Pinterest – what's that all about then?

Pinterest - everywhere you look at the moment someone is talking about it. It almost seems as if it’s come from nowhere doesn’t it?

However, Pinterest has been around since 2010, when it was opened as a closed beta (invitation only) and has grown in leaps and bounds since then. Originally frequented mainly by US women, pinning crafts, home decorating ideas, wedding plans and such like, it’s only really this year that the UK has woken up to the power of Pinterest, and it’s place and use in marketing.

There’s a great infographic over at Web Analytics World that compares Pinterest use in the UK and the US, and if you’re looking at Pinterest from a business point of view it makes really interesting reading.

It shows us that far from being women posting knitted tea cosies, the majority of Pinterest users in the UK are men, and they’re pinning business related things; stats, research, links and more.

And that’s the reason Pinterest should be included in your marketing strategy. Posting ‘pins’ on the site allows people to click back to your blog or website, as well as sharing (repinning) things you’ve put on there, reaching a whole new audience.

So how do you get started on Pinterest? First of all you’ll need an invitation – you can get this by applying on the website, or asking someone you know has an account to invite you.

When you follow the link on your invitation, you’ll be asked to sign in using your Twitter or Facebook logins – this allows Pinterest to know that you are who you say you are, and the site will import a few details such as your Twitter description, email address etc.

Then you’ll be asked to create some boards. Some boards are suggested for you, but we recommend choosing your own titles. Remember, just like Facebook and Twitter, it’s important that you share things on Twitter that aren’t just related to your own business and blogs, so bear this in mind when you set up your boards.

We’ve gone with:

• Marketing by Web Clients – we want to be able to showcase and promote our clients as they’re important to us
• Infographics – Pinterest is a very visual site, so great graphics get shared a lot. We wanted a place to put all the fab infographics we find relating to marketing, and this is the place!
• Social Media Marketing – we come across lots of great info on Social Media on a day to day basis, as well as producing our own, so this board gives people interested in that kind of info somewhere to find our recommendations.
• Google Adwords for Business – it’s what we do, so it’s important for us to tell people that. People following this board will only see our posts about Adwords, so they’re not bombarded with other info they’re not interested in.
• General Business – we find lots of things we like to share with our followers and contacts, and not everything fits into one of our other boards, so general business help goes here.
• Bristol – we’re always looking to connect with people in our local area, so a Bristol board helps us to do that!
• SEO for business – another of our services, and a pretty popular subject on Pinterest.
• Humour – for those time out moments, a browse through this board makes us smile. Lots of people connect to us and reshare our info because of this board!
• Doing it for the kids – it’s not all business on Pinterest, and we like to use this board to post interesting things we come across that might be of interest to parents (including our MD Claire)
• Blogs we like – exactly what it says. We often come across Blog posts we love, and we like to share our finds with you.

In future we’ll probably add more boards, but that’s what we started out with.

You’re then encouraged to add a ‘Pin This’ button to your browser – we’d highly recommend it as an easy way to pin things to your board. (We’ll talk more about pinning in a future post).

The interesting thing that a lot of people have failed to pick up on is that Pinterest allows people to follow only the things that interest them. For example, if you’re interested in learning about SEO and Adwords, but have no interest in kids and humour, then you only folow the relevant boards; you won’t see anything from any of the others.

This is what makes Pinterest different to (and a whole lot more focused than) Facebook and Twitter, where you have to see everything we post, whether you’re interested in it or not.

If you’re not on Pinterest, we’d highly recommend you get yourself an account, have a play around and see the effect it has on your traffic.

If you are on Pinterest, use the comments section below to tell us your profile address and a little about the kind of things you share – we’d love to know how it’s working out for you too!

And of course, you can follow us on Pinterest.

Categorised in: Pinterest

This post was written by Nikki