With the New Year comes a whole host of new innovation! From the pioneering Skillshare, which offers an online marketplace for offline classes, to the increasingly popular Dwolla, a tool that facilitates the transfer of money via social networks and now processes $1 million per day. There are tens of new technologies keeping our office positively buzzing, but it seems there is one website that attracts more kudos than anything else. We just can’t stop discussing Pintrest, an invitation-only site that describes itself as a pinboard to organise and share things you love. The growing phenomenon looks to be this year’s hot ticket in the social networking space, and thus far has managed to attract four million users in little over twelve months.
Pintrest combines two of the most captivating aspects of social media: visual content and sharing who you are. Not to mention, it looks as sexy as any website we’ve ever seen.
What is the appeal of Pinterest, you may ask? I think the best way to explain the attraction of the visually appealing website is best done by Don Reisinger, cnet.com blogger, who described it as “scrap-booking on the Web.”
Pinterest features a range of content, but it is dominated by home decor, fashion, food, and crafts. Hitwise found that 58 percent of the visitors in the past three months were women, and most, 59 percent, were between 25 and 44. And while there aren’t many brands using Pinterest just yet, there is lots of talk about that changing very quickly!
The idea is that users click on a bookmarklet in their browser when they find images they like on a web page, or they snap a photo with the Pinterest iPhone app, and then they are asked to categorize and describe the images. A collection of categorized images can be built by one person or can be opened up to contributions from other users. Users can then subscribe to an individual collection or to everything another user posts.
It’s funny that some people say mainstream users don’t want to go to the trouble of categorizing web content, but other people say that there is a core human desire to organize things. Pinterest’s early success seems to indicate that people want to organize things when there are beautiful things to organize and the interface for doing so is relatively attractive. There are already Pinterest users with 20,000 followers
Only a handful of brands (Whole Foods, USA today, and the Travel Channel, to name a few) have really got engaged, but of those who have, it would seem each one knows exactly what they’re doing. Simply put, the audience on Pinterest is different from the major social networks because most people use it to find inspiration, whether they are hosting a party, getting married, remodeling their bathroom, or looking for a recipe for dinner. In other words, many are using Pinterest to help guide their buying decisions, and this is what brands have to bear in mind.
An example of a pintrest page
Whilst at first the site may seem to niche to benefit a wide range of brands, there are still three major benefits that can be applied to any company. Getting seen is vitally important to any business, especially those too small to really compete for paid search terms. Kerry Jones from blueglass.com put it perfectly when she said, “Discoverability” is a word I’ve seen thrown around a lot regarding Pinterest. Meaning, Pinterest helps people find new products/brands/styles they would normally not come across by plugging keywords into a search engine. Chances are, the people I choose to follow on Pinterest have similar taste to me. I know I can check out their pin boards and probably see pins of jeans that would suit my taste. If I do a search for jeans on Pinterest, I know I’ll find trendy options and smaller brands I don’t know about, or even a DIY project for turning an old pair of jeans into a mini skirt. If I search for jeans tomorrow, I will see something new since results change as new pins are added.”
It has also been made clear that are strong link building opportunities here. For example, every time someone pins something from your site, it automatically pulls in not just the image from your site, but also the link. There is a chance for that pin to be repined multiple times, and in doing so build up a healthy amount of backlinks. For more on linkbuilding with Pintrested, read this.
Finally, brands are building fantastic advocates via the site, as people can not only pin a singular image or article, but dedicate an entire pin board to brands. We think this works best if you don’t (sorry to remind you again) oversell yourself. So for example, if you’re running a cake business, your followers might also like to know about complimentary great coffees, or places to buy ingredients – other companies, in different countries for example. The trick here is to massage your followers’ interests.
If you need simple break down of exactly how to get started, Mashable wrote a wonderful beginners guide recently which we strongly advise you check out. Or, if you’d rather throw yourself in at the deep end then head straight over to Pintrest homepage now! Whatever you do be sure to let us know what you think of this new and exciting concept.
