
What is Pinterest? An easy way to understand Pinterest is to think about it in a “real world” way, perhaps like this:
Imagine your business or brand is a store. In addition to the merchandise you sell, you have a wall where you have placed corkboards. (In this scenario, the bulletin board wall is your Pinterest Account). These corkboards tell your customers more about your company than just the merchandise hanging on the racks does.
For instance, you have one board where you have pinned photos of your products being used by real customers, another board shows your customers some of the places you get your inspiration from, such as tear sheets from magazines. You have a board with photos of your “back room” employees so customers can see who is behind your business; you have a board full of testimonials from your customers, etc.
Every time something good happens, such as when you receive a great testimonial, you print it out and pin it to your testimonials board. When you add a new service or product, you add a photo of it and how to use it, when you find something that inspires you; it gets pinned on your “inspiration” board. And so on.
So, Pinterest allows you to do a better job of conveying your story to your potential customers. But what is the real value of Pinterest for business? Why should you care?
Who’s Hanging Out on Pinterest: A very important target market for thousands of businesses
- Approximately 70% of users on Pinterest are female
- 50% of all users are between 25 and 44
- 50% of users have children
- 28% of users have a household income of $100,000+
Is Pinterest Popular? It’s the fastest growing website on the Web
- On average, users are spending more time on Pinterest than on Facebook
- 104 million total visits in March; putting Pinterest behind only Facebook and Twitter in terms of activity
- Pinterest has 2.2 Million daily active users and 12 million monthly active users – and growing daily
Can it Help My Business? Early adopters are getting great ROI
- Website owners are seeing a huge uptick in referral traffic from Pinterest which is great for SEO on your site
- Good for overall online visibility because it’s indexed by the Search Engines
- It’s free to set up a business account
- Right now there is no advertising, so it’s a lot less noisy than Facebook
- In terms of e-commerce, Pinterest is generating up to four times the revenue per click as Twitter and 27% more than Facebook
- Also in terms of e-commerce, visitors from Pinterest are spending 70% more than visitors referred from other sites.
For average folks, Pinterest is just really fun to use, it’s simple, and it’s intuitive. (I’ve spent many an evening pinning my boards while watching TV).
If you feel your business would benefit from testing Pinterest, stay tuned. MY next blog help you set up your account, get started on Pinterest, and much more!
The data on Pinterest came from the following sources: Mashable, comScore, Shareaholic,Convertro, and Hubspot.
Have more questions? Just Ask Betsy!
