So What Is Pinterest?
Pinterest is your very own personal virtual pinboard. You can create several pinboards on any themes you like and pin interesting photos you own or see across the web to them. Creatively speaking there’s a lot of different ways people can use Pinterest, as mentioned by the website itself, people have used Pinterest to save images they’ve come across the web as a kind of bookmark. For example, someone redecorating their house my decide to create a pinboard to save images of patterns, colours or furniture they’ve seen on websites and pinned them to their pinboard for inspiration.
Not only can you make your own pinboards, but you can view pinboards created by other people, making Pinterest a great social network to discover new things and gain inspiration from like-minded people.
Pinterest For Small Businesses
Businesses who are using Pinterest now have the jump-start on this new social phenomenon. As with most social networks, businesses may ponder whether Pinterest is of any use for their line of work, but just like with most social networks, you can get Pinterest to work for you with the right strategy.
Getting Started With a Profile
When setting up a profile you can add a profile pic, fill in information about your business and link to your other social network accounts. Create pinboards based on on the the products and services you provide (think about the sort of keywords you use on your website).
Being Social With Pinterest
Add the ‘Pin It’ button to your bookmarks bar, now whenever you see an image on a website you like, you can click this Pin It button and Pinterest will simply pin the image for you to your chosen pinboard.
Follow friends who are already on Pinterest as well as companies and people whose pinboards interest you. Comment on pins you ‘like’, ‘like’ pins just as you’d ‘like’ content on Facebook and you can also repin images you see to your own boards (quite similar to ‘retweeting’ on Twitter).
Create pinboards that tells the story of your company and also creat pinboards around more specific themes. If your company is a restaurant, you could pin images that have inspired the theme and ethos of your restuarant and you could create pinboards with images of your special meals, highlighting any new deals and such.
Pinterest Helps Users Search
When people need answers to their questions they tend to use Google or other search engines, when people need to know what’s happening in the world right now in real-time (e.g. news, sports or entertainment) they use Twitter, when people want to find out more about their friends interests and lives, they’ll be using the upcoming Facebook Graph search.
When people want to find inspiration, they use Pinterest.
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You can find out more about social strategy by contacting Touchpoint Digital.
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