Pinterest: The Underestimated Social Media Channel you Should be Using

Pinterest is one of the five biggies in social media, but despite this, quite often it’s not used by businesses. Think about the social toolbars that are present on almost every website; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even YouTube are regular features here but quite often Pinterest is nowhere to be seen.

Pinterest

photo credit: Larry Miller / Flickr

Not relevant

The belief that Pinterest isn’t relevant is quite a common one. With it being image heavy, a lot of B2B companies and info-heavy sites, which may be lacking in a strong stock of images, quite often ignore it with the opinion that it’s not relevant to their company.

The truth is, Pinterest isn’t just about pretty pictures and idyllic scenes, it’s also a great way to position yourself as an expert in your industry. It’s possible to pin videos, snippets of white papers, event details and even ad campaigns.

Remember, the things you pin aren’t only there for people to look at, if you pin something informative, like an excerpt of a white paper for example, people are likely to want to read the rest of it and will therefore click through to your site, consequently increasing traffic.

Image-heavy sites

These are the sites a lot of people feel Pinterest is meant for. However, just like other businesses, a lot of them aren’t making the most of this brilliant social platform.

Take Eight by Eight, for example, image-heavy, football-focused and considered the 15th best football blog online; they also have almost 30,000 followers on Instagram, but their existence on Pinterest – pretty non-existent.

Other social sites are bigger

This is perhaps the biggest misconception out there. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram certainly all have their benefits but when you look at the figures, a Pinterest presence could almost certainly be more valuable.

In September last year, Pinterest put a number on its user-base for the first time ever announcing their passing of the 100 million monthly user milestone. Now, if you’re well acquainted with your facts and figures you’ll know that this is still considerably less than Facebook’s 1.65 billion monthly users. However, every business’ main aim is to sell their product so the results of this 2012 study into shopping engagement between the two channels are actually very interesting.

Despite the huge difference in users, the study found that “69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase as compared to only 40% of online consumers who visit Facebook.”

Celebrity culture

Finally, unlike Instagram and Twitter where users like to follow their favourite celebrities and idols for fashion, fitness and general health and beauty tips, according to research from Ahalogy, Pinterest users are looking to connect with brands as opposed to anything else and are therefore open to business marketing.

In the research, users were asked whether they would be more likely to use Pinterest to follow a celebrity or brand/store and 83% said they would rather follow a brand.

Clearly underestimated with so much potential, here are four huge reasons your business should be using Pinterest to not only increase your audience but also purchase rate too.

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3 Comments Pinterest: The Underestimated Social Media Channel you Should be Using

  1. Dan Roy

    Pinterest is probably the most underestimated social networking sites of all. I have no idea why most marketers ignore it at the first place.

    Reply
  2. Janice | MostlyBlogging

    Hi,
    I am conducting an expert interview on Pinterest’s value for bloggers. Do you still think it’s a good ROI for bloggers despite Pinterest’s visibility decrease with the algorithm change? If so why? If interested, send your answer to my Email that came in with this comment. Thank you! Janice

    Reply
    1. Ivan Widjaya

      Janice,

      Yes, Pinterest is still a good place to expose your brand. We probably need to really think social media platform as a place to engage followers and prospects – not to distribute your updates.

      Changes are always good 🙂

      Reply

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